All Chapters of The Mate They Threw Away: Chapter 351 - Chapter 360

Sage.I hadn't made it three steps toward the office before Nessa's radio crackled with another call, and this time her face went carefully blank in the way it always did right before she delivered bad news."What," I said."Petra," she said. "She's crashing too. Different pattern than the others. Her silver toxicity markers just spiked instead of dropped.""That doesn't make sense. She wasn't connected to the same current as the ICU patients.""I know. I don't have an explanation. I just have a patient in trouble."I followed her at a near-run, the exhaustion in my limbs shoved aside by pure adrenaline, and found Petra thrashing weakly against her restraints, skin flushed an angry, unnatural red, monitor screaming a rhythm too fast to be sustainable."Her body's rejecting the chelation compound," Kessler said, already at her bedside, hands moving fast over the IV line. "The nymph minerals bound to the particulate matter like Strahovsky predicted, but the byproduct's acting like a tox

Sage.We worked through the photographs for nearly two hours, spreading them across the small table until the surface disappeared beneath clinical horror laid out in neat, methodical rows."This one," I said, tapping a photograph near the bottom of the pile. "Different subject, but the same annotation cluster near the sternum. He's confirmed the pattern across multiple bodies now. That's not exploratory anymore. That's verification.""Verification for what, though.""I don't know yet. But verification means he's close to done mapping and getting ready to build something with what he's learned." I rubbed my eyes, the exhaustion of the night finally catching up to the adrenaline that had carried me this far. "Dominic, I need to ask you something, and I need you to actually answer instead of deflecting.""Ask.""Strahovsky built the weapon that wiped out Tartarus's ability to defend itself. You've told me that story now, the true version. But before that… before Saturn, before any of thi

Sage.Dominic found me in the courtyard an hour after the Sisters had departed, still sitting on the low garden wall, staring at nothing in particular."Nessa told me the coven came and went already," he said, settling beside me. "That's fast, even for a group known for being efficient.""They tried to bind me. Traditional ceremony, three days, the whole ritual. It didn't take.""Didn't take how.""Like their magic hit a wall that wasn't supposed to be there. Hekate said the ritual's bound wielders far more powerful than me before. It just didn't work on whatever this is." I rubbed my eyes, the exhaustion of the last two days sitting heavy behind them. "She said it might mean I'm outside the shape their traditions were built to hold."Dominic was quiet a moment, processing that. "How does that make you feel.""Untethered," I admitted. "Everyone keeps finding new things I can do, and nobody, including me, has any idea how to actually control any of it. I didn't ask for power that break

Sage."You're not answering the actual question," I said. "Why my clinic. Why now, with everything else happening."Aurora tilted her head, studying me with an unsettling patience. "Chaos is nourishing, Dr. Winters. Fear, hope, desperation, all of it tangled together in one building, that's a feast most places can't offer. I didn't choose Dr. Halden randomly. I chose this Sanctuary because it's the most emotionally saturated place in the territory right now.""So you're just here to feed. Nothing more.""Nothing more," she agreed, though something in the careful precision of the phrase made me doubt it."I don't believe you."Her smile sharpened slightly. "You don't have to believe me. You just have to decide what you're going to do about my presence, which, I suspect, is the actual question keeping you standing so rigidly in this doorway."She wasn't wrong. I felt the weight of the decision pressing on me, call security, risk whatever chaos an actual confrontation might cause in a bu

Sage.The Council Leader's heir was seventeen, pale and thin in a way that had nothing to do with youth and everything to do with weeks of failing treatment, and the moment I looked at him with the Twilight rising, I understood exactly why standard protocols hadn't touched whatever was eating him alive."His name is Corin," said the attending physician, a nervous man who clearly hadn't expected to be handing his patient over to the woman the Council was actively trying to prosecute. "We've tried everything in the standard formulary. Nothing's slowed the progression.""That's because it's not a standard infection." I studied the threading pattern beneath his skin, the same parasitic web I'd first seen in Marcus weeks ago, except denser here, more advanced, wound so tightly through his nervous system that it had started interfering with basic motor function. "This is late-stage Rift-plague mutation. The same thing I've been treating in dozens of other patients.""The Council didn't disc