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Home / Werewolf / The Alpha's Forbidden Plus-Size Mate / Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

All Chapters of The Alpha's Forbidden Plus-Size Mate : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

111 Chapters

Twenty one

Kaia's POVRhea's cottage smelled like dried herbs and old books and something underneath both of those that I'd never found a name for. Something warm and green and very old, like the first week of spring when the ground is remembering what it is after a long winter. I'd been coming here since I was a child and I'd stopped trying to name the smell years ago. Some things you just let be what they are.She opened the door before we knocked.She looked at me the way she always looked at things she was assessing, with an attention that went through the surface rather than stopping at it. Not invasive. Just thorough. She'd been looking at me like that for as long as I could remember and I'd never minded it because nothing about it felt like judgment. It felt like someone who was actually trying to see what was there.She stepped back and let us in."Sit," she said to me. She told Killian the tea things were where they always were and he'd know. She told Mira to stop hovering in the doorwa

Twenty two

Killian's POVThe council chamber felt different when I walked into it this time.Same room. Same long table and stone walls and old-wood smell and my father at the head of it with the six council members arranged around him in the familiar order of consequence. I had called this session formally, which I had the standing to do as heir, and the formality of the summons had done its work. They had all come promptly. They knew something significant had happened. The pack grounds had been processing my return since dawn, the scent of Shadow Fang territory on all of us, the sight of Mira, the quality of Kaia walking back through the tree line with something different in the air around her. Packs talk. They never stop.I didn't make them wait."Kaia is home," I said. "She is with the pack healer. Injured but functional." I looked at Kaelen as I said the next part, and I kept my voice even because evenness was more useful than anger right now, though the anger was there and had been there s

Twenty three

Kaia's POVWord spread the way it always spread in Silver Moon, which was fast and imperfectly and with embellishments added at every stage of transmission.By the time I came out of Rhea's cottage two hours after we'd arrived, the version circulating through the pack grounds had Kaia, the Beta's Omega daughter, shifting into a wolf the size of a house, single-handedly destroying an entire Shadow Fang battalion, and carrying the prince out of the camp on her back. The battalion detail was an exaggeration. The part about carrying Killian was simply wrong and I made a mental note to correct it when the right moment came. But the wolf the size of a house part was close enough to accurate that I let it stand.The pack was looking at me. I noticed this the moment I stepped outside into the morning light, still moving carefully around the hip, Killian a half-step behind me and Rhea's second journal tucked under my arm. People stopped what they were doing when I passed. Not all of them. Some

Twenty four

Killian's POVThe Luna candidates arrived three days after we came back from Shadow Fang territory, which felt like either very poor timing or very deliberate timing, and I had spent enough time around political wolves to know it was almost certainly the latter.There were three of them. Lyra of the North-Crest pack, Maren of Iron-Claw, and Sable of the Eastern Ridge. My father had arranged their arrival as part of the mate selection timeline that had been announced at the same full-pack assembly where he'd announced the Gauntlet. I had not forgotten that announcement, or the look on Kaia's face when she heard it, or the precise way all the air seemed to go out of the situation in that moment. I had been carrying that look in my memory for the past ten days.Lyra arrived first because Lyra was the kind of person who arrived first. She was Alpha-born, North-Crest's most politically significant daughter, tall and fair-haired and precise in the way of someone who has been prepared for ex

twenty five

Kaia's POVThree days after we came back from Shadow Fang territory, I stood in the doorway of the Great Hall and watched Lyra of North-Crest laugh at something Killian said.He hadn't made her laugh on purpose. I could tell because he looked faintly surprised by it, that brief unguarded expression he got when something landed differently than he'd intended. But she laughed anyway, and it was a real laugh, not a performed one, and she touched his arm when she did it, light and easy, the touch of a woman who is comfortable in her own authority and not afraid to let it show.I stood in the doorway for about four seconds. Then I turned around and went back the way I came.This was not jealousy. I told myself this clearly, in the specific internal voice I used when I was being honest with myself about something I didn't entirely want to be honest about. It wasn't jealousy because I had nothing to be jealous of. Killian had told me four nights ago, sitting on the wall at the edge of the sp

