Lahat ng Kabanata ng Rejected by My Mate, Desired by His Enemy : Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

 "The first child on the registry is eighteen months old," Sage says, setting the folder on the table, "and she already melted her crib." The training room at the back of the pack house is small and warm and smells like candle wax and something faintly electric that I've come to associate with active power use. Fourteen children are present today, ranging from Haven and Oliver at nearly four to a boy named Marcus who just turned nine and can apparently bend light around himself when he's startled. Forty-three names on the registry. Fourteen here today. The others are spread across territories, their families receiving weekly check-ins from Council-assigned contacts and monthly visits from Sage's growing network of trained instructors. It took six months to build this. It feels like longer. "Melted the crib how?" I ask. "Heat manifestation. Passive, uncontrolled, happ

 "She did it again," Sage says, appearing in the kitchen doorway with the expression she uses when something has exceeded her expectations and she's still processing whether that's good or concerning. "The shield. She held it for forty minutes this time." I look up from the Elder correspondence spread across the table. "Forty minutes." "Without prompting. Without assistance. Without anyone telling her to." Sage sits down across from me. "She just decided she wanted to practice and she did it until she was satisfied." A pause. "She's three and a half." Through the bond Donovan looks up from whatever he's doing in the training yard. I feel the question before it arrives. "Haven held her shield for forty minutes," I send back. A beat. Then: *Should we be worried or impressed?* *Both, I think.* *Same as usual then.* 

"Was it worth it?" Oliver asks.He's sitting across from me at the kitchen table with a cup of warm milk Sage made him before she went to bed, his small hands wrapped around it, his eyes on my face with the direct attention he brings to questions he actually wants answered rather than questions he's asking because children ask questions.Three and a half years old and he already knows the difference between asking and asking."Was what worth it?" I say."Your power. You gave it to Haven." He looks at his milk. "I know because Sage told me. When Haven was sick and the power was too much and you took it so she wouldn't die." He looks back up. "Was it worth it?"I look at my son.Oliver came to us through the worst version of everything, through Clarissa and Lucian and the conspiracy and the exile, and he absorbed all of it and came out the other side as this, a child who sits at kitchen tables in the late evening asking the questions everyone else is afraid to ask."Yes," I say."Even t

 "Five wolves," Marcus says, setting the intelligence report on the table. "That's all. Five wolves claiming to be over five hundred years old, traveling without pack affiliation, requesting audience with the Council and specifically with the three-bloodline children." The emergency session has twelve Elders and the specific quality of attention that fills a room when nobody is certain whether what they're about to deal with is a threat or a gift and the difference matters enormously. "Claiming," Elder Crane says. "We have no verification." "Their magical signature is unlike anything in the Council's records," Vera says. "Our mages spent six hours on the preliminary assessment. The power they carry predates every framework we use to measure it." She looks around the table. "That doesn't confirm five hundred years. It confirms old. Very old." "How old is very old?" Marcus asks.&nb

 "Two years," Donovan says. "That's what it's been." He's standing in the doorway of the Alpha office, which is technically his office but has been functionally our shared office since the Elder correspondence started requiring a dedicated space. He has two cups of coffee and the expression of someone who has been doing mental arithmetic and arrived at a number that surprised him. I look up from the quarterly alliance report. "Two years since what specifically." "Since everything." He crosses to the desk and sets one mug beside my hand. "Since I found you in the snow. Since Haven was born. Since the conspiracy started unraveling. Since you became Luna and then Elder and then the first omega on the Council in three hundred years." He sits across from me. "Two years since all of it." I look at him. Then I look at the room around us. The Elder correspondence in organize