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Home / Werewolf / The Alpha's Ruined Bride / Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

All Chapters of The Alpha's Ruined Bride: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

93 Chapters

61

Kessa To say I was shocked when I heard Alpha Ronan was around would be an understatement. This was the second time he had come to the Silverpine pack house to see me. The first time had not ended in a way that would have made a reasonable person attempt a second visit. And yet here he was, walking through my door like it was a decision that had cost him nothing, wearing that expression that gave away just enough to be interesting and not enough to be legible. I led him through one of the side doors, the one closer to the interior sitting room, away from the main corridor where there would be too many eyes and too many ears and too many people forming opinions about what it meant that Alpha Ronan of Vaelthorn was walking through the Silverpine pack house in the middle of a weekday afternoon. "Have a seat," I said. He did, settling into one of the chairs with the ease of someone who moved through spaces without needing to negotiate with them first. The mask he wore was tilted at an

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Ronan "If there is anything, Kessa, then you should know that I have fallen in love with you. I love you." It came out before I had fully decided to say it. Not impulsively, it had been building for long enough that impulsive wasn't the right word but without the careful architecture I usually put around things before I released them. Just the words, plain and direct, sitting in the air between us before I could assess whether the timing was right or the setting was appropriate or any of the other things I might have considered if I had given myself the opportunity. Kessa stared at me, the expression on her face was the one she wore when she was processing something faster than she wanted to, eyes steady, the slight tension of someone who is thinking very hard while trying not to show that they're thinking very hard. Like I was a puzzle she needed to solve and the pieces weren't arranging themselves the way she expected. I didn't wait for her to find the answer and walked out. The

63

Naledi He smelled so much of her, and he hadn't even tried to hide it, hadn't offered a story, hadn't constructed anything to soften it. Just answered my question with yes and sat there with Kessa's scent still on him like it belonged there. "Fuck." I groaned as I walked back to my room. The corridor was quiet at this hour, the pack house settled into the deep stillness that only came after midnight, and I moved through it quickly, not wanting to be seen with whatever was currently on my face. I knew what my expression did when I was trying to hold something together and not quite managing it. I had seen it in mirrors enough times to know it wasn't subtle. I closed my door behind me and stood in the dark for a moment. There was no way, absolutely no version of this, where I was going to stay back and watch someone walk off with what I had spent so long trying to reach. I hadn't come this far. I hadn't done everything I had done, rearranged everything I had rearranged, stood outsid

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Kessa I had to put everything behind me. Because it meant nothing, or at least, that was what I had been telling myself since last night, repeating it in different arrangements, trying to find the version that would stick. Alpha Ronan confessing his love was nothing but a derailment. A distraction, him showing up with his carefully chosen words and that expression he wore when he was letting something real out, trying to pull my attention off the ground I was standing on and redirect it toward him. It didn't change anything. It couldn't change anything. Not right now, not in the middle of everything I was building. I kept telling myself that, I wasn't entirely convinced, but I kept telling myself anyway. I moved through the office that had once belonged to my father, the one Dylan had taken over approximately two years ago with the easy entitlement of someone who believed inheritance was automatic. I had avoided this room for a long time, both when I lived here and after. Something

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Kessa It was a new day. I had put everything behind me, or rather, so I had thought. "You look beautiful in this yellow gown." My mother's voice came from the sitting room entrance as I descended the staircase, and I paused briefly on the last step to acknowledge it. It was nothing serious, a pale yellow dress that fell all the way to the floor, simple and clean in its construction. But the color was deliberate. My father had hated yellow for reasons he had never explained and had never needed to explain because in this house, his preferences had always been enough of a reason on their own. I was going to visit him this morning, and if there was a small, uncomplicated satisfaction to be found in wearing the exact color he despised to do it, I was going to take it. "Thank you, mother." I came off the last step. "Is father around?" It was still early, the kind of morning that hadn't fully decided what it wanted to be yet, the light pale and uncommitted through the windows. I doub

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Kessa The man was sitting on a mat when I walked in, eyes closed, hands folded in his lap, with the particular stillness of someone performing peace rather than actually having it. I couldn't help the laugh that escaped my throat. He turned at the sound of it. The calm on his face was something I hadn't seen before, or hadn't seen in this configuration. Not the controlled stillness he wore in formal settings, not the tight composure of a man managing his temper in public. This was something quieter. Whether it was genuine or another layer of performance, I hadn't decided yet. "Father." I stepped further into the room, letting the door fall mostly closed behind me. "I know you weren't expecting me. But I had to drop by." I looked around. The room was sparse in the particular way that spaces become sparse when someone has been spending a lot of time alone in them, the minimum necessary, nothing decorative, nothing inviting. There was nowhere obvious to sit that wasn't the floor, an

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Ronan At first, I had genuinely underestimated Naledi. I hadn't said that out loud, I wasn't in the habit of announcing when I had been wrong about something but I had registered it quietly and with the honesty that the observation deserved. When I had assigned her the correspondence work, I had expected competence. Reasonable, adequate competence from someone who had grown up in political spaces and knew how to move through them. What I had not expected was for her to clear a three-hour pile of backlogged paperwork in under three hours and then appear at my office door asking for more. I had considered, briefly, whether she was burying herself in the work to avoid thinking about everything else, her sister, the situation, the things that had been said and done and left unresolved. But that explanation didn't hold up under examination. People who worked to avoid thinking made sloppy work. They moved fast and left holes. Naledi's work had no holes. Every letter was correct, every ca

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Ronan When it ended, no one tried anything. Not a word of dissent, not a sideways comment, not even the particular brand of loaded silence that council members sometimes used to communicate displeasure without technically saying anything. They were all on their best behavior, filing out with the careful movements of people who had just recalibrated their understanding of where the lines were. Good, that was the intended outcome. "That was good." Naledi appeared at my side as I stepped away from the head of the table, her notebook closed under her arm, her pace matching mine without effort. "The part at the end especially," she added. Then, in a tone that carried no drama and no particular need for my response: "Those men had already been talking before the meeting started. One of them said I wasn't even as strong as I looked." She glanced at me briefly. "And that I was sleeping with you to get the position." I kept walking. I wasn't going to say she was making it up. I knew exa

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Third POV. The room had no windows. That was deliberate. The three men who met here had always preferred it that way, no light that wasn't controlled, no outside reference point, no way for anyone passing to look in and see what was being discussed. The dark was a habit as much as a preference, cultivated over decades of conversations that were never meant to be heard. Three cups, three chairs and a table between them with the kind of age in its wood that suggested it had held a great many secrets and intended to hold a great many more. The short one, Elder Croft, who had sat on the outer council of the Silverpine pack for longer than most of its current members had been alive turned his cup slowly in both hands. The dark liquid inside moved with it, catching nothing in the low light. "I told you," he said. "I told you it was a bad omen the moment she took over." He set the cup down with a precision that suggested he was containing something. "She is looking for it now. You know

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Ronan The bell rang at twelve past midnight. A year ago, I would have received the report from my bed, processed it through the chain of command, and returned to sleep. That was not something I was proud of in retrospect, the particular detachment of a man who had convinced himself that delegation was the same as leadership, that proximity to the difficult things was optional if your structure was sound enough. I had learned otherwise, I was at the outskirts inside of ten minutes, with Sage beside me and four guards at the perimeter. The scene that met us was not subtle. Blood on the ground. A significant amount of it, not from a single source, distributed across the area in the particular pattern that came from a confrontation that had moved rather than stayed in one place. Two guards from the night rotation were down, neither of them fatally from what the medics were already establishing, but neither of them in any condition to give a coherent account of what had happened yet.

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