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Home / Werewolf / The Alpha’s Unwanted Mate / Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

All Chapters of The Alpha’s Unwanted Mate: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

90 Chapters

Chapter 51

Cassandra's POVThe walk back from the elders' hall was the longest of my life, and not because of the distance. The main house was barely five minutes from the council building on the east side of the pack grounds, but every step felt weighted, as though I were carrying what had just happened in that room with me in a physical way, the reality of it pressing down through my shoulders and into my feet. Sebastian walked beside me and neither of us spoke and the silence between us was not uncomfortable exactly, but it was full, crowded with everything that needed to be said and everything neither of us had words for yet. Pack wolves moved out of our path as we crossed the courtyard, and I noticed the way they shifted aside without being asked, the way their eyes came to Sebastian first and then tracked to me, and how the look when it landed on me had changed from anything I had received since the day I arrived here. It was not curiosity and it was not the polite suspicion I had grown

Chapter 52

Sebastian's POVThe eastern border was compromised at half past one in the morning.I felt it before the alarm reached me, that disturbance at the edge of the territory that an Alpha feels the way a person feels a change in weather before the clouds arrive, a low pressure shift in something that lives beneath conscious awareness.I was already pulling on my shirt when the first howl came from the east tree line and I was out of the door before the sound had fully faded. River met me in the yard with three border wolves at his back, and from the set of his face I knew before he spoke that this was not a single rogue testing the fence line.The formation they had used, spreading along the perimeter in a loose arc that mirrored our weakest patrol points with too much precision, was not the work of desperate wolves running without a pack. This was directed. Someone had given them our blind spots, and that someone had access to information that should have never left these grounds.We drov

Chapter 53

Cassandra's POV He took me to the ridge on the north side of the pack grounds and I understood why the moment I saw it. The path up to it was narrow and quiet, threading through trees old enough that their roots had broken through the surface of the ground in thick, gnarled waves that you had to step over or around, and the walk took about twenty minutes at the easy pace Sebastian set. He talked during the walk in a way I had not heard him talk before, not about strategy or pack politics or the careful management of difficult situations, but about history. He told me about his father, who had been a formidable Alpha by all accounts but a difficult man, which Sebastian said without bitterness, simply as a fact he had made peace with over time. He told me about the founding of this territory three generations back and the alliances that had built it and the ones that had fractured it and what it had taken each time to hold it together. He told me about the curse, when it had started

Chapter 54

Sebastian's POVThe morning we were to go to the sage, I woke before dawn to find Mira outside my study door.She would not normally come to me directly.Mira operated through quiet channels and careful timing and the particular diplomacy of someone who had learned to navigate a hierarchy from the bottom of it. When she came to me directly it was because something had happened that could not wait for the usual routes. I looked at her face in the grey light of the early morning and I already knew before she spoke that the news was the kind that made the decision to go to the sage feel less like a choice and more like a deadline."Fen," she said. Fen, the young border wolf who had been injured in the rogue attack three nights ago, the one I had checked myself and declared healing on schedule. "He is worse this morning.The healer came to me because she was afraid to come to you, and I told her that was not the way we did things here. She says his injuries should have closed by now. Wolv

Chapter 55

Cassandra's POVWe walked back from Wren's in silence for the first several minutes and I let the silence hold because I needed the space of it to understand what I had just heard properly before any of it was put into words between us.The marking. When the Alpha marks his true mate the bond closes. The fracture heals. The curse lifts. But it must be willing. It must be real.I turned those words over carefully as we moved along the ridge path with the morning light coming through the trees at angles and the wind moving above us and the whole weight of what I had just heard settling through me in layers. I had known, somewhere beneath the surface of things, that this was where the path was leading.I had felt it building for weeks, in the mate bond and in the things that passed between me and Sebastian without words and in the way this world had been slowly reorganising itself around the fact of what we were to each other. I had simply not allowed myself to look at the destination di

Chapter 56

Cassandra's POV"I said I am ready. Are you going to keep staring at me like I just told you the sky is green or are you going to say something useful?"Sebastian leaned back in his chair and looked at me with that infuriating calm he wore like armour, the kind that made you want to throw something just to see if anything underneath it would crack.He had been quiet for a full ten seconds since I walked into his study and said what I came to say, and every one of those seconds had crawled across my skin.His hazel eyes moved over my face in that slow, assessing way of his, like he was reading something I had not given him permission to read, and the worst part was that I could not tell what conclusion he was arriving at."I heard you," he said finally, his voice low and entirely too controlled for the situation."Then respond," I said, keeping my chin up even though something in my stomach was doing things I refused to acknowledge.. "I did not walk all the way to your study before br

Chapter 57

Cassandra's POV"You have got to be absolutely joking me."I said it to Sebastian's face the moment he opened his study door and found me standing there with Mira behind me, and I watched something flicker through his expression before he pulled it back into that maddeningly composed mask of his and stepped aside to let us in. He looked at Mira first, then at me, and something in the set of his jaw told me he already knew at least part of what I was about to say, which somehow made it worse."Kael sent a message to Harrow," I said the moment the door closed. "An hour ago. Mira traced the route. It went through the outer settlement, the same way he has been routing everything he does not want you to see." I crossed the room and stopped in front of him. "So whatever we planned for tonight, whatever timeline you and River have been building toward, he is already one step ahead of it and you need to tell me right now what we are actually dealing with."Sebastian looked at me with that sti

Chapter 58

Sebastian's POV"You are late," she said the moment I pushed the door open, and I stopped in the doorway and looked at her standing in the centre of the room with her arms folded and her grey eyes sharp and something in my chest moved in the way it had been moving since the first night in the rain, that particular recognition that had never dulled."By four minutes," I said."Three minutes and forty-seven seconds," she said. "I counted.""Of course you did." I stepped inside and closed the door behind me and looked at her properly for the first time since the afternoon, since the conversation in my study that had ended with the word she refused to acknowledge and that I had spent the evening turning over quietly in the part of my mind that was not occupied with Kael and Harrow and the machinery of what tonight required. She had dressed simply, which was Cassandra entirely, no performance in how she occupied a room or how she presented herself in it, and it was one of the things about

Chapter 59

Cassandra's POV"Why are you looking at the ceiling like it owes you money?"Sebastian's arm tightened around me fractionally, which told me he had not known I was awake, which told me he had been lying there for some time trying not to wake me while whatever was moving through his head worked itself out without witnesses. I turned my head and looked at his face in the grey early light and read it the way I had been learning to read it for weeks, past the composed surface and into the things moving underneath, and what I found there made me sit up."It did not work," I said. Not a question.He looked at me and for a moment he was simply a man trying to find the right words for something he had not wanted to say, and in that moment I felt for him in a way that bypassed every complicated thing between us and landed somewhere very simple and very clear. "The bond is real," he said carefully. "I can feel it. It is exactly what it should be.""But the curse is still there," I said."Yes."

Chapter 60

Sebastian's POV"You have got a lot of nerve," I said, stepping into the doorway with my arms folded, "coming to this territory after everything you have done to it, and standing there looking like you belong here."Harrow looked at me from across the entrance hall and not a single thing moved in his face. He was older than I had imagined from Cassandra's description, with white hair and black eyes that had seen enough decades to have stopped finding anything particularly surprising, and he stood in the entrance of my pack house with two of his wolves behind him and the specific calm of a man who had planned his arrival down to the detail and believed the planning had accounted for everything. He was about to discover it had not."Alpha Cole," he said, and his voice carried the practiced authority of a man who had spent his life being listened to. "I did not expect you to come yourself.""Then you do not know me as well as you think you do," I said, stepping forward into the hall. Riv

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