All Chapters of The Alpha's Silenced Mate: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

64 Chapters

41: LIKE SAFETY.

Lyra's pov I woke to the sound of small footsteps in the corridor outside.I knew those footsteps. I had been hearing them for weeks — the particular cadence of someone who had somewhere important to be and had decided that walking faster was the same as being more helpful. They stopped outside my door. A pause. Then three knocks, which was more than Petra usually bothered with."It's me," she said through the door. "Mama said I shouldn't come but I told her you needed me."I sat up against the pillows. My head ached and my throat felt dry and the fever had broken sometime in the night, leaving behind the hollow, scraped-out feeling that came after. I was better than yesterday but I was not, by any honest measure, well.I reached for the notepad on my nightstand and wrote: *Come in.*I held it up toward the door, realized she couldn't see it, and knocked twice on the nightstand instead.The door opened.Petra came in with Rue under one arm and a small cloth bundle in her other hand,

42: HE WAS KIND TO YOU.

Lyra's pov He stayed.I hadn't expected him to, not really — Petra's instruction had the feel of something a polite person would agree to and then find a reasonable excuse to leave within ten minutes. But the light shifted from afternoon to early evening and when I surfaced from the shallow half-sleep that kept pulling me under, he was still in the chair.Not watching me. He had found a book somewhere — I didn't know when, I must have been asleep — and was reading with the same focused stillness he brought to everything, one ankle crossed over his knee, the room quiet around him like it had decided to be quiet specifically for him.I watched him for a moment before he noticed I was awake.This was the most unguarded I had ever seen him. Not soft — Matthias was not soft, I didn't think he had ever been soft — but settled. Like a man who had put something down temporarily and was allowing himself the brief rest of not carrying it.He looked up."Better?" he said.I considered honestl

43: I DON'T THINK ITS A GOOD IDEA.

Matthias's pov I woke before dawn and lay still for a moment in the dark, which was not unusual. What was unusual was the quality of the stillness — the absence of the particular weight that had been sitting on my chest every morning for three years, the one I had stopped noticing because it had been there long enough to feel like a permanent condition rather than a symptom.It wasn't there this morning.*Best sleep you've had in three years,* Knox said, with no preamble.I know.*I'm just noting it.*I got up before he could note anything else.The card was on my desk where I had left it — the fold open to where my thumb had stopped last night, the wax broken, the first edge of the interior visible but unread. I had come back to the office after leaving Lyra's room and looked at it for a long time before going to bed, and I had not read it then either, and I had not fully understood why until I woke up this morning with three years of weight missing from my chest.I picked it up a

44: WHO IS OSWIN.

Matthias's pov She had been indoors for two days and the morning was clear and cold and I had run out of reasons to keep finding things to do on the other side of the mansion from her room, so I went to the healing house and told her to come with me and did not wait to see if she would argue.She followed, which I had expected, and when the stables came into view she slowed, her feet losing their certainty on the path, and I looked back and understood immediately — the way her eyes moved across the stalls, the particular stillness of someone encountering something unfamiliar and trying to look as though they weren't."You haven't ridden before," I said.She shook her head, and I turned back to Crest's stall because the alternative was standing there looking at her while I recalculated the morning, and I did not need her to see me doing that."Then you'll ride with me," I said, and that was the end of it.*This is either a good idea or a terrible one,* Knox said, while I was saddling

45: I TRUST HIM.

Lyra's pov The ride back was different from the ride out.I noticed it somewhere in the first ten minutes, when the tension that had been living in my shoulders since the moment he lifted me into the saddle had quietly packed its things and left without announcement, and I was simply riding — his chest behind me, his arms on either side, Crest moving beneath us with the same unhurried patience he had kept all morning — and it did not feel like something I was managing anymore.I did not know exactly when I stopped gripping the pommel so tightly, or when my back had stopped holding itself away from his chest with such careful deliberateness, but somewhere between the stream and the first stand of pines the distance I had been maintaining had closed without my permission, and by the time I noticed I was leaning slightly against him we were already close enough to the stable path that correcting it would have been more conspicuous than leaving it alone, so I left it alone and looked at

