You Are Not Rejecting Me novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: House Empty

I did not go to the motel.

I waited for her where she would have to come.

At six in the morning I sat on a sawhorse in the carriage barn behind the lodge, among my half-stripped chairs.

Her phone lay in my lap.

She had to come for it.

She would have noticed it was gone by now, and she would have turned the motel room upside down.

The barn door slid open at ten past six.

Seren stood in the gray light with her jacket buttoned wrong.

Her eyes went to my hand, and to the phone in it, and she stopped.

"There you are," she said. "I've been looking everywhere."

"I bet you have."

"You took it by mistake. Nia, I was so scared. Give it here."

She held out her hand, with her warm, rueful smile.

I knew that smile.

I had been trusting it for twenty-seven years.

"Fourteen months ago you told me you were so happy you could burst," I said.

"I read it last night. You were at the lodge with Owain while Cadell was at the council hall."

The smile did not move.

Then it slid off her face, all at once, and what was under it was perfectly calm.

"You read my messages."

"I read all of them."

"Well," Seren said. She dropped her hand. "That's a shame."

"Is that all?"

"What do you want me to say? That I'm sorry?"

She leaned a hip against the barn door.

"I'm not. I was going to tell you after the moon, when it was done."

"When what was done?"

"When Owain was Alpha."

I stood up.

I could not help it.

"You set up your own mate."

My voice shook.

"Somebody put a hand on his arm for the camera, and you let the pack say it was Marigold's."

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