All Chapters of Mated To My Captor: Chapter 91 - Chapter 94

 Kira stops me at the door of Sage's quarters before I go.She doesn't say anything elaborate. She just puts her hand flat against my chest for a moment, over the sternum, where the bond sits, and looks at me with the specific quality of someone transmitting something they can't fully articulate through the most direct available channel.I put my hand over hers briefly."You've got this," she says.I nod. Then I go. The walk to my father's office has a particular quality I've experienced before, I've been in this corridor under difficult circumstances before. I've walked this route after assassination attempts, after pack councils, after the announcement of the betrothal that I didn't know was coming until it arrived in my father's speech.This is different.Every previous walk down this corridor I was managing something on behalf of a situation I was inside. Today I walked into the situation deliberately. T

 The voices reach us before the movement does.Sage and I are in the corridor outside her quarters when the compound's main courtyard below becomes audible through the window at the corridor's end, the specific quality of organized departure rather than ordinary traffic, multiple people moving with coordinated purpose rather than individual routine.We go to the window together.The Nightbreeze delegation is leaving.Not quietly, not with the gradual dispersal of a visit concluding on schedule, but with the compressed efficiency of people whose departure has been decided suddenly and is being executed immediately. Wolves I've seen peripherally for the last week moving through the courtyard with luggage and the particular body language of people operating under instruction rather than inclination.Lyra moves through the center of it with her characteristic unhurried precision, except that underneath the precision today there is somethin