All Chapters of The Alpha’s Unwanted Mate: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Cassandra's POV"You are going to stand there and tell me that the woman who I spent fourteen years believing chose to leave is sitting twenty feet away, alive, and I am supposed to just—" I stopped. I pressed both hands flat on the wall of the corridor and breathed. "Mira. I need you to say that again slowly.""She is in the south room," Mira said, watching me with the careful expression she wore when she was genuinely uncertain how I was going to respond. "She gave a name. Sera. She said you would not recognise it because your father did not know it." She paused. "She said she has been trying to get back here for eleven years and that tonight was the first time the border was clear enough to cross."I stared at the wall. The mate bond in my chest was warm and steady, which was doing something for my ability to breathe, and I sent something along it without knowing if Sebastian could receive it, something that was simply I am alright and I need a moment, and I did not know if that wo

Cassandra's POV"Tell me what you feel," my mother said from the doorway. "Do not think. Just say it."I had my hands on either side of Claire's face and she was sitting very still, eyes closed, breathing carefully, and I was doing something I did not have a name for yet. It was not magic the way stories described magic, not a light or a surge or a dramatic crackle of energy. It was more like feeling through a wall for something familiar, searching through the layers of Claire's grief the way you feel through clothing for a seam, and when I found the thread of it I would know because it would feel wrong against everything else, foreign, placed rather than grown."There is something," I said slowly. "It is—" I paused, because the English word for it did not exist. "It feels like a knot. Like someone took something that was already there and pulled it tight in a direction it was not meant to go.""Yes," my mother said. "That is it. Do not pull it. Follow it."I followed it. It ran down

Sebastian's POV"Say that again," I said slowly, looking at the man who had walked through my doors uninvited, and making certain my voice carried the particular quality that reminded people in my hall that they were in the Alpha's hall. "Say it slowly. Because you came into this pack unannounced and unbidden and told me my mate is needed urgently, and I would like to understand exactly what that means before anyone goes anywhere."Cael looked at me with the expression of someone who had been doing important things for a long time and had learned to be patient with the people who stood between him and doing them. He was older than he looked, I could feel that, the particular weight of age that sits differently in a wolf who has carried something significant for decades. He looked at Cassandra and then back at me. "Three packs," he said. "The Velden territory to the north. The Ashburn settlement to the east. And the Graywater coast pack." He paused. "Each of them showing signs consiste

Cassandra's POV"He felt it," I said, setting down the report and looking at Sebastian across his desk. "Which means we have less time than Cael estimated."Sebastian turned from the window. "Cael said days.""Cael said days before Davan knew I existed and could do this," I said. "He knows now. Anyone sensitive enough to have been placing grief-bindings for a decade felt that release just now and identified the signature." I held his gaze. "He knows I am here. He knows what I am capable of. And he has three active bindings that I have just demonstrated I can break." I spread my hands. "He is not going to sit quietly and wait for me to come to him one at a time."Sebastian came away from the window and sat on the edge of the desk, which was the posture he used when he wanted to be at eye level rather than standing over me, a habit I had noticed and filed quietly away. "You think he moves against us," he said."I think he adjusts," I said. "Either he accelerates the deterioration of the

Sebastian's POV"She is still in there," River said from beside me, and I knew that, I had been counting the seconds since she went in and I had been holding the bond open with every piece of focus I possessed, which was considerable and which was currently the only thing keeping me standing still instead of going in after her."She is still in there and the bond is holding," I said. "I can feel her.""What does she feel like?" Cael asked from my other side."Moving," I said. "Deliberate. Not in distress." I paused. "Angry. Something in there is making her angry.""That is the binding's emotional residue," Cael said. "It is good. Anger means she is distinguishing her own responses from the construct's. She is not being absorbed."I held the bond open and I kept my focus entirely on the thread of it, the specific warmth of Cassandra's presence on the other end, which I had learned to read the way I read a wolf's eyes, in layers, the surface and then the depth and then the thing beneath