46: IT ENDS TOMORROW

Lyra's pov I found it in the medical reference book.Not under the pillow, not in the herb basket, not anywhere I had learned to check — but inside the front cover of the thick reference volume I used every single day, the one that lived on the center table of the healing house and had Vera's name written in faded ink on the first page and had been handled by every healer in this pack for the better part of a decade, and I found it when I opened the book to check a compound ratio mid-morning with Vera two feet away at the cabinet behind me.I saw the fold of the paper before I saw what it was, and something in my chest understood before my mind caught up, and I closed the book and said nothing and walked out of the healing house and into the corridor and opened it there, alone, with the cold air coming off the stone walls and the sounds of the pack morning filtering in from the courtyard.The handwriting was not Moira's precise controlled script this time — it was someone else's, rou

47: PREGNANT.

Lyra's pov I had not been sleeping well, which was nothing new, but the particular quality of the not-sleeping had changed in the past week — less the alert watchful wakefulness of someone listening for threats and more a heavy, waterlogged kind of restlessness that left me feeling worse in the morning than when I had closed my eyes, as though sleep was happening to my body without actually reaching me.I had been explaining it to myself as the aftermath of the fever, which was reasonable, and as the accumulated weight of everything the past weeks had contained, which was also reasonable, and I had been a healer long enough to know that the body kept its own accounts and sometimes presented the bill all at once without warning, so I had accepted the tiredness and the low persistent nausea that had been accompanying my mornings and the particular sensitivity that had arrived in my body like an uninvited guest and had not yet shown any intention of leaving.I had been explaining all of

48: THEN SOMEONE DID THAT TO HER.

Matthias's pov I had carried her from the dining room to the healing house myself.Not because there was no one else available — Alexei had been on his feet before I was, and two pack members had appeared in the corridor within seconds, drawn by the sound of the chair — but because my hands had already found her and my body had already made the decision and by the time my mind caught up with what was happening I was already moving and handing her off to someone else was not something I was willing to do.She had weighed less than I expected, which was its own kind of information, and she had been completely still in the way people were still when they had gone somewhere their body needed to go without them, and I had walked the length of the garden path to the healing house with her against my chest and Knox utterly silent in a way that was nothing like his usual silences.Vera had met me at the door with the expression of a woman who had already assessed the situation from twenty fe

49: BECAUSE YOU'RE MINE TO PROTECT.

Matthias's pov I told Ryder in the office with the door closed and no preamble, the way I delivered information that needed to be received clearly before anything else was done with it, and Ryder sat across from me and listened and when I finished he was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when something had landed somewhere significant and he was deciding what it meant before he spoke."Before she arrived," he said."Yes."Another silence, shorter this time. "Does she know that you know?""Vera told her I was waiting outside. She knows I was told."Ryder nodded slowly, his forearms on his knees, looking at the middle distance with the careful expression of a man building a picture from pieces he hadn't finished arranging yet. He did not ask the question I could see sitting behind his eyes — the one about who and how and what it meant for the arrangement and what I intended to do — and I was grateful for that, because I did not have answers to any of those questions yet and I

50: YOU'RE MINE.

Lyra's pov Vera told me to stay and I stayed, which surprised me more than it surprised her.The old version of myself — the one who had arrived here forty-something days ago with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned that stillness was dangerous and usefulness was the only reliable form of safety — would have been back at the center table the next morning, hands moving through the work, the motion of it keeping everything else at a manageable distance. But I stayed in the cot and looked at the ceiling and let the thoughts come, and found that they did not destroy me the way I had always assumed they would if I stopped running ahead of them.The pregnancy was real. Nine weeks, possibly ten, and growing with the patient indifference of something that had decided to exist regardless of the circumstances around it, and I was a healer who understood exactly what that meant — the timeline of it, the physical reality of it, what it would look like in another four weeks and an

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP