All Chapters of The Alpha's Ruined Bride: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Kessa "I heard what happened." I breathed it softly. Alpha Ronan sat across from me, legs folded, glasses at the bridge of his nose, and I had to take a very deliberate internal step back from the immediate reaction my body had to that specific image. He looked, I was not going to finish that thought. I had not come here for that. I had come because I had heard about the attack at the outskirts and the message written in blood and the two injured guards, and I had come because something in me had moved toward him before I had made a conscious decision to do so. I was going to be professional about this. I pulled myself together, smoothed my expression into something appropriate, and reminded myself firmly that this man had also recently told me he was in love with me, which was information I was still very carefully not knowing what to do with, and that none of that was relevant to the current conversation. He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. I swallowed, I wa

Ronan There had to be an emergency pack meeting. Two guards were dead. Two more were still in the infirmary. The boundary stone had been scrubbed clean on my orders, but everyone who needed to know about the message already knew, and the people who didn't need to know had developed theories of their own, which was always more dangerous than the truth. I couldn't focus on anything else, not on the thing that had happened in my office with Kessa, which I had been carrying quietly and carefully since it happened, the way you carry something you don't want to jostle, not on Beta Sage's ongoing investigation, not on the paperwork that had accumulated on my desk in the forty-eight hours since the attack. All of it was on hold until this was handled. The old version of me would have sent a delegate. Would have managed the aftermath through layers of intermediaries and received a clean summary at the end of it. That version had been efficient in a way that had nothing to do with actually l

Kessa My thoughts had been all over the place. Knowing that Alpha Ronan's pack was the first to be attacked sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't put down. Elder Marlow had said it plainly, now that my father knew I was looking, I would be targeted. It was a matter of when, not if. And the attack on Vaelthorn told me that the when was not a distant thing. It was already moving. I heaved out a sigh that I had been holding back, pressing my fingers against my temples and leaning back in my chair. The more I sat with it, the more it accumulated, the weight of it, the layering of everything I was trying to do at once, the specific exhaustion of carrying a war on multiple fronts while trying to look like someone who had it together. It was beginning to make me question things. The choices. The path I had taken. Whether the cost of all of it was going to end up being worth what I was reaching toward. But I couldn't give up, that was the one fixed point in all of it. The place I retur

Kessa The day had gone slower than I expected, but I had pushed through it. Mia was still there with me in the office, working through the pile of files that had accumulated from the transition of authorit, the ones that didn't require significant decisions from me but still needed to be reviewed before they could be closed or redirected. It was the administrative inheritance of taking over from someone who had used their position carelessly, and there was a lot of it. "This is absurd." Mia muttered it under her breath with the tone of someone who had been patient for several hours and was beginning to reach the limits of that patience. She pushed a file across to my side of the desk without looking up from the one she was still reading. "I mean, who could be this stupid?" She shook her head. "Genuinely. Who sits in a position of authority and makes decisions like this?" I set down my pen and collected the file she had pushed toward me. My eyes moved across the documents inside.

Kessa I stretched out in the garden chair, letting the sun settle over me the way it only did on good Sunday mornings, it was warm and unhurried, the kind of warmth that didn't ask anything from you. I was genuinely glad I had decided to do this today. Just this, there was nothing official, nothing that required a title or a decision or a conversation I had to be armored for. Tomorrow was going to be difficult. The pile that Dylan had left behind was waiting for me with the particular patience of things that didn't go away simply because you weren't looking at them. Case after case of decisions that needed to be unmade or remade, people who had been wronged by someone who had never once considered them worth the courtesy of proper process. Dylan himself hadn't been seen in the pack house. Beta Quinn's surveillance was in motion, but the first substantial report hadn't come through yet, and the not knowing was its own specific kind of irritation, the awareness that he was somewhere