บททั้งหมดของ Mated To My Beta Stepbrother: บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

The response from Daemon arrived three days after I submitted the report, and it arrived not as a written reply through the administrative channel but as a request delivered by Tyler on Monday morning while I was finishing breakfast, asking if I was available to meet with the Alpha at ten o’clock.I told Tyler yes and I finished my tea and I thought about what Elena had said about the language being right and the timing being right, and I thought about the difference between a written reply and a requested meeting and what that difference communicated before the meeting had even begun.Killian was already in the strategy wing when I arrived at Alpha Daemon’s office at ten, which meant the meeting was specifically without him, and I understood that as structural rather than exclusionary because a meeting about my role in the pack’s operations was correctly a meeting between me and the Alpha and not one where Killian’s presence would have either helped or been appropriate.Daemon was at

The coffee shop was a fifteen-minute drive from the pack house and Killian drove without speaking, which was the right thing to do because I had nothing useful to say during the drive and he understood this without being told, and the bond carried the steadiness he had been offering all morning without requiring me to acknowledge it each time I drew from it.He pulled into the small car park behind the building and put the car in park and looked at me and said, “I will be here waiting for you. However long it takes,” he said.“Thank you,” I said, and I looked at him for a moment. Then I opened the door and walked around to the front of the building, pushing through the door into the warmth of the coffee shop.My father was already there, seated at a corner table near the window with two cups in front of him, both with steam still rising, and the specific detail of two cups told me something before anything else did because it meant he had been here long enough to order without waiting

The training room was empty when I arrived for Thursday’s afternoon session, which was typical for the twenty minutes before Tyler’s rotation began, and I used the time the way I had been using it since the trial period started, running through the morning’s briefing patterns in my head while my body warmed up, letting the two processes run in parallel the way Tyler had taught me. I was midway through the second warm-up sequence when I heard the door open behind me, and I turned, expecting Tyler, but it was not Tyler. Selene crossed the training room floor with the specific quality of movement that I had learned to read across weeks of being in the same spaces as her, and what I was reading now was different from anything she had brought into a room where I was present before, because what she was carrying was not opposition and it was not the cold satisfaction she had worn in the council hall and it was not the careful neutrality she had been maintaining in shared spaces since the

A note was on Elena’s desk when I arrived for Wednesday morning’s session, set to one side with the particular placement of something that had been deliberately positioned and not set down in passing, and I saw it when I came through the door before Elena had said anything.It was on official council stationery and it had my name on the front in the administrative script that the council’s records office used for formal correspondence.Elena was standing at the small table where she kept the tea things and she looked at me when I came in and said, “Sit down. The tea is ready.”I sat and she brought both cups to the seating area and settled into her chair across from mine and she did not gesture toward the note or explain its presence and I understood from this that she intended to let me reach for it in my own time rather than presenting it as the session’s opening item.I picked up my cup and I held it and I looked at the note on the desk and then I reached over and picked it up and

An alert came through at three in the morning and I was awake before the bond had fully delivered the information, because the bond was connected to Killian and Killian was already moving.The quality of his movement in the predawn dark of the apartment was the specific quality that meant this was not a drill and was not a minor perimeter irregularity.“What is it?” I said, sitting up.“That sounds like an alliance alert,” he said, pulling on his shirt with the efficient economy of someone who had been trained to be operational within ninety seconds of waking.I was out of bed before he finished the sentence and I was dressed in the time it took him to reach the door, and he looked back at me and said, “Go to the intelligence room,” because we both already understood where I needed to be and that it was not at the perimeter.The pack house was reorganizing around us as we moved through it, the coordinated efficiency of a community that had been running response drills since the summit