All Chapters of My mate chose my sister : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

I was not there when it happened. I heard about it in pieces, the way you heard about earthquakes you had slept through, from the evidence left behind and the account of someone who had been awake.Aurora told me. She found me the following morning on the back prep station, which was where I had been reassigned since the corridor access was severed, and she appeared at the kitchen's side entrance at half past eight with her hands in her coat pockets and the particular expression she wore when she was deciding how much of something to say.She had been deciding a lot in the two days since the corridor. I had noticed. She was generous with information but precise about the dosage, which told me she understood that information had weight and weight required care, which in turn told me she was more like her brother than her energy initially suggested."I need to tell you something," she said. "And I need you to not react visibly because there are three people in this kitchen who are watch

The summons came through my father, which was its own kind of statement.A folded note slipped under the east block door at seven in the morning, written in my father's hand but not his words, too formal, too measured, the phrasing of something dictated rather than composed. Alpha-designate Alexander Blackwood requests your attendance at the private study at your earliest convenience. The matter is a pack administrative concern.Pack administrative concern. Six weeks ago that phrase would have made my stomach drop. Now I read it, set it on the desk, and finished my coffee.Then I put my coat on and went.Alexander was alone when I arrived.That was the first thing I registered. No Victor. No Marcus. No attendants or witnesses or formal structure of any kind. Just Alexander in the private study that had always been more his than his father's, standing at the window with his back to the door and his hands clasped behind him in the posture of someone who had been standing there long enou

Lily came to the east block at quarter past eleven that night with the expression of someone who had just pulled a pin from something and was deciding whether to throw it or put it back.She never knocked anymore. Three quiet taps on the doorframe, the way you signaled a person who might not want the sound of a full knock carrying down a monitored corridor. I opened the door before the third tap landed and she came in and sat on the floor in the now-established position, back against the wall, knees up, and looked at me with that particular stillness that meant she had been carrying something for hours and was finally somewhere safe enough to set it down."I found it," she said.I had been sitting at the desk with the locket in my hands, turning it between my fingers, the way I had been doing in intervals since my mother had pressed it into my palm that afternoon. I set it down on the desk surface, where the silver of it caught the lamplight."Tell me," I said.She had been careful. S

I did not go to the terrace that night.I had been going every night for six days, since the first time Ethan had appeared at the far end of it and asked me why someone with my scent was carrying trays. Six evenings of cold air and low voices and the particular quality of standing beside a person who did not require you to perform anything. Six evenings of something building between us in the careful, patient way that things built when neither person was willing to rush them, because rushing was for people who were afraid they might not get another chance and we had both, without discussing it, decided we were not those people.I had gone every night.Tonight I sat on the east block floor with my back against the bed and the locket in my hands and the lamp off and the moonlight coming through the single window, and I thought about what Marcus had told me in the cold alley that morning.The full picture.I had been assembling it in pieces for six weeks, one fragment at a time, and now

He found me in the east garden at dusk.Not the terrace. Not the narrow alley beside the kitchen or the groundskeeper's path or any of the places that had become our geography over six evenings of finding each other in the dark. The east garden was different. Smaller, more sheltered, bordered on three sides by the old stone wall that separated the main estate from the pack's lower residential quarter. In summer it was planted with something I had never paid enough attention to learn the name of. In winter it was bare and frost-edged and entirely empty at this hour, the light going out of the sky in long slow gradients of blue and violet and the first cold stars appearing at the eastern edge.I had come here because the plan I had built with Lily that morning needed one more thing, and the one more thing required that I be somewhere that Sophia's monitoring rotation did not cover at dusk, and the east garden was not on any route that mattered to anyone and was therefore, for now, entir