Reborn to Reject the Alpha Who Betrayed Me

Chapter 7: What Their Wolves Know

Vesper looked at the notebook, wishing she could answer him without sounding mad.

"I remember that room," she said. "I remember you in it. I don’t know how to explain why you dreamed it."

"When were we there?"

She glanced at the date on her phone. "It hasn’t happened."

Stellan said nothing.

Vesper heard herself and wanted to take the words back. She could have called it a nightmare after all. He might have accepted that, and she could have asked about the letter without telling him anything else.

Except he had drawn the window.

He had been trying to reach her before she ever picked up the phone.

"I woke up this morning with memories I shouldn’t have," she said. "Years of them. I know how that sounds."

"You said I moved a desk."

"You were trying to break the glass."

"Was there a fire?"

Vesper’s breath caught.

He touched the line beside the window. "That part’s confused. I remember heat. I don’t know if it belongs to the room or whether I woke because I was too warm."

"There was a fire."

His face changed as he looked at the drawing. "I wrote this before your call, that’s why I’m listening. I don’t know what it means yet."

"Neither do I."

"We can start with the room. When you’re ready, tell me where it is. Somewhere I can check without warning Hollis."

She nodded. A place, a window, a desk. Those were things she could give him when she could bear to describe the house. She couldn’t tell him how it ended. Not here, with the garden open and her mother waiting for a message. She needed to decide what she could say without giving up the ordinary protections she had only just regained.

"I’m not asking you to believe all of it yet."

"Were you hurt?"

"In what I remember."

"And this morning?"

"No."

He rubbed a hand over his mouth.

Vesper had expected disbelief, perhaps a request that somebody call a physician. She hadn’t expected him to look at his own notebook as though it had betrayed him.

"I need a little time," she said. "Not days. Let me get through tonight without signing anything. Then I’ll tell you the rest."

"Why wait until then?"

"Because if Dacre hears I’m talking about things that haven’t happened, he’ll have an explanation ready before I’ve finished saying them. And Mother will be frightened." She met his eyes. "I want to speak to her myself. Please don’t call anyone about this."

Stellan rested his elbows on his knees. "I won’t send a report about a private conversation. But if there’s an immediate danger, I need enough to help."

"He expects me to do what I did before. That’s what I can change today."

"The agreement."

"And the engagement."

Saying it plainly loosened something in her chest.

Stellan glanced at her phone. "Does your mother know you want to end it?"

"She asked me this morning. I didn’t give her an answer."

"Give her one."

Vesper almost smiled. "You sound like her."

"I’m beginning to like her."

"You’ve met her."

"Usually across a table while she tells me I’m wrong about something."

That surprised a laugh out of her. It was brief and unsteady, but it belonged to this room instead of the one in the notebook.

Orla could do that to anyone.

Vesper unlocked her phone: I don’t want the engagement. I’ll tell Dacre myself. Please keep the agreement safe.

She sent it before she could spend ten minutes choosing softer words.

The reply came while she was still holding the phone.

Come home when you’re ready. We’ll decide how to handle the guests.

Her eyes stung. "Mother knows."

"Good."

Vesper put the phone on the table beside the notebook.

She should have stood up then. She had come for an answer about the rejection, and he had already told her he wanted to meet. There was no need to keep staring at him, noticing the small nick along the edge of his jaw, the way one cuff had been folded twice and the other only once.

Her wolf disagreed. The pull toward him had become harder to ignore indoors. There was no breeze to scatter his scent, no passing patrol to distract her. She could feel it each time he breathed.

"Do you still feel it?" she asked.

His gaze lifted from the phone. "Yes."

"Even now?"

"I’ve spent the last half hour sitting across from you trying to concentrate on what you’re saying. Yes, I feel it."

She looked down at her hands. "I thought you might say I’d imagined it. Then why did you stay away?"

He sat back. "You weren’t the only one who received an answer through somebody else."

Vesper looked at him. "Sabine?"

"She came to my office two days after the assembly. Said you appreciated the request, but you wanted to pursue your relationship with Hollis."

"I wasn’t in a relationship with him."

Stellan’s expression hardened. "Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Dacre had been attentive at the assembly. She remembered him bringing her a drink, walking her back to the Aldercrest rooms after her father’s knee began to trouble him. She had thought him kind.

He had asked her to dinner after the rejection arrived.

"I went out with him the following week," she said. "Not before."

"Sabine said you wanted no further contact from me."

Vesper pressed her palms against her knees. She had spent four years thinking Stellan found her unworthy of a conversation. Meanwhile, he had been told she had chosen someone else.

"Why didn’t you ask me?"

The question came out sharper than she intended.

His jaw shifted. "Because I thought you had already said no."

"But you believed her."

"So did you."

Vesper opened her mouth, then closed it.

He hadn’t raised his voice. He didn’t need to.

She looked toward the garden. A man was emptying weeds into a barrow. He had no idea what they were discussing. Vesper envied him. She could be furious with Sabine and still have to admit she had trusted her too.

"I did," she said.

Stellan let out a breath. "I’m not trying to win an argument."

"I know. I just don’t like the answer." She turned back to him. "At the winter council, I went out through the kitchens when I saw you coming toward me. I thought you were going to ask why I kept looking at you."

"I thought you wanted me to leave you alone."

She rubbed her thumb over a crease in her skirt. After that, avoiding him had become part of every gathering: choosing the far end of a table, finding a reason to leave early. She had never considered what he might make of it.

"Could somebody have misunderstood?"

"Possibly. I want the records before I accuse anyone."

