Alpha Raphael's Second Chance Mate
Nora's life turned into a nightmare after she was banished from her pack by her own husband. She was subjected to mockery, abuse and humiliation before being cast out with nothing.
Faced with the cruelty of a world that had never once been kind to her, the moon goddess decided to bless her with her fated mate.
The same man she watched slaughter others without a single trace of mercy. The man who was twice as cold and twice as ruthless as the husband who destroyed her.
Yet he would not let her go. She found herself stuck between the husband who used her and the ruthless mate who wanted her but refused to admit it. Two powerful men. One woman who was never supposed to survive any of it. And a moon goddess who was not done with her yet.
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Chapter 3
NORA
They came for me at first light just like he said they would.
I had not slept. I had sat on the edge of that hospital bed through the entire night with my hands folded in my lap and my eyes fixed on the wall in front of me and my mind going over and over everything that had happened until the words and the faces and the memory of Lena walking out with my baby blurred together into one long continuous ache that never once let up.
When the door opened and two guards stepped in I did not even flinch. I had been expecting them. I stood up slowly, with one hand pressed against my abdomen, and I followed them out without a word, there was nothing left to say to anyone in this place.
They walked me through the hospital corridors and every nurse, every maid and every pack member we passed along the way looked at me and then looked away. Not one of them held my gaze.
Not one of them said anything. They all just turned their faces and found something else to look at and let me walk past them like I was already gone.
We came out through the main hospital doors and the morning air hit me cold and sharp and I pulled what little I had around me and kept walking.
I could see the pack gates ahead.
And I could see that it was not just the guards waiting there.
The entire pack had gathered.
I stopped walking for just a second when I saw them all standing there, dozens of faces spread out across the grounds near the gate, and then one of the guards pressed a hand against my back and kept me moving forward and I understood then that this had been arranged.
That Kael had made sure there would be an audience for this. That walking me out quietly through a side entrance in the early morning would not have been enough for him. He needed everyone to see it.
I kept my head up. I do not know where I found the strength to do that but I did.
I walked toward those gates with both guards beside me and the faces of my pack watching from every side and I kept my eyes forward and my chin level and I breathed through every step.
Then Lena's voice cut through the morning air like a blade.
"There she is."
She was standing near the front of the crowd with Kael beside her and her voice was loud and clear and designed to carry. Every head that had been turned in my direction turned further.
"She tried to take the baby," Lena announced, her voice ringing out across the grounds.
"After everything that was done for her. After being taken in and given a roof and a place in this pack. She tried to steal the alpha's child."
Murmuring moved through the crowd like a wave.
"That is not true," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected it to. "That baby came out of my body. You cannot steal what already belongs to you."
"She is lying," Lena said simply, turning to the crowd the way someone turns to an audience they have already won over. "She was found trying to leave the pack with the child in the early hours. The alpha's heir. She had to be stopped."
"I never touched that baby." My voice rose now and I could not stop it. "I was never even allowed to hold him. I woke up and he was already gone and you know that. Every person standing here who was at that hospital last night knows that."
Nobody spoke up.
I looked out at all those faces. People I had lived among for years. People I had seen every day in those halls and at those meals and at those ceremonies. And not one of them opened their mouth.
Kael stepped forward then. He did not raise his voice. He never needed to.
"You are being removed from this pack effective immediately," he said, looking at me with that same flat unbothered calm he had shown me in the hospital room. "Not just for the attempted abduction. For being a threat to the stability of this pack and to the safety of its members."
"You are doing this because you are afraid," I said, and I looked straight at him when I said it. "You are afraid of what I know and what I saw and what I could tell people if I stayed."
Something moved in his eyes. Just for a second.
"Take her out," he said to the guards.
They grabbed my arms and I pulled against them on instinct, I desperately wanted to grab my child , maybe touch the child.
"I gave birth to that child!" My voice broke open completely now and I did not care anymore who heard it or what they thought of it.
"I carried him and I delivered him and you took him from me while I was unconscious and you are standing here calling me a thief in front of people who know exactly what you did!"I yelled, with tears streaming down my eyes.
"All I wanted was to be with my child, why are you being so cruel? I am your mate"
" Ex mate"Lena corrected.
Her eyes burned with rage, as she signaled the guards to drag me off.
The guards dragged me forward and my feet scraped against the ground and the faces of the pack blurred past me on both sides and through it all not one person moved. Not one person took a single step in my direction.
The gates opened.
They pushed me through and the cold outside hit me all at once and I stumbled and caught myself and turned back around just as the gates began to close.
Kael was watching from where he stood. Lena had her hand through his arm and she was smiling the way someone smiles when they have gotten exactly what they wanted and taken their time enjoying every second of it.
Slowly,I watched them close the gates.
The sound of them shutting was the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life.
I stood there on the outside of everything I had ever known with nothing in my hands and nowhere to go and the cold wrapping itself around me like it already knew I was alone.
I turned away from those gates because looking at them was not going to open them back up.
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9.7
Elara Voss was rejected by her Alpha on the night of the Blood Moon - cast aside as a nobody with no wolf, no rank, and no future. She ran. But fate had other plans.
In the human world, she collides with Damien Crest - cold, ruthless billionaire by day, the last living Shadowking by night. He offers her a contract marriage. She has nowhere else to go.
But ancient markings are awakening on her skin. A god is whispering her name. And Kael, the fearsome Werewolf High King, has declared across all supernatural realms that she is his fated mate.
Two kings. Two worlds. One woman who was never supposed to matter.
They all rejected her once. Now they'll burn their empires down to claim her.
7.6
He hated my gut!
I detested his arrogance!
I was supposed to be his ex-stepmother,but I hated pack politics and returned to the human community after Alpha Holt's death.
