Semua Bab Alpha VS Omega' Twin VS Twin (A Dark Werewolf Romance): Bab 171 - Bab 180

POV: Lord Silvain Mordaunt | Kensington Mansion, Dining RoomThe table had been set for fourteen, which was the number that Mordaunt's dining room accommodated without feeling either sparse or crowded, and the food had been prepared by his human staff with the attention to presentation that he required regardless of whether the guests would eat it, because presentation was a message about the host and the message Mordaunt intended to send tonight was that everything was under control.He sat at the head of the table and watched his guests arrange themselves and read the room the way he read all rooms, which was completely and without appearing to.The Parliament members were performing calm with varying degrees of success. Davorin was genuinely calm, which meant he had decided the incident was manageable and had moved on. Two others were performing calm over something more agitated, which meant they were worried about the Geneva question, about the European Covenant observers who had

POV: Callum | The Feral Den, then Rookeries docksideI watch Moira pack from the doorway of the small room she has been using since the raid, and I do not go inside because she has not invited me and she is the kind of person who means things she does not say out loud.Finn is on the floor behind her, sitting upright the way he has recently learned to do without toppling sideways, which he is enormously proud of, and he is examining a wooden spoon with the focused intensity of someone who has decided the spoon is the most important object in the world. He is eighteen months old. He has Cormac's jaw and Moira's eyes and he will not remember any of this, which is either a mercy or a different kind of cruelty depending on how you think about it.Cormac is not here yet. He knows Moira is leaving. He has known since last night and he has spent the intervening hours being very deliberately busy, which is what Cormac does when something is happening that he cannot fix by fighting it."He'll

POV: Callum | The Feral Den, then dockside meetingAlpha Jax Ironhide is not what I expected, which is itself a piece of information.I expected American. The way people who have heard too many stories about American packs expect American: loud, large, performing dominance the way some wolves perform everything, as theater designed to establish position before any conversation starts. Ironhide is large, definitely, the kind of large that means his body spent years being told to be useful, but he is quiet in a way that larger men rarely are, and he looks at the Feral Den the way someone looks at a place when they are genuinely trying to understand it rather than assess it for weaknesses.He has been in London four days. He arrived without announcement and my people found him before his people found mine, which is either careful or testing, and I have not decided which.We meet at the dockside, my choice of location, with Tom on my left and Cormac three steps behind me where he wants to

POV: Marcus | Crimson Gallery, then memoryHer name was Elspeth Cairn and she was thirty-one years old and she had been a third-year nursing student when it happened, which she told me once and which I have been carrying since Thursday like something I am not sure what to do with.I know her story in pieces, the way you know things about people you live alongside without being able to have direct conversations about the parts that matter. The Gallery does not encourage donors to talk about their histories. The Gallery's position is that histories are external, that what matters is the present relationship between donor and establishment, that looking backward creates the kind of emotional complication that interferes with the arrangement's smooth operation.I have been reconstructing Elspeth's story from the pieces she gave me over seven months, late at night in the corridor when the house was quiet, and this is what I have:She was helping at a community health fair in East London, t

POV: Valentina | London, various locationsI have been tracking the embryo for nine days and I am learning what Fell wants me to learn, which is that he has been preparing for exactly this contingency for longer than I have been hunting him.The first address from Silas's records leads me to a warehouse in Bermondsey that smells of preservation compound and recent occupation. Not recent like yesterday. Recent like four hours ago, the specific sharp quality of chemicals that have been moved and handled within the same day. The equipment is gone. The surfaces have been wiped with the particular thoroughness of someone who knows what forensic analysis can recover. A single stool left in the center of the floor, which I think is intentional, a way of saying I know you are here.I find the second address through a contact Tom gave me, a supernatural community worker who maintains informal records of unusual activity in warehouse districts and who tells me that a refrigerated transport left