"I remember being told you didn’t want a mate from Aldercrest. That I was too young. That the connection didn’t mean you intended to act on it.”

She had kept those words. Even when the precise wording of the letter escaped her, she remembered Sabine explaining them until there was nothing left to question.

"I said none of that," he told her. "Not to anyone."

His anger was visible now, and oddly that made him easier to look at. He was no longer carefully measuring every word while she struggled to keep herself together.

"I was twenty," she said. "I thought you knew better than I did."

"I was twenty-seven. Mostly I knew I didn’t want to make a fool of myself at an assembly."

"You didn’t come over."

"Your father was introducing you to half the room."

"You could have waited."

"I did. You left."

Vesper remembered how tired her father had become. She had gone with him, intending to find Stellan the next morning. She could see that evening more clearly now, without Sabine’s interpretation laid over it.

"So you wrote."

"So I wrote."

They looked at each other across the table.

Vesper wanted those four years back almost as fiercely as she had wanted the last three. But she hadn’t returned to the assembly. Whatever had brought her here, it had left her with this morning to work with.

She reached for her phone. "Could you have your office find your copy?"

“I’ll ask. It may be in the old event files. I won’t promise we can produce it in ten minutes. And you’ll look for what you received?”

"Yes."

She put the phone down again without using it.

Stellan noticed. "What?"

"I keep thinking I should be doing something."

"You are."

"I’m sitting here."

"You asked the question you came to ask."

She considered that. It wasn’t enough to prove Sabine had lied. It was enough to stop treating the letter as Stellan’s final answer.

Her wolf stirred, impatient now with every inch of the table between them.

"We’re mates," Vesper said. She had once imagined the words coming out tenderly. Instead, they sounded like something she needed to verify aloud.

Stellan’s gaze held hers. "We’re fated mates."

"And you don’t consider that settled?"

He looked at the notebook, then back at her. "I consider the connection settled. I’d still like to know whether you can stand having breakfast with me."

Vesper laughed again, properly this time. "I can manage breakfast."

"Then we’re doing better than we were yesterday."

She shook her head, still smiling, and the movement brought tears she had thought she was done with.

Stellan reached across the table.

She watched his hand stop short of hers, then she put her fingers into it. His palm was warm. No soot, no hurried grip because he was trying to keep her upright. Her wolf eased against that contact, and Vesper felt the first quiet moment she had known since waking.

She wanted to keep his hand.

She also wanted to be able to let it go.

When she withdrew, he opened his fingers.

"I’m not ready to promise you anything," she said.

"I haven’t asked."

"I’m ending the engagement because I don’t want Dacre. Not because I owe you a chance."

Stellan nodded once. "All right."

She stood, taking her phone from the table.

His eyes followed her, and she felt the pull again. It could have been comforting to let it decide everything. She knew too well what happened when she stopped making decisions for herself.

"I need to go home before noon."

"I’ll have Iver walk you out."

"Would you come tonight?"

The question surprised her.

Stellan stood. "To your engagement party?"

"I’ll tell Dacre when I get home. Before anyone arrives."

"Then why keep the party?"

"Some of the delegates are already traveling. Mother may want to feed them rather than turn them away. But they need to know what’s changed before they walk in."

"Does your mother want me there?"

"I’ll ask. You were on the first seating plan."

"Was I?"

"Sabine took you off. She says I told her to."

He glanced at the notebook. "We have a fair amount to untangle."

"I know."

Vesper sent Orla a second message. She would speak to Dacre at noon, with her mother present, and wanted the engagement announcement removed from the evening. If Orla kept the reception, could Stellan attend?

This time her mother took a few minutes to reply.

They used the pause to exchange direct numbers. Stellan wrote an archive request to his assistant while Vesper checked whether Dacre’s office had sent the missing pages.

Nothing.

Orla’s response arrived: We’ll speak to Dacre together. I’ll have the guests notified that it’s a reception only, with no engagement announcement. Stellan may come as my guest at seven. I’ll restore his name at the gate. Come home so we can talk.

Vesper showed him the message.

"I’ll be there," he said.

She bent to retrieve her bag. The weight of the flask shifted against its side, reminding her that she still had more questions than answers.

At the doorway, she turned. "I never told Sabine to reject you."

Stellan looked at her for a moment. "I never rejected you at all."

Vesper could hear Sabine’s voice explaining the letter, so certain, so sympathetic.

For the first time, she had an answer Sabine hadn’t delivered.

***

Dacre's car was outside when Vesper reached home.

She sat behind the wheel until the engine stopped ticking. Through the windshield, she could see the gardener taking lengths of white ribbon off the porch rail. One had caught on a splinter. He tugged, frowned, and went to fetch scissors.

The preparations were already coming down.

Vesper got out.

Orla met her in the hall, leaning on her walking stick. She searched her daughter's face, then drew her into a brief embrace. "He's in the morning room. Would you like some time first?"

"No. I'll lose my nerve."

"You can be nervous and still tell him."

Vesper left her bag in Orla's locked office. The flask remained inside it; she wasn't ready to explain the tea. She took her phone with her.

Dacre rose when they entered. His jacket lay over a chair, and the familiar little velvet box sat beside his coffee.

She had loved that box once.

"There you are." He came toward her. "Sabine said you'd gone to Blackthorn."

Vesper stopped beside her mother's chair. "I did."

He looked between them. "Something I should know?"

Orla sat. "Vesper has something to tell you."

His attention returned to her, patient and indulgent. She recognized that expression from the river house. It had usually come before he explained why she was being unreasonable.

"I won't marry you," she said. "And I won't sign the agreement."