All Chapters of Forbidden Affectionate : Chapter 11 - Chapter 19

Chapter 11: Controlled BurnScrolsal's PovI have been managing difficult rooms for thirty one years and the skill it requires is not intelligence, though that helps, and it is not authority, though that is useful.It is the ability to identify the moment a situation stops being manageable and to move before that moment arrives.Tonight had stopped being manageable approximately four hours ago.I stood at the podium in the Halcyon lobby and delivered the statement Dorian had written for me and I delivered it well.Because I delivered everything well and because the alternative was to stand in front of every camera in the Northern Territory and explain my presence on a recording that Elara was apparently now carrying.I had not known about the recording until forty minutes ago.Dorian had called me from somewhere in the building with the specific calm of a man who had been several steps ahead of this evening from the beginning and found the experience privately enjoyable.He told me El

Chapter 13: What Ren KnowsKarl's PovI put the phone on the table and looked at Lucian and Lucian was already on his feet, which meant I had approximately four seconds before he did something that would get him burned by sunrise."Sit down," I said."Where does Dorian have him?" He was already moving toward the door, jacket in hand, and the look on his face was not the one I had seen six years of Summit politics produce, it was something older and less managed than that."Lucian." I stepped in front of the door and held his eyes. "If you walk out of here with an active burn order and Scrolsal's statement on every feed in the territory, you don't get to Kae, you get arrested at the first checkpoint and they close the session without the submission and everything we built tonight burns with you."He stopped. His jaw moved once and he looked at me with the specific expression he reserves for information he hates but cannot argue with."Then what," he said quietly."You talk to Ren Cole,

Chapter 15: What Dorian WantsDorian's PovI was seven years old when my father lost his territory.Not in a challenge, not in a vote, in a conversation, in a single Summit session where Gregor Vane sat at the head of the table and reclassified our eastern holding as an unaligned corridor.My father sat across from him with nothing to say because Vane had spent six months acquiring every piece of leverage my father had and cashing them all at once.My father drove home and sat in the kitchen and did not speak for three days.I watched him from the doorway and decided two things that have not changed since.The first was that I would never sit across a table from a man like Vane without having already won the conversation before I walked into the room.The second was that the way to do that was not strength, it was information, and patience, and the specific willingness to build something across years that other people could not see coming because they were too focused on what was dire

Chapter 17: Four YearsRen's PovI had been sitting in the stairwell of the Halcyon Building for forty minutes when Karl called me back.He said Lucian had the information and they were moving and I should stay where I was and not do anything, which was the instruction I had been given and ignored and given again for the last four years of my life. I stayed where I was.The stairwell smelled like concrete and old air and I sat on the twelfth floor landing and looked at my hands and thought about the version of this night I had run in my head a hundred times, the one where I made a different choice at twenty six when Vane's man came to me with the offer. The offer had not been complicated.Information from inside Kae Armstrong's pack, access to his operational decisions, early warning on any legal moves he made toward the Summit, in exchange for a position and a salary and the specific promise that my younger sister's pack in the southern corridor would be left alone when Vane moved on

Chapter 19: The RoomElara's PovI had not planned to be here.That is the truth, the actual one, not the version I would give to anyone who asked, the actual truth is that I had delivered what I came to deliver.The recording and the files and the name, and I had walked away the way I always walk away, without looking back, because looking back had never once changed what was behind me.Then Karl Whisperer had called me at five in the morning and said three words.He said “Scrolsal was down.”And I turned around. The formal session room on the thirty second floor was the same room where Vane had died twelve hours ago.Which said something about the Summit's relationship with symbolism that I did not have the patience to examine, and it was full by the time I arrived.Every Alpha in the Northern Territory in their seat, Summit staff along the walls, three elders at the front table in Scrolsal's absence, because Scrolsal was currently in a medical unit on the ninth floor with wolfsbane