All Chapters of His Father's Mate: Chapter 31 - Chapter 37

RHEAAt the villa, the mood was tense that evening after what happened in the council chamber. The house was unusually quiet. Only the soft creak of wood, the slight movement of curtains in the night breeze, and the distant footsteps of servants moving carefully through the halls could be heard.I led Aria down the narrow hidden staircase, my healer’s robes brushing softly against the cool stone. The lantern in my hand swayed gently, casting long, dancing shadows that stretched across the rough walls. The air grew thicker and cooler the deeper we went, laced with the familiar scents of dried herbs, and the earthy undertone of stone that had stood for centuries. I could hear Aria’s breathing behind me—still a little labored, still carrying the strain of the partial shift and the chaos that followed. I didn’t speak much. Words felt unnecessary right now. She needed space to process, to feel the ground beneath her feet before I handed her pieces of

Damian's POV The empty bed shouldn't have hit me as hard as it did.I had seen worse. Pack violence. Territory disputes that ended in body bags. Boardroom betrayals that cost men everything they'd spent decades building. I had learned early that attachment was a liability and sentiment was a slow poison for men who needed to make clean decisions.But the sound Aria made when she stepped into that room—Not a cry. Not a gasp. Just a small, quiet collapse of breath, like something load-bearing had given way inside her chest without warning.That sound did something to me I wasn't prepared for.I glanced through the room fast, the way I'd trained myself to do since I was twenty-two and learned that survival meant reading a scene before your emotions got to vote. Stripped bed, no struggle marks on the floor, no overturned furniture, no blood. The IV stand was positioned too neatly—someone had moved it deliberately, not kno

Nova's POV The throw pillow was softer than anything I had ever owned.I knew this because I had been holding it for the past forty minutes under the pretense of having somewhere to rest my elbow, which was absolutely a legitimate reason to hold a pillow and had nothing to do with needing something to grip when Darius looked at me a certain way.I was aware this was not my most dignified moment.Aria had disappeared down the east hallway followed by Rhea twenty minutes ago. Damian had taken a call in his office and hadn't come back. Which meant Darius and I were alone in the sitting room with nothing between us except approximately four feet of Persian rug and the very careful distance we had both been maintaining since he arrived.Darius sat at the other end of the couch.He wasn't doing anything provocative. He was just sitting there with his forearms on his knees. His profile was sharp in the low lamp light, the lin

Aria's POV The photograph was cold in my hands even though the room was warm.I stared at the man's silver eyes, catching the light at an angle that made them almost luminous even in an old photograph, even through twenty years of fading and careful storage. The same angle. The same quality of light that I kept catching in mirrors at wrong moments and telling myself was stress or bad lighting or anything except what it obviously was.My mother was laughing in the photograph. Genuinely laughing with her head tilted back, one hand raised like she was mid-sentence about something that had gotten away from her. She looked young. Younger than I had ever seen her, even in the earliest memories I had of her before the illness took the softness out of everything. She looked like someone who hadn't learned yet that the world was going to ask very hard things of her.The man beside her wasn't touching her. They were just standing close. His profi