I was forced back to heal the wounds of the one that hated me the most, my stepson Adrian.
To the world he was the famous NHL golden boy of hockey and to the Frostfang pack, their feared Alpha.
But the moon goddess had another plan.
On the night he was crowned as Alpha, his father's mark faded from my neck and Adrian's mate bond burnt harshly on my skin. But fate wasn't done yet.
We were expected to team up to fight a common foe when we could barely stand each other.
Was our fate strong enough to overcome physical hatred?
7.4
Cadence, a modern botanist, woke up to a glaring sun and massive, alien purple leaves blocking the sky. She was stranded in a terrifying, primal world.
Before she could process the metallic smell of blood in the air, a white tiger the size of an SUV crushed a giant boar's neck right in front of her. The beast locked its piercing blue eyes on her hiding spot. But instead of tearing her throat out, a blinding flash of silver light erupted, and the monster transformed into a towering, heavily scarred naked man.
He was Harlan, a shifter who immediately claimed her as his mate under tribal law. Dragged back to his primitive village, Cadence faced a brutal reality. Unbonded females were targets, and she was expected to take multiple mates just to survive. The tribal women mocked her fragile frame, calling her useless. To make matters worse, her foreign scent attracted a rogue serpent-shifter who violently ambushed her in the river.
The icy shock of the serpent's attack plunged Cadence into a deadly, burning fever. The tribe's Shaman tried his healing magic, only to shake his head and abandon her.
"She lacks primal fortitude. She will rely entirely on her own weak vitality. I can do nothing."
As Harlan held her shivering body in despair, Cadence felt a deep sense of desperate injustice. Was she really going to die in a filthy stone hut in an unknown universe, killed by a simple cold?
No. She remembered her grandfather's strict survival lessons. Forcing her heavy eyes open, she grabbed her terrified tiger mate's hand. She didn't need their failing magic; she had science.
"I need specific plants to live. I need white willow bark. And a spicy, ginger-like root."
She rasped, preparing to show this savage world the true power of a modern survivor.
7.2
I woke up in a lavish bedroom, only to find a man built like a god of war chained to my wall, glaring at me with pure, unadulterated hatred.
A glowing apparition appeared and told me I had died in a car crash and transmigrated into the body of Elara, a tyrant Luna. Worse, the chained man was Ryker, one of my six fated mates whom the original Elara had brutally tortured.
Because of her sadistic crimes-starving them, exiling them, and sending two of them on a suicide mission-my affinity with them was at negative five hundred. The apparition delivered my terrifying death sentence.
"In three days, at the Marking Ceremony, you will be killed by your six mates."
No matter what I did-freeing Ryker, sharing my food, or lifting their brother's exile-they viewed every act of kindness as a sick, twisted trap. They were just waiting for the punchline to my cruel joke, ready to expose me and end my life.
I was just a librarian who organized book clubs and paid my taxes. Why did the Goddess throw me into this doomed vessel to pay for a psychopath's blood debts? How was I supposed to survive when the men destined to love me were actively plotting to rip my throat out?
Cornered by their righteous fury, I realized playing defense wouldn't work. I grabbed a dagger, sliced my own palm over the ceremonial stone, and swore a blood oath to bring their missing brothers home-or initiate a soul-shattering Rejection Ceremony myself.
9.4
I was the eldest daughter of the powerful Kirk family, sent away to a Swiss sanatorium to recover from my supposed mental illness.
But my stepmother, Johnie, never intended for me to get better. She sent her personal cleaners to drag me onto a plane back to Washington D.C.
In my past life, I didn't know they were assassins. I was forcefully injected with heavy sedatives and locked in a secret torture chamber inside our luxury estate.
My stepmother and cousin skimmed my inheritance while watching me suffer.
They framed me as a crazy addict, and my own father, a sitting Senator, turned a blind eye to protect his political career.
"Her political value is gone, just get rid of her quietly."
That was the last thing I heard my father say before I was brutally slaughtered by my own family.
Until my last breath, I couldn't understand why they hated me so much.
Why did my father let them force those pills down my throat?
Why was my life worth less than my stepmother's public image?
Opening my eyes again, the freezing sensation of lake water filling my lungs vanished.
I was back in the VIP room of the St. Moritz Sanatorium in 2023.
It was the exact morning before the cleaners walked through my door with uncapped syringes.
This time, I wouldn't just survive. I was going to cut the throat of the Kirk family.
7.9
Cora Foster was a brilliant archaeologist, but a jagged burn scar across her face made the world treat her like a contagious monster.
During an elite excavation of a Gilded Age crypt, touching an ancient artifact triggered a terrifying memory. She remembered being Seraphina Beaumont, a socialite brutally buried alive by her vain, cruel sister, Isolde.
When the team pried open the crypt's pristine mahogany casket, they cheered, believing the mummified corpse inside was Seraphina. But Cora recognized the onyx hairpin and the angular jawline. It was Isolde. The sister who had stolen her life, mocked her agony, and left her to suffocate in the dark. Her colleagues scoffed at her forensic proof, dismissing her as a scarred, delusional liability.
Worse, the ruthless billionaire funding the expedition, Julian Montgomery, was the spitting image of Alistair—the man Seraphina had deeply loved. Why was Julian staring at her ruined face with such intense, inexplicable recognition? And why did Isolde take Seraphina's most precious silver ring to the grave?
Driven by a century of agonizing grief, Cora secretly pried the tarnished ring from the mummy's stiff, dead fingers and dropped it into her pocket.
"What are you looking at, Foster?"
Julian's deep voice vibrated inches from her ear, his cold, predatory eyes locked directly onto her half-open pocket.