All Chapters of Mated To My Captor: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The heavy bag stops swinging eventually.I stand in front of it with my hands at my sides, breathing hard, and look at my knuckles. Split on both hands, dried blood cracking at the edges, the particular rawness of skin that has been asked to do more than it wanted to. I unwrap the training cloth slowly, finger by finger, and drop it on the bench.I check my phone.Leo: Don't worry about me. I know what I'm doing. Trust me.That's still the last message. Sent however long ago, sitting there like a door closed from the inside. I've called four times since. Each one went to voicemail with the particular promptness that means the phone is on and the person is choosing not to answer, which is somehow more isolating than if it had rung out.I stand there long enough that the training facility lights dim slightly on their automatic cycle, the compound's way of suggesting that people with sense have already gone to bed. I pocket my phone, pick up my jacket, and walk back to my room through co

 The first thing I register when I wake up is the empty space beside me.The indent in the pillow is still there. The warmth is still faintly there. I lie on my side looking at it for a moment.I smile before I can decide not to.Then I reach for my phone.Leo: nothing.The smile goes. I lie there looking at the ceiling for a count of ten, then I get up, because lying there looking at the ceiling doesn't solve anything and never has. I shower, dress, wrap my still-tender knuckles loosely, and head out.Ashley is in the corridor.She's coming from the direction of the stairs with two coffees in her hands, and when she sees me she stops and her face arranges itself into an expression I've never seen on her before. It's not quite a smirk. It's more considered than that, warmer, the expression of someone sitting on information they find privately delightful and have decided, for now, to sit on quietly.She looks at me.

 The briefing room holds eight of us.Younger wolves mostly, the ones assigned to secondary security positioning rather than the perimeter detail, and we sit in two rows of chairs while Cassidy stands at the front with her tablet and walks us through the evening's architecture with the methodical precision she applies to everything security-related."Positioning is fixed for the duration of the visit," she says, pulling up a diagram on the wall screen behind her. "Nobody moves from assigned posts without direct authorization. Guardian detail, that means you maintain proximity to your charge at all times. All times. If he goes to the bathroom, you stand outside the door."Someone in the second row makes a sound that might be the beginning of a laugh. Cassidy looks at them. The sound stops."Inter-pack formal visits operate under specific protocols that exist because inter-pack formal visits have gone wrong before," she continues. "Your job is

 Councilman from the Nightbreeze senior delegation has a handshake that lasts slightly too long and a laugh that requires reciprocation, and I reciprocate it with the precision of someone who has been trained since childhood to perform warmth on demand regardless of internal conditions."Your father speaks highly of your work with the younger wolves," he says, still holding my hand."He's generous," I say, and I smile, and the smile costs me something I'll calculate later when I have the privacy to take inventory.My father moves me through the celebration with the practiced ease of a man presenting something he's proud of, his hand occasionally at my shoulder, steering without appearing to steer. The formal dinner has dissolved into the looser architecture of pack celebration, the long tables pushed to the walls, someone having produced music from somewhere, the younger wolves gravitating toward the floor while the senior wolves cluster in conversa

 I wake up and lie still for a moment, running through everything the way I've started doing, a quiet inventory of active problems ordered by urgency.The betrothal sits at the top of the list before I've fully decided to put it there. The kind of thing that doesn't soften overnight, that wakes up with you at full weight rather than requiring a few seconds to reassemble.Leo surfaces next, and I check my phone reflexively.Nothing new.And then something strange happens. For the first time since Leo went unreachable, the weight of his silence feels... smaller. Not unimportant. Not resolved. Just relatively smaller against the size of everything else currently occupying the available space. I register that, file it somewhere uncomfortable, and get up.Guardian duties don't pause for personal catastrophe. That's one thing this life has in common with every life I've had before it. I'm near the archives corridor when