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CHAPTER 84: PRACTICE
publish date:
2026-09-14 20:25:17
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The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 90: A NAME REMEMBERED
COLEDamien called before I had even finished my coffee, his voice sharp with something that sounded a lot like shock."Everyone knows it," he said without preamble, "Elias Marlow. He went very, very quiet when I mentioned it, very quiet in a way I haven't seen from him since our conversation in his study.""Wanted to know what he said?" I asked, my hand already moving towards Lena, who had gone rigid next to me the moment he had heard the change in my voice."He said it was the name on the guardianship transfer, twenty-five years ago. He spent twenty-five years believing it was a shell name, nothing more than the way most of the transaction's documentary evidence is designed to be hidden. But he confirmed it personally, is the name of the man who signed the paperwork, buying his silence."The weight settled heavily over the apartment, Lena's hand clenching around mine as she finally realized what he meant, the facts finally clicking into place in my skull."That's him," she said soft
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 89: THE FOURTH PROPERTY
LENACole and I picked the number four house on our list. It was a stretch of wooded land, twenty minutes or so outside of town. The house itself was not much to behold, even from the narrow dirt road.We parked well back as Astra had instructed us all to and trekked our way through the tree line with care, quietness, gold light seeping through leaves that had not lost all of their chlorophyll. Cole moved ahead of me, taking in everything with sharper, more trained eyes than had been the norm for him before these past few months had happened."There," he murmured, tapping towards the space between the trees that allowed us to glimpse the house with relative ease.It was large, and yet nothing special, nothing to draw too much attention from passersby. Well maintained, but not ostentatious. There were no cars either in the visible driveway. It appeared to be inhabited, but with no real signs of it at the present.We took up our positions after that, patience being the primary virtue as
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 88: NARROWING THE RADIUS
COLENoah had pasted an entire wall of the library corner with printouts by the time we arrived and marked out a crude map of the territory around Northcrest, circling places in careful succession, radiating out from the faculty parking lot where Lena had seen him before"Assuming he was willing to drive no more than thirty minutes for a casual stop," Noah said, not looking away from the laptop on his lap, "that gives us a search radius that's still big, but considerably smaller than an entire region.""How do we narrow it?" Lena asked, studying the map."Property records. Older, wealthy, private places, the ones the discreet hide in. I'm comparing it against ownership structures that have reason to be intentionally obscured, shell companies, trusts, anything that implies someone has considerably more interest in keeping a normal property search from finding their address."Astra followed along the marked-out sections with her fingers. "That's clever. Most people don't bother hiding p
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 87: A NAME AT LAST
LENAAiden got a hold of Thorne through their carefully channelled means and had received a response within a day, faster than Thorne had done anything similar previously so the level of urgency must have been apparent on his end.I met up with Thorne again at the ranger station and the cold, forgotten walls surrounded what little new piece of this Thorne wanted me to receive. He was already waiting for us, and I knew straight away when he took in the sight of the printed image Noah had presented him with.'Where did you find this?' he asked, voice tight.'Aiden found some old security footage. It's eleven years old. You know him.'Thorne kept looking at the grainy image for a long while before he spoke. 'Cassian Vale. That's the name he went by. When I still moved in circles where that name would have meant something to me. I don't know if that's his real name. I suspect it isn't. But it's the only name I've ever heard in connection with him.'The name settled into place, the months
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 86: THE EYE WITNESS
COLENoah found something two days later. I could tell by the deliberate thrill in his voice when he called that it was worth delaying practice for. "It's security footage," Noah said, once I'd slipped off the pond and away from my teammates. "From a council building renovation. Eleven years ago. It was... archived? Mostly left forgotten? Buried in the contractor's files that Marcus accessed when he mentioned the renovation coinciding with the council transition that set things in motion.""What does it show?" I asked, wiping the towel to dry my sweat, willing to focus on his words if not the sting of my muscles. "A man with his description, wandering the halls, captured on film for four seconds by an unassuming security camera. Pale eyes, tall stature--the contractor stopped playback to remark in passing, if the timestamp and his notes are accurate, before moving one to the next item."My heart was racing. "There wasn't any."“Can you get a clear image?”Working on it," I said. "Enhan
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 85: DEBORAH'S CONTACTS
LENADeborah called through Aiden's careful channel a week after the break in and something in the tone of her message, relayed secondhand, had enough urgency that we set up to meet within two days.She'd brought someone with her this time, an older man introduced only as Elias, careful and watchful in the particular way that suggested decades of practice staying unnoticed, and we met at a different diner this time, further from Brackenridge territory, Deborah's caution about being seen with us clearly having been sharpened since our first conversation."Elias remembers him," said Deborah, without much preamble."The quiet elder. The one your friend described."Aiden leaned forward, careful attention fixed entirely on the older man across the table. "Tell us what you remember."Elias took a long moment to consider the request, old caution warring with whatever had convinced him to come at all. "I served on my pack's council for over twenty years before I stepped down, and I met him tw
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