The Alpha's Rejected Fate: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (Wolf's Midlife Bond Book 1) by Aline Ash

Author:Aline Ash [Ash, Aline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Kieran

His mother and father stood solemnly near the graveside, surrounded by his brothers and sisters. Behind them, surrounding the mournful figures with bowed heads, was the rest of the pack. It looked like every single person had turned up, but they knew that outsiders would be there. Outsiders, even though they were his family, were not to be trusted. There wasn’t a single child present in the crowd other than the twins. Kieran wondered if Zora noticed, and if she did, would she say something. He knew he had to tell her eventually, but he was afraid of breaking her already fragile heart.

Kieran took in every tear-stained cheek, his eyes roaming slowly over the people he knew and loved so well. Their pack was one the of the largest in the area with just over fifty wolves. Each and every single one of those fifty looked defeated. The shock and sorrow bent normally proud spines until they resembled old, swayed trees. The alpha and his family were always at the center and the heart unless the pack was on a run, and then the alpha and his mate led. His family was bracketed in the middle.

He stood out alone, but he too was surrounded by his family.

His family. Not his brothers and sisters or his parents, but his children. The woman he’d always love. Her mother.

He could barely breathe as he stared at the dark wound of gaping earth and the shroud-draped body in the maw of it.

The cold frozen ground had been no match for his brothers and the members of the pack who took up pickaxes and shovels and carved out a grave in their burial grounds. The sacred spot was hidden in the woods, where the older trees and the very epicenter of their ancestral lands lay. Hidden by towering trees, even the wind hardly dared to make a sound in their sacred spot.

The whole pack stood on one side of that grave, and he stood on the other. The grave separated him, but he didn’t feel cut off.

Outsiders—at least anyone other than Brooke Wind who was a wisewoman in her own right, had never been allowed at a pack burial before. Zora and his children were a part of the pack in ways that hadn’t been conceived of before. No one questioned why they were allowed to be there, not with the brutal death of the woman they’d just laid in the ground, cleaned and wrapped in layers of white by his mother and his sisters.

This was a violent act, the likes of which many in the pack were too young to ever have remembered being perpetrated.

The wiseman’s words, carried by the frigid breeze whipping around them, pierced through Kieran like bullet holes. “May you take your place with your ancestors, wherever they should walk. May you find peace in this new life. Life after the life lived here. May you know joy and rest. May your wisdom guide us here, who are still living and still searching, until we know the joy of being equally unrestrained by a physical form.

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