Todos os capítulos de The Alpha’s Unwanted Mate: Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 80

Cassandra's POV"You have a lot of nerve," I said, looking at the man who walked through Sebastian's pack gates two days later with his hands open and his posture carefully unthreatening and the specific expression of someone who has calculated that honesty is his only remaining option. "Walking into this territory after everything you have done to three packs of wolves who did nothing to deserve it."Davan looked at me and he was younger than I had expected, not yet thirty-five, with dark eyes and a stillness about him that would have read as calm if you were not looking at what was underneath it. He was looking at me with the expression of someone confronting something they had been told to fear and finding it different from the description. "You are not what Harrow said you would be," he said."People keep saying that," I said. "What exactly did Harrow say I would be?""A weapon pointed at everything he built," Davan said. "Something ancient and destructive that would tear through

Cassandra's POV"Tell me about the hunters," I said to my mother, sitting cross-legged on the end of her bed while she sat against the headboard with a cup of tea and the expression of someone who had been waiting for this particular question since she arrived."Which part," she said."All of it," I said. "Cael says the Aethar were hunters before they were breakers. He says the original ability was not to sever bonds but to find and contain entities from the early Lycan period. Entities that are apparently not wolves and not human and one of which is apparently sitting underneath a grief-binding in Ashburn territory." I looked at her. "So. All of it."She looked at her tea for a moment and then looked at me with the expression I was beginning to recognise as the one she wore when she was deciding how much to give me and landing on everything. "The world before the pack structure," she said, "was not clean the way history makes it sound. The early Lycans were not the only things living

Cassandra's POV"Stop," I said, holding up one hand, and everyone behind me stopped. Sebastian, River, Cael, the four border wolves, and Davan at the back who had been quiet for the entire journey and was being quietly useful in a way that I was tentatively deciding to appreciate rather than distrust.We were standing at the western boundary of Ashburn territory and I could feel it from here. Not the grief-binding, which was a familiar texture by now, the particular constructed wrongness of Davan's work. What I could feel underneath it was something else entirely. Something that Cael had been trying to describe to me in the library for four hours the night before and which I now understood in my body in a way that language had not been able to produce.It was alive.Not alive the way a wolf was alive or the way a tree was alive. Alive the way very old things are alive when they have been waiting for a very long time in a very small space and the quality of their waiting has become ind

Sebastian's POV"Her name is Isolde," I said, setting the note on the desk in front of River and Cael, "and she is using a title that was formally dissolved seventy years ago." I looked at Cael. "The High Warden. Tell me what that means and do not be careful about it."Cael looked at the note with an expression that moved through several things before it settled into something that was not quite alarm but was in the same neighbourhood. "The High Warden was the position held by the head of the inter-pack authority before the current council structure replaced it," he said. "When the territorial boundaries were drawn and the individual Alphas took formal sovereignty, the High Warden position became redundant and was retired." He paused. "The person who held it last died forty years ago without an heir to the position.""And yet someone is using the title," I said."Someone who believes the position still has validity," Cael said. "Or who wants others to believe that it does." He looked

Sebastian's POV"You are hovering," River said from behind me, without looking up from the report in his hands."I am standing at the boundary," I said. "This is where I am supposed to be.""You have moved twelve feet closer to the cliff path since she went down," he said. "That is hovering."I looked at the path that led down from the cliff edge to the coastal approach, the one Cassandra had disappeared along eight minutes ago, which was one minute past the seven-minute check-in interval she had agreed to, which I was not making into something yet because one minute was not cause for alarm and I was not going to be the kind of mate who transmitted alarm through the bond at a one-minute deviation. The bond was warm. She was present. She was focused in the specific way she got when she was working, that particular quality of concentrated attention that I had come to recognise as her most fundamental self.She was fine.I was standing twelve feet closer to the cliff path than I had star