Rejected by Her Alpha, Claimed by His Brother

Chapter 9 – Between Breath and Blood

For a second, I forgot how to breathe.

The circle’s light shot up around us, a cage of pale fire. Corren’s grip on my waist went iron-hard—and then something invisible hooked into him, too.

His power flared, instinctive and brutal. The air shook with it. Under my trapped palm, the earth answered, a deep, painful thrum that vibrated in my bones.

“Liora—” His voice was a raw scrape. “Let… go.”

“If you think I haven’t tried,” I hissed through my teeth.

The rune-light climbed my arm, cool and numbing, like my skin was being turned to stone. My resonance screamed, trying to recoil. Couldn’t. The circle had me by the roots.

And now it had him.

I felt it the moment the magic latched onto Corren fully: a second hook driven into the knot of power that was our not-supposed-to-exist bond. The circle tasted him, tasted us, and shifted, hungry curiosity sliding into something like delight.

It knows us, my wolf realized, terrified and furious. It remembers.

“Bryn!” Corren barked. His voice shook the trees. “Get—”

“I can’t move!” Bryn’s answer came strained, muffled through the roaring in my ears. “Feels like my legs are—nailed down. Liora—”

“Don’t,” I ground out. “Don’t touch the light.”

If this thing could do this to an alpha and a resonant almost-luna, I didn’t want to find out what it would do to a hunter with no shield but sarcasm.

Another pulse rolled through the ground. The rune-lines flared, then split—half of the glow diving up into my bones, half slamming into Corren’s chest. I felt it hit him like a punch. His breath left in a harsh grunt; his fingers crushed my ribs.

And then we weren’t in the clearing anymore.

Not entirely.

Stone walls flickered over the trees. Iron doors over trunks. The taste of damp, stale air over pine. Our shared vision from before didn’t just flash and vanish this time; it layered itself over reality, doubling the world.

I saw the clearing, the circle, Bryn frozen at the edge.

I saw, overlaid, a corridor of rough-cut stone, lit by a single, smoking torch.

“Liora.” Corren’s mouth was near my ear, words ragged. “You see it?”

“Yeah,” I whispered. “I see it.”

The circle had stopped pulling us downward. Instead, it held us suspended between here and… there. The not-place where the children’s heartbeats rattled like trapped birds.

“Look,” I said. “Don’t fight it. Not yet.”

He made a sound that might’ve been a laugh if it weren’t so full of pain. “You’re asking an alpha not to fight?”

“I’m asking you to trust me,” I shot back. “And them.”

As if on cue, a small hand slid into mine inside the vision—not my real hand, my not-hand, in the stone corridor. Warm. Shaking. Tavis.

“You’re louder now,” he whispered. His eyes were too big in his thin face. Behind him, I could feel Kiva like a flicker of wild electricity, hiding but close. “The forest can hear you.”

“We need more than the forest,” I said, forcing my voice steady. “We need to know where you are.”

He licked cracked lips. “Down. Cold. With the old roots.” His gaze flicked past me, to where he must have felt Corren. “And we need him to stop bleeding on us.”

I jerked. “Bleeding—?”

Real-world Corren swayed behind me.

I tore my focus back to the clearing.

Blood slicked his side where one of the rune-lines had kissed flesh, smoke curling faintly from the burn. His shirt clung wet and dark.

“i***t,” I breathed. “You let it in.”

He bared his teeth. “I kept it from taking you.”

The circle pulsed again, sensing weakness, pressing harder against our bond. Pain flared bright behind my eyes—our pain, shared, magnified.

In the overlapping corridor, Tavis squeezed my not-hand until phantom bones ground.

“Hurry,” he whispered. “Before it learns how you fit.”

Above us—through us—the forest groaned.

I dragged in a breath that tasted like pine and stone and fear. There was no time to untangle everything the circle wanted from us. No time to soothe my own shaking instincts.

Just enough time to choose.

“All right,” I said, to Corren, to Tavis, to the trees and the magic and my own terrified wolf.

“You want us?” My voice came out low and rough, shaking the cage around us. “Then you take us together. And you show us every wrong you’re hiding.”

The rune-light surged in answer.

For one breath, we hung there—between forest and stone, between past and present, between losing ourselves and finally, finally seeing the truth.

And then the circle obeyed.