All Chapters of The Mate They Threw Away: Chapter 361 - Chapter 370

Sage. More of them poured out of the tree line the moment we thought we'd found a rhythm, at least a dozen fresh constructs joining the fray, and I felt the stretched, slowed quality of Chrono-Predatory phasing start to strain against how many threats it needed to track at once. "There's too many," I called to Dominic, ducking under a swiping bone claw and driving my palm into a Bone-Singer's ribcage, shattering it from the inside with a burst of Source-laced force. "We need to fall back to a chokepoint." "There's a ravine, thirty yards east," he shouted back, parrying two attacks at once with brutal, economical precision. "Narrow enough to limit how many can reach us simultaneously."

Sage.I hadn't planned to look at Kieran that way. It happened by accident, mid-argument, three days after the Sovereign of One confrontation with Dominic, while Kieran was in my office trying to explain again why he'd once let the Council pressure him into signing away visitation rights during my darkest year with Noah."I didn't have a choice," he said, pacing in front of my desk. "The Ancient Covenant gave the Council direct authority over custody disputes involving anchor children. I fought it as hard as the law allowed.""As hard as the law allowed," I repeated, skeptical."Yes.""That's always been your line, Kieran. As hard as the law allowed. As hard as tradition allowed. As hard as the Covenant allowed. Have you ever once stopped to ask yourself why you never seem able to push past that particular wall?""Because it's the law," he said, frustration bleeding into his voice. "Because breaking Covenant law isn't a small thing, Sage, it's…"Something in the phrase snagged at me,

Sage. The heat started three hours after the bond network collapse, once the terminal had gone quiet and Nessa had finally convinced me to lie down on the workshop cot instead of standing back up. At first I told myself it was fever. Ordinary exhaustion, the kind that came after absorbing three hundred and twelve strangers' worth of grief into a body that had never been built to hold that much. Then my skin started to glow. "Sage." Dominic's voice, sharp with alarm, from somewhere near the door. "Your arms." I looked down and understood immediately why he s

Sage.The report came in three days after the Arena, delivered by one of Dominic's contacts with a face gone pale beneath his usual composure."You need to see this," he said, setting a tablet on the desk between us, hands unsteady. "Surveillance footage. Thorne's private compound, the one we've been trying to locate for weeks."I pulled the tablet closer, and the image on screen made my stomach turn, a sterile lab, similar in architecture to the photographs Dominic had shown me weeks ago, except this time the subject on the table wasn't a captured, unwilling victim.It was Thorne himself."He's injecting something," I said, watching the grainy footage with growing dread. "Into his own arm.""Void-Alpha parasite," the contact said grimly. "We intercepted enough of his research to identify the compound before we lost the feed. He's been developing it for months, theoretically, as something to weaponize against Source-wielders like you. We never anticipated he'd test it on himself.""Wh

Sage. We had less than a day before the Council's deadline, and I spent the first six hours of it in the makeshift lab Strahovsky had set up in the Sanctuary's basement, staring at a dead Rift creature's exposed genetic sequence and trying not to think about the countdown ticking somewhere above our heads. "It's not a werewolf," Strahovsky said, adjusting the microscope's focus with steady, unhurried hands despite the chaos unfolding one floor above her. "Not entirely. This creature came through during the last tremor, killed two scouts before it died of what appears to be exposure to our world's atmosphere. Its biology wasn't built to survive here." "Show me the sequence again."