All Chapters of THE ALPHA'S SACRED MISTAKE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

SERA I slept without interruption for the first time in fourteen months. I know this because I tracked my sleep the way I tracked everything, with the clinical attention of someone who had learned that unconsciousness was a vulnerability and that vulnerability required management. In fourteen months inside the Dravon territory I had not slept through a full night once. Something always woke me. The mark pulsing. Lyra pressing at the edges of things. The specific quality of a territory that had been carrying something old and heavy for five hundred years, that had given off a low persistent frequency even in its sleep. The territory was quiet this morning. Not the quiet of absence. The quiet of something that had set down a weight it had been holding so long the holding had become indistinguishable from its own nature. I lay in the room they had given me in the main house and listened to it and let the listening be what it was. The bond was warm and steady in my chest. Not the urg

SERA He asked to see me before the territory address. Not Kael. Me. He sent the message through the guard who had been stationed outside his rooms since we returned, a polite custody that had not been stated explicitly but that Veyne had accepted with the specific dignity of a man who understood what he had done and was not in a position to object to its consequences. I went alone. He was sitting at the window of the room they had given him, which looked out over the eastern gardens and the old training ground beyond them. He had changed from the travel clothes of the day before. His hands were folded in his lap with the stillness of a man who had trained himself out of the habit of movement because movement in his world had always been read as intent. He looked older this morning. Not newly old. Old in the way that had been there all along and that the entity's presence had kept below the surface, the way the entity had kept everything below the surface that was not immediately u

CADEN I told Milo at 6am the following morning while the packhouse was still quiet and the generator had given up at 3am and the real power had come back an hour later and everything was back to normal in the way that storms normalised things temporarily before the truth of what they had shifted became apparent. I told him plainly because Milo deserved plainness and because I had been carrying this alone for sixteen days and it was time. 'I felt the bond on the roof,' I said. 'The first night. Before she came back through the gate. Before any of what you have spent eleven days documenting. I felt it and I understood what it was.' Milo set his coffee down. 'She was in my room,' I said. 'Eleven seconds. Close enough. My wolf registered it instantly. Hers did too.' I paused. 'She left without finishing the assignment. I knew what the assignment was. I let her come back.' Milo was very still in the way he was still when the information he was receiving required him to rebuild somethi

MILOThe border report arrived at 9am the way it always arrived, the same format, the same operative, the same shorthand that I had been reading for six years and could process in under three minutes without a second coffee.Pack movements on the northern approach. Rogue activity down from last month. A trader who had passed through the territory three days ago with no issues. Contact list for the week, six names, standard.I read the first name.Second name.Third.Fourth.Fifth.I stopped.The name sat on the page the way names sometimes sat on pages when they arrived somewhere you had not expected them, carrying a weight disproportionate to the five letters that composed them.Ines.A contact of the trader. Pack-adjacent, the report noted. Passing through. No affiliation flagged.I sat with the report in my hands for a moment that lasted longer than the report required.Then I continued reading.Sixth name. End of contact list. Routine observations on the eastern perimeter, nothing

SERATwo days after the injury I was cleared for light duties and told to stay off the training ground for the remainder of the week.Light duties meant desk work, which meant the administrative tasks the pack administrator had begun routing to me after discovering I processed paperwork faster than anyone she had tried in the past year. I did not find this work interesting. I found it useful. It gave me access to the packhouse records in a way that did not require justification.I was reading through a quarterly supply log on the morning of day nineteen when my wolf surged.Not gradually. Not a flicker or a hum. A surge, the kind that bypassed the suppressant's remaining grip the way water bypassed a dam that had been compromised at the base, and for approximately three seconds my vision shifted to something amber and my left hand, the injured one, closed on the edge of the desk with a strength that had no business being in a recently dislocated shoulder.I breathed.Four counts in, s