Semua Bab Meant To Be Daddy’s: Claimed By My Fiance’s Father: Bab 61 - Bab 70

SERAPHINAI didn’t see Damien before I left.I looked for him, though not in any way I’d admit to, but I came downstairs earlier than necessary and took the long route through the ground floor and found Agnes in the kitchen and nobody else.Agnes said he’d already gone out.I ate my breakfast standing up and left.Shane was coming through the academy gate at the same time I was.He saw me and raised a hand in greeting, then started toward me. I pointed at him.“Five feet,” I said.He stopped, his gaze dropped to my finger then back to my face. “I’m sorry?”“Five feet minimum. Stay there.”He looked behind him like there might be someone else I was talking to. He scoffed. “That’s ridiculous.”“It’s a reasonable boundary.”“It’s a measurement.” He crossed it immediately, falling into step beside me. “Good morning.”“Shane.”“You look tired.”“I am tired. I’m also serious about the five feet.”“You’re not serious about the five feet.” He held the door open and I went through it because r

DAMIENThe woods gave me nothing.We covered the south ridge in under twenty minutes, eight men spread across the search pattern, torches cutting through the dark between the trees. I moved ahead of all of them in my wolf form, covering ground faster, using the scent trail that Seraphina had described.It was there, faint but real. Three distinct signatures, none of them belonging to any wolf I recognized from any territory I’d dealt with in twenty years of running this pack.And then it stopped as if walking off the edge of a map.Scentblockers. The same as the witness who had disappeared from the shelter house on Seraphina’s wedding day.I shifted back and stood at the point where the trail ended, the trees around me dark and indifferent, and looked at the ground. Compressed earth. Multiple sets of prints, shifted back to human form here. A vehicle further out, past the tree line where the neutral road ran along the border.They’d had a vehicle waiting.This was planned and time

The automatic doors slid open and I felt the hospital's cold hit me first. I saw them before they saw me.Seraphina and Callum were standing near the row of chairs by the reception desk. Close enough to be mid-conversation, far enough apart that someone had adjusted. Seraphina's hand was lowered like she'd been using it to make a point about something, and she'd stopped. Callum had his arms crossed and his jaw slightly set, which meant whatever they'd been talking about, he hadn't liked it.And I wouldn’t like it either.He didn’t tell her anything, did he? They both looked up when I came through the doors.I watched the thing pass between them—the sudden careful neutrality. The conversation folds itself away.I was too tired to dissect it.I'd been driving since just after two in the morning, the files from Alan on the passenger seat, the highway empty in a way that felt like punishment, with silence being a companion that gives you too much room to think. I'd gone through every v

SERAPHINAI heard the elders before I saw them.Their voices carried that low formality that suggests they had arranged themselves for a purpose, drifting from the entrance hall into the living room where I was sitting with a book I hadn’t been reading for the past forty minutes.I stayed where I was.Damien’s voice came next. I couldn’t make out the words at first, just the register of it, controlled and tired in equal measure. Then Brone’s voice, measured, as it always was, and whatever he said landed differently than anything else had tonight because the quality of Damien’s silence after it changed completely.“Do you have any idea,” he said, “what this week has looked like? My son is lying in a hospital bed with spinal damage. My border was breached by an organized unit of wolves that we cannot identify. My pack has a leak I haven’t located yet.” The control was fraying at the edges in a way I had never heard from him before. Never once in four years. “And this is what you bring

DAMIENMarcus came home on a Tuesday.The packhouse adjusted around him, Agnes reorganizing the ground floor without being asked, the guards changing their patrol pattern so the main entrance was always covered, small practical acts of care that the pack extended without announcement.I helped him through the door myself.He didn’t say anything about that. Neither did I. We had arrived, somewhere between the hospital corridor and the drive home, at a version of each other that didn’t require commentary on every gesture. It was new and it was fragile and I intended to protect it.I got him settled in the ground-floor room we’d converted. Agnes appeared with tea, her smile bright like she had been waiting to be useful and was finally being allowed to be.“I’ll be right here,” she told Marcus, in the tone that brooked no argument.Marcus looked at her, then at the tea, then at me. Discomfort crossed his expression knowing he was going to be mothered whether he wanted it or not and had d