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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 180: THE LAST NAME
LENAWe found the last of the forty-one names on a Tuesday in early summer, nearly two years after Ruth first walked into the archive out of a snowstorm, and it was Beatrice who found her, not me.I was upstairs with Elena, who had discovered stairs that spring and regarded them as a personal challenge, when I heard Beatrice call my name in a voice I’d never heard from her before. Not distress. Something closer to disbelief.I came down to find her sitting very still at the long table, a single sheet of paper in her trembling hands, Ivy hovering behind her with both palms pressed to her mouth.“What is it?” I asked.“Read it,” Beatrice said. “I don’t trust myself to say it out loud.”I took the page. It was a placement record, like all the others, the same clipped bureaucratic language, the same cold blanks filled in by a hand that had never once considered what it was erasing. Name: Corwin, M. Age: 4. Pack of origin: Corwin, Harrow Point. Placement: state guardianship, transferred ou
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 179: TWO YEARS
LENAWe marked two years of marriage at the cove, because that was where we happened to be, and because, by then, it felt less like choosing one home over another and more like simply living in the larger house we’d built.Elena, eight months old and recently, triumphantly mobile, spent the morning attempting to eat sand with a determination that suggested she might, eventually, succeed through sheer persistence. Tomas’s apple trees had borne their first real crop that autumn, small and tart, and Cass, seventeen now and taller than everyone but Cole, had spent the whole summer turning them into a cider that tasted mostly of ambition.“It’s terrible,” Marian announced, tasting it for the third time. “I’m having more.”“That tracks with everything I know about you,” I said.Sarah had run a second piece that spring, shorter than the first, about the cove and the Shore Trust and the forty-one names, and at the very end of it she’d quoted me without my quite realizing, until I read the pri
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 178: RETIREMENT
COLEMy father announced his full retirement at the spring equinox, one year to the day after he had named me his successor, and he did it in four sentences, exactly as he had once advised me to.“I have led this pack for twenty-seven years,” he said, standing at the water’s edge where I had once stood in his place. “I handed my son the lead a year ago, and I have spent the year discovering how much I still had left to unlearn. I am finished unlearning in public. From today, I am simply Rowan, and I would like to be introduced to my granddaughter as a man with time.”The hall laughed, warm and startled, and my mother, beside him, laughed hardest of all.He’d told me two weeks earlier, over dinner, gruff and almost shy about it, that he wanted to step back fully rather than linger as an adviser forever looking over my shoulder. “A pack needs one Alpha, not one and a half,” he’d said. “I’ve watched enough leaders cling to the edges of power to know what it does to the people underneath
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 177: THE REVIEW
LENAThe state’s placement review released its first findings in February, and Priya called before I’d finished my coffee.“Sit down,” she said.“I’m already sitting.”“Sit down further.” I could hear papers shuffling on her end. “They’ve confirmed eleven of the forty-one. Eleven placements the court found no legal basis for whatsoever. Three are being reopened for restitution. And Lena—” Her voice caught, professional composure slipping for just a moment. “One of them is a homicide referral. The investigator who signed off on a 2003 placement falsified a death certificate. They’re reopening it as a criminal matter.”I set down my mug very carefully, because my hands had started to shake.“Whose?”“You’ll want to be sitting for this part too.” A pause. “The Thornfield file. Dana’s pack.”I closed my eyes. Dana had visited three times since November, slow and careful, testing the water each time before wading in further. She’d met Marian at Christmas, awkward and overjoyed, and cried i
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 176: WINTER BALANCE
COLECoaching a full season and leading a pack at the same time, I discovered that winter was an exercise in constant, undignified triage.“You smell like a locker room,” my father observed, arriving at the pack meeting hall forty minutes after I did, still in my team jacket, hair damp from a shower I’d taken standing in my skates.“I had practice. Then the Nordvik boundary dispute. Then practice again.”“You could delegate.”“I am delegating. I delegated the boundary dispute to Damien, who delegated it to Marcus, who called me anyway.”My father almost smiled. He’d stepped back further than I expected, that winter, content to advise rather than direct, and I found myself missing the easy certainty of having him simply take over when I faltered. He didn’t take over anymore. He waited, infuriatingly patient, until I asked.“How do you do it?” I asked him, one night, after a particularly brutal Thursday. “Both. At once. Without losing the thread of either.”“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I l
The Captain's Forbidden Mate CHAPTER 175: DANA
LENADana Okafor arrived at the archive on the first cold morning of November, and I knew her the moment she stepped through the door, though I had only ever seen her in a single photograph.She had the same wary set to her shoulders that Ruth had carried, the same habit, I would learn, of standing near exits without quite meaning to. Thirty-four years old, a dental hygienist from three states south, with a careful blowout and a wedding ring she kept turning with her thumb.“I don’t know why I came,” she said, before I’d even offered her a chair. “I almost didn’t. I got halfway here twice and turned around.”“I’m glad you didn’t the third time.”“My husband thinks I’m visiting a college friend.” She laughed, short and humorless. “I’ve been lying about where I’m going for three weeks. It felt safer than explaining something I don’t understand myself.”I made tea. Beatrice hovered at the edge of the room, and I waved her off gently; some conversations needed fewer witnesses. Elena, six
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