twenty six

Killian's POVThe hip was better enough by the fifth day that Kaia showed up at the training grounds at midnight.I knew she was there before I heard her. The pull that ran between us had been a constant low frequency since the first day in the pack square, and I had learned over the past weeks to read it the way you learn to read weather, the specific quality of it telling me not just that she was nearby but something about the state she was in. Tonight it had a particular alertness to it, the frequency of someone who has been cooped up long enough and is done with it.I was already at the training grounds. I had not, technically, been waiting for her. I had been doing what I always did when I couldn't sleep, which was standing in a dark space thinking about the things I was going to have to do in the next few weeks. The council session. The Bond Test. The conversation with my father that needed to happen before either of those, the one we had been circling for days without landing o

twenty seven

Kaia's POVMy father came to find me on the sixth day.I was in Rhea's garden, sitting on the low stone bench along the east wall with the second journal open on my knees, reading about Asha. Not the history of her, the political history, the version Corvus had told Killian that had filtered back to me through him. The personal record. The account written in Asha's own hand in the last years of her life, describing what it had felt like to shift for the first time, what it had felt like to be seen, what it had cost and what it had given. The handwriting was old and required slow reading and I'd been at it for an hour and I hadn't wanted to stop.Then I heard footsteps on the path outside the garden gate and I smelled him before I saw him, the familiar scent of cedarwood and authority that I had grown up associating with the presence of someone who needed to be managed.I closed the journal and put it beside me on the bench and waited.He came through the gate the way he always moved t

twenty eight

Killian's POVLyra found me alone the morning after the dinner, which I suspected was not an accident.I was in the map room reviewing the border intelligence reports that had come in overnight from the eastern scouts. Two Shadow Fang movements in the past seventy-two hours, both small, both probing rather than committing, the kind of activity that meant Vane was rebuilding rather than retreating. I had expected this. A man like Vane didn't absorb a setback and disappear. He recalibrated. He found the new angle. Whatever he had lost in that camp when Kaia shifted and his model of the world failed completely, he had not lost his ambition or his patience, and those were the two things about him that actually mattered.Lyra knocked on the open door and waited to be invited in, which was the correct thing to do and which told me she had been briefed on Silver Moon protocols before arriving. North-Crest was thorough. They always had been."Come in," I said.She came in and sat in the chair

Twenty nine

Kaia's POVSera showed up at Rhea's cottage two days after Rhea sent the note, which meant she had taken exactly two days to decide she was willing to do this and arrange her schedule around it, which meant she was more invested than she was going to admit out loud.She came through the door, looked at me sitting on the stool with Asha's journal, and said, "Put the book down. You can read on your own time."I put the book down."Rhea thinks you need to learn rooms," she said. "I agree with Rhea, which is not something I say often, so note it." She pulled a chair up and sat across from me with the direct, economical posture she carried everywhere, the posture of someone who had never in her life wasted a physical inch on performance. "I am going to teach you how to read a room and how to move through one and how to make people feel that you are exactly where you are supposed to be even when you have never been in that room before in your life. This is a learnable skill. It is not glamo

Thirty

Kaia's POVI went to the birch tree on the ninth night because I needed to think and the birch tree was where I went when I needed to think and some habits are older and more reliable than any plan.It was late. The pack grounds were quiet, the main buildings dark except for the watch lights, the specific deep quiet of a place where most people were asleep. I had been awake since two in the morning with the particular restless quality that came when too many things were moving simultaneously and my brain refused to slow down enough to let the body rest. The council session in five days. The Bond Test. The evidence against my father, which Killian had organized with the thoroughness of someone who had been building it carefully for weeks. Vane rebuilding somewhere in the north. Lyra's withdrawal, which Killian had told me about the day after it happened, sitting across from me in Rhea's garden with the evening light on his face, delivering it plainly without trying to soften it.North-

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