《The Alpha's Lost Mate.》全部章節：第 31 章 - 第 40 章

Sophie Steele"Put the phone down," I said.Dominic looked at me, the screen still lit in his hand."Helena's statement can't be stopped tonight," I told him. "Lena can't stop it, you can't stop it, going back upstairs to make calls won't stop it. It's done." I held his gaze. "Whatever damage it does, we deal with it in the morning."He looked at the phone for a long moment. Then he set it face down on the counter."Okay," he said.The kitchen settled back into its quiet, alongside its amber light and the abandoned mug, plus the two of us, still close, neither of us having moved the distances we'd closed in the last half hour.I slid off the counter, moved to the small sofa along the kitchen's far wall, the one the staff used on long shifts. Old, worn at the armrests, the kind of furniture that had absorbed enough years to become comfortable in the way only old things could.I sat, and drew my legs up beneath me.After a moment, Dominic moved the armchair from the corne

Gerald Steele"It went poorly," Aldric said over the phone, with the tone of a man stating something he considered obvious."It went as it went," I replied. "Which is a different thing."A pause. "Dominic had documentation, Gerald. Payment records, names, dates. He laid it in front of the council like a case file. Castellan looked at me for the rest of that meeting like he was revising thirty years of opinion.""Castellan revising an opinion is not the same as Castellan changing a vote," I said. I was at the desk in the room I used when I stayed at the villa, the door closed, a glass of water untouched beside me. "There is a significant distance between discomfort and action.""Perhaps," Aldric said. "But the motion won't pass now. Not this week. Not with the council in this state.""The formal motion was always one instrument," I said. "Not the only one."Silence on his end. Aldric was old enough, sharp enough, to understand what I meant without requiring elaboration.

Dominic Steele"Get on a flight," I told Rowan. "Earliest available. Not commercial, take the charter.""Already looking," Rowan replied. "There's one out in ninety minutes. I can make it.""Take it." I was already at the desk, pulling up the council contact list on my laptop, one hand on the phone, the other moving through files. "The photograph at the front desk. Did Miriam describe whoever left it?""The staff at the desk said it was a courier. Uniformed, had a delivery log. It looked completely legitimate.""Which means it was arranged in advance," I said. "Before Miriam moved. Someone had the secondary address before we thought they did.""That's what I'm thinking," Rowan said. "Gerald's contact is better than we assessed.""Or Helena gave it to him," I said. "She was at the gate two days ago. She could have had people positioned in LA before she came here."A pause. "That's a longer game than we thought she was playing.""Yes," I said. "Go…Call me when you lan

. Sophie Steele"Stop," I said out loud, to no one, to the dark ceiling above my bed, to my own chest which had decided at two in the morning to feel like something was pulling it apart from the inside.The ceiling did not stop, and my chest did not stop.I pressed my palm flat against my sternum the way I had in the corridor on my first night here, the same instinct, the same useless gesture of trying to hold something in place that wasn't interested in being held. The pain was not sharp exactly. It was a pressure, deep, insistent, the kind that sat beneath your ribs and pulled, like something on the other end of a rope that had been stretched too far for too long was finally making its position known.I sat up.My wolf was not restless. It wasn't pacing or reacting to threat or responding to Dominic's proximity in the usual disorienting way. This was different. This was my wolf in distress, communicating in the only language available to it when words weren'

Dominic Steele "Regional authority," I said to Lena, keeping my voice level. "Walk me through exactly what he filed." Lena had the document on her screen, pulled up within minutes of Gerald's submission. "Emergency petition, filed under Pack Charter Section Twelve, which allows any senior family member to request regional oversight when an Alpha's succession line is in dispute." She turned the screen toward me. "He's arguing that the existence of an undisclosed heir, combined with what he's calling a pattern of concealment from the pack's leadership, constitutes grounds for external review." "External review means the regional Alpha has authority to intervene," I mentioned. "To observe, technically. But observation at that level creates a public record, you know? And everything goes on the regional ledger." Lena lowered the screen. "It also means the timeline moves out of your hands as the regional authority sets its own schedule." I stood in the study with that for a moment