All Chapters of The Alpha's Forbidden Plus-Size Mate : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Kaia's POVThree days before the council session, Killian came to Rhea's garden with food.Not as a gesture. Not as a performance of thoughtfulness. He came through the gate with a cloth-wrapped bundle under his arm and set it on the bench beside me and said, "You haven't eaten since this morning. Rhea told me." Then he sat down on the low wall across from me and opened his own portion and started eating without making it into anything.I looked at the bundle. Then I looked at him."Rhea told you," I said."She mentioned it when I stopped by to check the joint," he said. "She's keeping notes on your recovery. I offered to bring food. She said yes.""She could have told me to eat.""She did," he said. "You apparently said you'd eat later and went back to the journal."I opened the cloth. Bread and cold meat and something pickled that smelled like it had opinions. I ate because I was, apparently, hungry, and because not eating was not a sustainable strategy for any of what was coming.W

Kaia's POVThe night before the council session I did not go to the training yard. I did not go to the birch tree. I did not go anywhere.I sat in Rhea's cottage with the lamp burning low and Asha's journal open on my knees, and I read the last pages of it, the ones I had been saving without admitting I was saving them.Asha had written the last entry three days before her death. She had known she was dying, not dramatically, the way people in stories know they are dying, but in the practical way of someone who has been told by a healer that the thing happening in her body is not going to stop. She had written it plainly. Tomorrow the healer comes again. I do not think her report will be different. There are things I want to say while I still have the words.I read slowly.She wrote about Caelan first. Not the political Caelan, the Alpha who had overturned an alliance and changed the law and withstood thirty years of pressure from the packs who had never forgiven him for choosing her.

Killian's POV The hall did not quiet down for a long time. I stood at the front of it with Kaia's hand in mine and I let the sound move through the space and I watched the pack in the moment of it. Not managing it. Not performing anything. Just watching. There were wolves in that hall who were genuinely moved. I could see it in their faces, the specific expression of people who have felt something shift in a deep place without fully understanding why. The Omega women in the lower tiers, some of whom were crying in a way that had nothing to do with grief. The younger warriors who had grown up with the prohibition as immovable law and were watching it come apart in real time and finding it less frightening than they had expected. Gideon, standing against the far wall with his arms folded and the particular expression of a man who has waited a long time for a thing to happen and is now watching it happen and finding that it looks exactly as it should. There were also wolves who we

Kaia's POVKaelen requested a private audience with my father two days after the Bond Test, and my father, against every instinct I would have expected from him, granted it.I found out because Dax found out, which was how I found out most things that happened in the quieter corners of the pack's political machinery. He came to the training yard where I was running drills with Mira, who had taken to combat instruction with a hunger that told me exactly how long she had been forbidden the chance to build any real skill of her own, and he waited at the fence until I noticed him."Your father's meeting with Kaelen," he said. "Privately. In an hour."I stopped mid-drill. Mira lowered her guard and looked between us."That's not standard procedure," I said. Formal hearings against accused traitors did not typically include private audiences with the accused, not this close to a full council session where evidence was going to be presented. Private audiences meant negotiation, and negotiati

Kaia's POVThe Eastern Ridge delegation arrived on a cold, clear morning, three wolves in formal grey traveling colors led by an Alpha named Thessaly who had the specific bearing of someone who had been navigating difficult diplomatic situations for longer than I had been alive.I had spent the previous evening with Sera going over every possible question they might raise, every weak point in our framework, every place where our answers might sound rehearsed rather than honest. Sera had been relentless in the rehearsal, playing the role of a skeptical Eastern Ridge representative with a precision that left me genuinely unsettled by the end of it, which she informed me was exactly the point."If I can rattle you," she'd said, "Thessaly definitely can. Better you fall apart in front of me tonight than in front of her tomorrow."I had not fallen apart. I had gotten close twice, when she pressed on the gap between when the conspiracy began and when it was discovered, but I had held my foo