All Chapters of The Mate They Threw Away: Chapter 301 - Chapter 310

 Sage "You are just an ordinary Omega, Sage Winters." The First Clan Chief's voice carried the particular boredom of a man who had said this kind of thing to a hundred people before me and watched all of them break the same way. He didn't know about me. Couldn't know. "So I implore you to make this easy on yourself." The room he'd chosen for this was too elegant for what he intended, gold accents, a low table, the kind of chair you'd offer a guest you respected. He hadn't offered me one. A young-looking werewolf entered behind him, and something in my chest pulled tight before my mind caught up to why. His enforcer. I could feel the aggression rolling off him in waves, the

DominicI heard the walls go down the same moment everyone else at the gathering did, a crash loud enough to silence three tables of chatter at once. I didn't need to see it to know it had something to do with Sage. Some instinct older than reasoning told me, the same way I'd known something was wrong the moment the First Clan Chief abandoned his own table to come sit at mine.He and I had never seen eye to eye. I preferred it that way. Trust was a currency I didn't deal in with men like him.My nostrils flared, and underneath the noise of the hall I caught it, burnt Alpha flesh, sharp and chemical in a way ordinary fire didn't produce.Silver nitrate.A lethal little compound, favored by werewolves who wanted to make absolutely sure a death stayed quiet. Ingested, it roasted a body's organs from the inside out and burned away every biological trace that might otherwise identify the corpse. Convenient, if you needed someone gone and untraceable. I'd used it myself, once or twice, in y

Sage."It would lose its divine and mysterious nature," Circe repeated her own words like she was tasting something bitter. "Do you know what happens to a thing once everybody can touch it?""It stops being special," I said."It stops being feared," she corrected. "Mystery is the only leash my sisters have ever had on you dogs. Take that away and what is left?" She gestured lazily toward the floor below us, toward the underground, toward all of it. "Chaos. Worse chaos than you already have."I watched her drain the rest of whatever was in her cup. For someone who claimed to see patterns in the past, present, and future, she sounded remarkably unprepared for this particular present."You did not see this coming," I said. It was not a question.Circe's eyes flicked to me, sharp despite the drink in her. "I see more than you can imagine, Sage Winters. I simply did not care to look at a vain Alpha and his temper tantrums.""That's going to bite you," Dominic said mildly."Everything bites

Sage.The food had gone cold, but I ate it anyway, mechanically, while my mind turned over everything that had happened since I'd walked into this building. A man had exploded in front of me because of a vow I hadn't known existed. A Beta had killed himself rather than admit failure to a Chief who'd ordered my kidnapping. A succubus had made a respected elder crawl across marble for the amusement of strangers, and I had let it happen for longer than I wanted to admit, because some small, ugly part of me had wanted to see him humbled.I didn't like that part of myself. I didn't recognize her.Across the table, Dominic was deep in conversation with one of the Seventh Family's representatives, his face arranged into the particular blankness he wore when he wanted information without revealing he wanted it. I studied the li

Dominic.I gave her the time alone she so clearly needed, though it cost me more restraint than I wanted to examine. Five years of not knowing where she was, not knowing if she was safe, not knowing if she thought of me at all in whatever version of a life she'd built without me, and now she was one floor away, on a balcony I could reach in under a minute, and I made myself stay exactly where I was.Some lessons I had learned the hard way. Chief among them: Sage did not respond to being chased. She responded to being given room to choose, even when every instinct I had screamed to close the distance and not let her out of my sight again.I dressed and went looking for Argos instead, found him exactly where I expected, already three steps ahead of whatever crisis the morning intended to hand me.