Semua Bab BRIDE FOR RENT IS MY FATED MATE.: Bab 141 - Bab 150

THIRD PERSON POVLife in the territory began to find its rhythm again.The new elder appointments were announced at a formal meeting four days after the verdict. Donald had chosen carefully — not just men and women of age and experience, but ones with demonstrated loyalty to the crown and the kind of character that did not bend under pressure or opportunity.The pack received the appointments well.There was a feeling moving through the territory in those days that was hard to name exactly but easy to feel. Like something that had been holding its breath had finally exhaled. Like the territory itself knew that the wrongness that had crept into it had been removed and was slowly returning to what it was supposed to be.Rebecca felt it. And everyone else did, too.She walked through the territory differently now. Not cautiously, not with the careful awareness of someone who was always half-expecting the ground to shift under her feet. She walked like someone who belonged. Because she

THIRD PERSON POVDonald came home on the evening of the second day.The sky above the territory was a deep, burnt orange when the gates opened for him. The sun was setting, and it reminded him that nothing ever lasted. There would always be an end.The guards at the gate stepped aside the moment they saw him coming down the road, and word moved ahead of him through the territory the way word always moved when the Alpha returned — fast and quiet, passing from one post to the next until it reached the main house before he did.Rebecca was at the door when he arrived.She had been inside when she heard the gates, and something in her chest had shifted immediately — a pull, low and certain, the kind that didn't need confirmation. She had set down what she was holding and walked to the door and opened it and stood there in the early evening air, watching the road.She saw Rowan first. Then the six guards behind him, riding in loose formation, their faces carrying the particular blankness o

THIRD PERSON POVThe days that followed were good ones.Rebecca woke up each morning without dread.That was the simplest way she could describe the change in her life, and also the most honest one. For so long, waking up had carried a weight to it — an awareness, even before she was fully conscious, of something to be careful about. Something to manage. Some version of herself she needed to assemble before she could face the day. She had carried that feeling for so long she had stopped noticing it was there, the way you stop noticing the sound of a river once you've lived beside it long enough.Now it was gone.She woke up in the mornings in the large, warm room that was hers and she lay still for a moment and listened to the territory outside the window and felt the absence of that weight like a physical thing. Like a door somewhere in her chest that had been shut for years had been quietly, finally, opened.She did her work. She attended to the territory's correspondence and disput

THIRD PERSON POVRebecca began to feel weak by the afternoon of the second day.It started as tiredness. It sat behind her eyes and made the light feel slightly too bright and the sounds around her slightly too sharp. She had been in a long council meeting that morning and had assumed it was that — the meeting had run over by two hours, and she had not eaten properly beforehand.She drank water and kept going.By evening, the tiredness had become something heavier. A warmth at the back of her neck that was not comfortable warmth and a slowness in her limbs that she had to work against to move normally.She said nothing at dinner.Donald noticed anyway."You're quiet," he said."Tired," she said. "Long day."He looked at her with a particular attention that seemed like something was off. She met his eyes and gave him a small reassuring smile and he let it go, though she could see from the way he watched her for the rest of the meal that he had not entirely let it go.She went to bed ea

THIRD PERSON POVSeraphina had been in the holding room for four days.It was made of stone walls, a narrow bed, and a small window set too high to see anything except sky. A guard outside the door at all hours. Meals brought and left without conversation.She had not slept much.She sat mostly on the edge of the bed with her hands between her knees and listened to the sounds of the house moving around her. She was in the particular stillness that comes when a person has done the thing they decided to do and now there is only waiting to find out what it cost.She knew they had found the bottle.She had known the moment Rowan appeared in her doorway and told her to turn out her pockets that it was over. She had hidden it well but not well enough, and she had always known somewhere underneath all the planning that there was no version of this that ended cleanly for her.She had done it anyway.She sat with that.On the first day she had gone over it in her head. Every step. The kitchen.