LOGINShare
Chapter Twenty-Two-Sophia's Mask Slips
publish date:
2026-04-14 14:58:09
Latest chapter
My mate chose my sister Chapter Twenty-Two-Sophia's Mask Slips
I was not there when it happened. I heard about it in pieces, the way you heard about earthquakes you had slept through, from the evidence left behind and the account of someone who had been awake.Aurora told me. She found me the following morning on the back prep station, which was where I had been reassigned since the corridor access was severed, and she appeared at the kitchen's side entrance at half past eight with her hands in her coat pockets and the particular expression she wore when she was deciding how much of something to say.She had been deciding a lot in the two days since the corridor. I had noticed. She was generous with information but precise about the dosage, which told me she understood that information had weight and weight required care, which in turn told me she was more like her brother than her energy initially suggested."I need to tell you something," she said. "And I need you to not react visibly because there are three people in this kitchen who are watch
My mate chose my sister Chapter Twenty-One- The Wolf Beneath
Lily came to the east block that evening with her coat buttoned wrong.I noticed before she sat down. Third button through the second hole, the hem sitting crooked on her left side. Lily Rowan did not button her coat wrong. Lily Rowan did not do anything carelessly, she was the most precisely organized person I had known in twenty-three years of knowing people, and the wrong button was the signal we had agreed on three weeks ago in the early frost of the tree line morning.Someone is watching. Be careful.I said nothing about it. She sat on the floor where Marcus had sat that morning, which struck me as both coincidental and somehow appropriate, and we talked about nothing for fifteen minutes. The kitchen schedule. A book she had borrowed from the pack library. The weather turning colder. Ordinary, boring, innocuous conversation conducted at a volume and content level that would satisfy whoever was outside the door or beneath the window or however Sophia's monitoring had been arranged
My mate chose my sister Chapter Twenty: An Unlikely Alliance
Marcus came to the east block the following morning with no coffee and no pretense and sat on the floor because there was only one chair and he left it for me.That told me more about the nature of the visit than anything he said in the first five minutes.I sat in the chair. He sat with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out in front of him and his hands resting on his knees, and he looked like a man who had spent the night making a decision and had arrived here as the conclusion of it. Not comfortable. Not relaxed. But committed, in the way that people were committed when they had passed the point of turning back and were now simply moving in the direction they had chosen."I owe you an apology," he said. No preamble. Just the sentence, placed directly in front of me like something he had been carrying and was now setting down.I looked at him."I'm not going to give you one," he said. "Not yet. Because an apology right now would be about making myself feel better
My mate chose my sister Chapter Nineteen: The Beta's Doubt
Marcus Thorn had a habit of doing security sweeps of the pack grounds at irregular hours.I knew this because in the five weeks since the gathering I had learned the movement patterns of every significant wolf in this pack the way you learned the layout of a house you were trapped in. Not from strategy, at first. From the simple necessity of knowing where the danger was before it arrived. Marcus ran his sweeps at dawn, at midday, and at unpredictable intervals throughout the evening, varying the timing specifically so that anyone watching the schedule would not be able to predict the gaps. It was the method of a man who took security seriously and understood that predictability was its own vulnerability.I had noticed. I had respected it, at a distance, the way you respected competence in people who were not on your side.What I had not expected was to be the thing he found during a sweep.It was late Friday afternoon, three days into the Nightfang visit, and I had taken the long rout
My mate chose my sister Chapter Eighteen: What a Father Should Be
My father came back the next morning.Not summoned. Not performing an errand for Victor or delivering another instruction wrapped in careful language. He knocked on the east block door at seven thirty, before the breakfast service, before the pack had properly woken, and when I opened it he was standing in the corridor with no pretense prepared, which was the most alarming thing I had seen him do in years.He was holding two cups of coffee from the communal kitchen. He held one out to me without a word.I took it. I stepped back from the door. He came in.We sat across from each other the way we had the night before, him in the chair and me on the edge of the bed, except that this time the silence was different. Last night's silence had been the silence of things being left unsaid. This morning's was the silence of a man trying to locate the beginning of something he had been putting off for a very long time.I drank my coffee and waited."I've been thinking," he said finally, "about
My mate chose my sister Chapter Seventeen:The Ceremony Draws Near
The invitations went out on a Wednesday.I knew because Lily told me, and I knew because the pack's mood shifted the way it always shifted when something inevitable moved from abstract to scheduled, a collective tightening, a change in the quality of the air. The mating ceremony was in eleven days. Printed on heavy cream card stock, delivered by hand to every allied pack in the region, the Blackwood name embossed at the top in gold and Alexander and Sophia's names beneath it like something already settled, already finished, already true.I held one of the invitations in my hands for approximately thirty seconds. One of the kitchen staff had left it on the prep station, not for me, just set down carelessly while she went to answer a question. I read it once. Then I set it back exactly where it had been and went back to work.Eleven days.I had known this was coming. I had been building myself around the knowledge of it for a month, the way you built around a structural element you coul
My mate chose my sister Chapter Eleven: A Name Like Thunder
The news moved through the pack the way all significant news did, not announced, not posted, just suddenly present in every conversation like it had always been there and you had simply not been listening carefully enough before.Ethan Nightfang was coming.I heard it first from the corridor outsid
My mate chose my sister Chapter Ten: Cracks in the Ice
I watched Alexander fall apart in increments so small that anyone not paying attention would have missed every single one.I was paying attention.I had nothing else to do with my time in the east block except read, walk the narrow permitted circuit of the grounds, and notice things. And what I not
My mate chose my sister Chapter Nine: The Cost of Loyalty
Lily came to my room on Friday afternoon with red eyes and steady hands, which meant she had already finished crying and had moved on to deciding.I knew those two states in her the way I knew the difference between rain coming and rain arrived. She had been my closest friend for eleven years, sinc
My mate chose my sister Chapter Eight: Crow at the Window
It arrived on a Thursday morning while I was doing nothing more significant than staring at a wall.I had been in the east block room for six days by then, relocated, stripped of training privileges, quietly erased from the functioning life of the pack the way you erase a word from a page, not torn
You may also like
Alpha Asher
Jane Doe10.0M viewsShifted Fate
Alicia S. Rivers1.3M viewsThe Alpha King's Daughter
Jane Doe766.1K viewsHer Forbidden Alpha
Moonlight Muse1.0M viewsREJECTED BY THE ALPHA : CLAIMED BY THE CROWN
Shizuka_the_author91 viewsThe Luna’s Forbbidden Blood
R.Lux227 viewsI Am Not Your Ordinary Luna, I Am The Rebel Queen
Shiroi_Nami365 viewsTASTE OF THE CURSED LUNA
SexMama240 views
