All Chapters of Rejected: The Alpha's Fatal Mistake: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

KadeThe walk back to the pack house took eleven minutes. Kade knew because he counted every one of them, because counting was easier than doing anything else with those eleven minutes, and because he'd learned a long time ago that a body given a task will usually perform that task instead of falling apart in front of an audience.Wolves stepped aside for him the whole way. Nobody spoke. That wasn't unusual — an Alpha walking through his own pack rarely invited conversation — but tonight the quiet had a different weight to it, the kind that came from forty people carefully not looking at him while thinking very loudly about what they'd just watched him do.He let them think it. There wasn't a version of tonight where he got to control that too.His father was waiting in the study, which meant this conversation had been decided before Kade even reached the door."You did the right thing." No hello. Marcus Voss didn't do hellos with his own son, not anymore. He stood at the window with

WrenThey walked for four days before they found anything that looked like Nightshade land.The first night, they slept in the hollow of a fallen tree a few miles past the Blackthorn line, close enough that Wren could still catch the ghost of home in the air if she let herself try, which she made a point of not doing. Sable built the fire without being asked and didn't say anything about the way Wren's hands still hadn't stopped shaking, which was its own kind of mercy."You should eat something," Sable said, the second night, holding out a strip of rabbit Wren hadn't seen her catch or cook."I'm not hungry.""I didn't ask if you were hungry. I said you should eat something." Sable's brothers had taught her to snare rabbits before they taught her much else about pack life, which was turning out to be the single most useful fact either of them knew, and she wasn't about to let the effort go to waste on Wren's pride. "You're no good to either of us if you fall over."Wren ate. It didn't

WrenSix weeks in, Wren had learned to fix a roof, snare something bigger than rabbit, and stop flinching when Ezra barked orders in a tone that used to remind her of every reason she'd hated pack hierarchy back in Blackthorn. Six weeks in, she'd also stopped waking up reaching for a chest wound that wasn't going to heal on its own, which she counted as the closest thing to progress she had, even if the ache itself hadn't actually gone anywhere.She'd started to know the others, too, in the specific unglamorous way you get to know people you work alongside every day. Milo followed her around the way younger pack members sometimes attached themselves to whoever seemed least likely to send them away, and she'd stopped minding it somewhere around week three. Petra spoke maybe six words a day, all of them to Sable, none of them to Wren, and Wren had decided not to take that personally — trust, she was learning, worked on its own schedule out here, same as everything else. Rennick and Dara

WrenThe mornings had a rhythm to them now that Wren hadn't expected to find comforting, six weeks into a life she still sometimes couldn't quite believe was hers. Water before breakfast. Roof repairs if the weather held. Milo underfoot with a hundred questions about training that Ezra mostly deflected and Wren mostly answered, because somebody in this pack needed to remember what it was like to be twelve and starving for someone to take you seriously."Teach me the vanishing thing," Milo said, for what had to be the fourth time that week, trailing her toward the training clearing with the single-minded persistence of a boy who hadn't yet learned that adults said no for reasons that usually made sense eventually."I don't know how to do the vanishing thing. That's sort of the problem.""You did it during the fight.""I got lucky during the fight."Ezra, already waiting at the clearing's edge, didn't look up from the knife he was sharpening. "Wasn't luck. Luck doesn't happen the same w

WrenThe Ironfang wolves came through the trees at midday, which Ezra said afterward was either very smart or very arrogant — nobody testing a pack's defenses came at midday, in the open, where they could be seen coming from half a mile off, unless they wanted to be seen coming.There were five of them, and the one at the front didn't look like Wren had expected an Alpha to look, not after Kade — broader, less sharp around the edges, the kind of build that came from actual labor rather than ceremonial training. He stopped his group a respectful distance out and waited, hands visible, for someone from Nightshade to come to him instead of walking in like he owned the ground."That's smart," Ezra muttered, already moving to meet them, Wren a half-step behind. "Man knows how to not get killed walking into unfamiliar territory. Good sign.""Alpha Rurik Thorne." He said it plainly, no flourish, offering a slight incline of the head that was somewhere between formal and simply polite. "Ironf