All Chapters of The Alpha’s Unwanted Mate: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Sebastian's POVI sat in my chair for a long time after.Claire had gone inside. Cassandra had gone inside. I had stayed in the garden for ten minutes with the cold air and the rosebushes and the quiet and I had tried to understand what had just happened. Not the events of it. The events were clear enough. Claire had gone there with intent. Cassandra had defended herself. The blood on her palm had been the rosebush, not Claire's hands, but it was close enough that the distinction felt thin.What I was trying to understand was the speed of my own certainty.I had looked at the two of them and I had known. Without deliberation. Without asking a single question. I had known who was telling the truth and who was performing it, and I had acted on that knowledge without a second of hesitation.Wolves can smell deception. That was the logical explanation. Elevated cortisol, the micro-shifts in chemistry that happen when someone constructs a lie and holds it. I had been able to scent that my

Sebastian's POVThe alarm came at two in the morning.I was already half awake when the howl reached the house from the eastern border. That distant, sharp sound that every Alpha knows before they are fully conscious of knowing it. Something was wrong at the perimeter.I was dressed and out of the door in less than a minute.Kael met me in the yard. Behind him, a dozen of the border wolves were shifting, the air filling with the sound of it, that low charged silence that happens in the space between a man and his wolf."Rogues," Kael said. "At least six. They breached the eastern line near the old mill."I did not wait. I shifted.There is nothing quite like the relief of the shift when the tension has been building long enough. The human body carries its weight differently than the wolf does. A wolf does not think the way a man thinks. It runs purely on instinct and purpose and in the darkness of the tree line with the cold ground under my paws, that clarity was the closest thing to

Sebastian's POVI told myself it was the right call.I had been telling myself that since Kael came to me the previous afternoon with the news about the tribunal. Three days. The elders were moving on it with a speed that told me Claire's visit to Doran had landed harder than I had expected. A formal tribunal inside pack grounds meant witnesses and procedures and a ruling I would have very limited ability to overturn without publicly declaring something I was not yet prepared to declare.If Cassandra was still here when it convened, she would be in the centre of it. Unprotected in all the ways that mattered in pack law.Sending her away was the only move that bought time.I knew all of that. Every part of it was logical and sound and correct.It did not make watching her pack her bag any easier.I stood in the doorway of her room and watched her move around the space with her practical, efficient movements, folding things, checking under the bed, pulling her coat from the hook behind

Sebastian's POVShe said his name and everything rearranged itself.Not loudly. Not with drama. She said Sebastian, I have to tell you something about Kael in a voice that was quiet and careful and completely certain, and I looked at her face and I knew before she said another word that whatever came next was going to cost me something I was not prepared to lose.We stayed in the trees. She talked and I listened and I kept my expression still through all of it because that is what I have always done when something has hit me hard enough to flatten me. I go still. I go inward. I present nothing to the outside that can be used.She told me everything. The covered walkway. The storage building door. Kael's voice stripped of its warmth. The other voice she had not recognised. The exact words.When he falls it has to look natural.When she finished she held my gaze and waited. She did not fill the silence with reassurance or apology or any of the softening that people usually reach for whe

Sebastian's POVRiver found me in the training wing at noon.He did not knock. He never did. He stood in the doorway of the equipment room and watched me wrap my hands for the bag until I acknowledged him, which was the rhythm we had operated on for twelve years.You sent for me, he said.I did.I had done it quietly. A message passed through a junior wolf who answered to me directly and only to me, routed past Kael's sight lines, which took twice the effort it should have and which told me something about how far into the structure this situation had already grown.River was forty-three in human years. He had been my father's wolf before he was mine. He was not political. He did not care about standing or positioning or the social geometry of pack life. What he cared about was the pack's safety and the Alpha's word, in that order, and those two things had always been the same thing until now.I told him what I knew.I watched his face as I spoke. River's face was not expressive at th