Semua Bab Oh My Beta!: Bab 71 - Bab 80

Aria's POV Two days passed without word from Riven. I had stopped counting the hours somewhere around the second morning and started counting other things instead. The number of times Olive winced when I changed her dressing. The number of times I checked the gate. The number of times I told myself no news was good news and almost believed it. The afternoon was pale and still, the kind of winter quiet that sat on everything like a held breath. I'd dragged the wide chair out from the receiving room and positioned it in the compound where the weak sun actually reached, and Olive had followed without being asked, pulling a low stool behind her, and now she sat with her back to me while I worked the ointment carefully across her wounds. They were healing. Slowly, unevenly, the deep ones still angry and raised, but the bleeding had stopped and Marta's ointment was doing what it was supposed to do. I worked it in with two fingers the way Marta had shown me, careful around the worst o

Riven’s POVThe bag over my shoulder was lighter than it should have been.I’d noticed it sometime around the second hour of walking, when the strap had started cutting into my flesh and I’d shifted it to the other side and felt how little resistance it offered. I’d eaten most of what I’d packed before I ever reached the forest. Whatever Marta had given me as a farewell present was long gone also. And there was nothing left in it worth carrying except clothes and a few books I'd picked from the book shelf at the cold palace.The trees thinned gradually the way they always did on the approach from the east, the old growth giving way to younger wood, the undergrowth loosening, the ground hardening under my boots from forest floor to the packed earth of the outer territory roads. My chest hurt with every step. Not the sharp urgent kind of pain that meant something was tearing, just the deep persistent ache of a body doing more than it had been given permission to do.I thought about the

Claire’s POVI gave them an hour.Long enough for Kade to settle him, feed him, and fuss over him the way he fussed over things he felt guilty about without knowing why. Long enough for the initial shock of his return to move through the pack house and become something people were talking about in corridors rather than staring at. Long enough for me to sit at my dressing table and think through every possible version of what happened next and find the one with the best odds.Then I went to see him.The guest room they’d put him in was on the second floor, east wing, one of the larger ones with a window that faced the training yard. I knew before I knocked that Kade had chosen it himself. He had a particular way of showing people they mattered to him through practical things, the best room, the fullest plate, the warmest fire, and it told me everything about where Kade’s head was after seeing Riven walk through that gate.That was a problem I would deal with separately.I knocked twice

Beta Riven’s PovThe torches burned down slowly around us and the cold settled into the yard and we didn’t talk about Claire or the elders or what I was going to say before the audience. We just trained. The way we had a hundred times before all of this. The way we had when things were simple and the pack was whole and I wasn’t supposed to be dead.After the sixth round he stopped and braced his hands on his knees.“You’re still pulling every strike,” he said between breaths. “Because of the chest.”“My strikes are landing fine.”“Riven.”“Kade.”He straightened and looked at me. Really looked, the way he hadn’t in months, clear-eyed and direct and present.“What happened out there,” he said quietly. “In the forest. Tell me.”The torches crackled. Somewhere past the yard wall an owl called once and went silent.I held his gaze.“Before the audience,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything before the audience.”He held my gaze for a long moment. Then nodded. Once. The nod of a man who didn’

Beta Riven’s pov I stood up before the sky had decided whether it wanted to be day or not, crossed the cold floorboards of the guest room, and leaned my palms against the window sill. Down in the yard the omegas were already moving, silent shapes in the blue pre-dawn, unfurling pack banners that snapped like warnings in the frost. Poles rose, fabric stretched taut, canopies taking shape along the ridge. The trials ground was waking faster than the rest of us. Last night still clung to me. Kade and I had stolen an hour in the old sparring yard before dinner, him in worn training leathers, me watching more than fighting because my ribs still sang when I breathed too deep. His footwork was there, muscle memory sharp as ever, but the timing… off. Half a beat late. Eyes glazing for fractions of a second when they shouldn’t. I’d seen that dulling look too many times these past months: the slow poison Claire fed him through those endless sticks of incense smoldering in his chambers. No sc