All Chapters of Mated To The Cursed Alpha : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

TobiasThe message arrived at dawn.I was in the east corridor when the courier found me — one of our own, not an outsider, which meant it had passed through our hands at the gate and been cleared before it reached mine. The seal on the front was from Aldenmoor, one of the four allied territories that had standing diplomatic communication with Royalfang. Lord Alpha Calder's house emblem pressed into dark blue wax, undamaged, formally correct in every visible way.I turned it over twice before I opened it.The message inside was brief and appropriately worded. An expression of continued solidarity from Aldenmoor to Royalfang. A note that Lord Alpha Calder had heard rumors of unrest in the region and wished to make clear that his territory's alliance stood firm. An offer of material support should it be needed — men, resources, whatever Royalfang required. The kind of letter one allied territory sent to another during uncertain times.It was diplomatic and completely unremarkable in ton

TOBIAS'S POVI had read the letter three times before I brought it to Rowan.And it wasn't because I needed to read it three times to understand it. The first time was enough for that. I read it three times because I needed to be certain I was not making shit up that wasn't there, not filling gaps with assumptions, not letting the exhaustion of the night push me toward a conclusion that the evidence only partially supported.By the third read I was certain. The evidence fully supported it. There were no gaps I was filling.I folded the letter and went to find Rowan.He was in the war room with two of his senior guard captains, working through the immediate priorities of a castle that had taken significant damage and needed to be functional by nightfall. He looked up when I came in and whatever he read on my face made him say something brief to the captains, who cleared the room without being asked to.I put the letter on the table."Theron left this," I said. "Deliberately. It was pos

ISLA'S POVI found it on a Wednesday morning when I was looking for a knife.The travel bag had been sitting in the corner of my room since I arrived at Royalfang, and I had been living out of it with everything positioned for quick access and nothing unpacked further than necessary, because the habit of being ready to move is easier to maintain than to rebuild from scratch when you suddenly need it. I was running my hand along the bottom seam looking for the knife I had misplaced when my fingers found the lining sitting slightly thicker than it should have been along the fold, and I pressed it and felt the unmistakable rigidity of paper sitting where paper had no business sitting.I pulled the stitching and reached inside and pulled out a letter with Matthias's seal on the front, unbroken and intact.I sat on the edge of the bed and held it in both hands and looked at it without opening it for a long moment, and the first thing I felt was a recognition so complete it was almost phys

ISLA'S POVThe lodge was the junction of four unclaimed territories, which was the kind of location that people chose when they wanted the meeting to belong to no one and therefore to be answerable to nothing, and the choice told me something about how Matthias understood power — as a thing that exists in the gaps between formal structures rather than inside them, which was accurate and also the most dangerous way to understand it.I rode in alone as the sun was finishing its descent, with two of Rowan's trackers somewhere in the dark behind me that I had to take on faith rather than sight, because their entire value depended on my behaving as though they were absent and the only way to behave convincingly as though they were absent was to genuinely lose track of them, which they had managed within the first mile of the approach and which I chose to interpret as evidence of competence rather than abandonment.The lodge was larger than I had expected from the coordinates — a working bu

IslaI stepped back from the window and sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor.Three flickers was the acknowledgment signal. It meant I'm secure, I have information, maintain position. The response should have been two flickers back within ninety seconds, which told me the message was received and would be relayed. I'd used this signal four times in the field. It had worked four times.The ninety seconds passed.Nothing came back.I went to the window again and looked. The treeline sat exactly as it had. The tracker positions hadn’t shifted. I couldn’t tell if they were holding still because they were watching or because they didn’t see the signal or because something else entirely had happened, and the not knowing was the part that required management.I went back to the bed and sat down.Here is what I knew.The quiet man at the table was connected to a pack that was declared dissolved fifteen years ago by official record.He was wearing their insignia, which mea