All Chapters of The Alpha's Lost Mate.: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

73 Chapters

Chapter Sixty-one: What Gerald Lost

Gerald Steele's POVGerald Steele was twenty-four the last time he truly recognised himself.Everything that came after was shaped by that year. Not because he spoke about it, he never did, but because, somewhere deep down, he spent the rest of his life trying to become the kind of man who no longer remembered what that younger version of himself had wanted.He met Rosalind on an evening that should have faded into memory like every other political gathering.A neighbouring pack was hosting a regional event, and his father had insisted he attend. Appearances mattered. They always did. Gerald went with little enthusiasm, expecting another endless night of council members disguising politics as celebration.Instead, he noticed a woman laughing.She wasn't trying to impress anyone. She wasn't watching to see who noticed her. She was simply laughing at something one of her friends had said, completely unaware that a man standing across the room had forgotten every conversation

Chapter Sixty-two: The Full Record

Vivienne SteeleVivienne had spent thirty years perfecting the particular art of knowing exactly how much truth a family could survive hearing at once, and it was that same instinct, honed over three decades of quiet damage control, that told her the moment she sat down at Richard’s old desk with a blank legal pad in front of her that this time, for the first time in longer than she could properly remember, she had no intention of managing the truth at all.She had been turning the decision over for the better part of a week, ever since Dominic had come to her, visibly unsettled in a way she rarely saw from her son, and told her what Erik Aldric had revealed about Gerald and a woman named Rosalind. It was a story Vivienne herself had never once heard in all her years married into this family, which told her something significant on its own: even she, who had made it her business for decades to know everything worth knowing under this roof, had been kept entirely in the da

Chapter Sixty-three: Whispers Reach the Pack

Dominic SteeleDominic was reviewing quarterly reports with Rowan when Brooke appeared in the study doorway without knocking, which was unusual enough on its own that he set the papers down immediately. Brooke had never once in the years she’d worked for this family interrupted a closed-door meeting unless the matter genuinely couldn’t wait for a more convenient moment.“You need to hear what’s circulating,” she said, closing the door behind her before she’d even fully crossed the threshold, “before you hear it secondhand from someone who’s already decided what it means without giving you the chance to explain it yourself.”“Sit down,” Dominic said, and she did, though the tightness in her shoulders told him she hadn’t come to deliver this news gently.“It started small, the way these things always do. A comment at the market from someone whose cousin works in the kitchen here, something about Sophie and a boy nobody had ever heard mentioned before. By the time it

Chapter Sixty-four: Open Ground

Dominic SteeleDominic stood at the edge of the pack’s gathering hall an hour before the assembly was due to start, staring at the rows of empty chairs that would soon fill with every adult member of the pack he had led for six years without once telling them the truth about his own son. Sophie’s voice behind him nearly made him flinch.“You look like a man about to walk into battle,” she said.“That’s roughly how it feels.”“Do you want me up there with you, or do you want me in the crowd?” She came to stand beside him, arms crossed, studying the empty hall the way she studied everything, carefully, before committing to a reaction. “I need to know before people start filing in, not after.”“Beside me,” Dominic said. “If you’re willing. I don’t want this to look like something I’m explaining on your behalf. I want them to see both of us standing in it together.”“Then I’m beside you.” She reached over and straightened his collar, an unnecessary gesture that steadi

Chapter Sixty-five: Two Ceremonies

Sophie SteeleSophie’s heart kept hammering long after she found him. He was curled up behind the stacked chairs in the hall’s side room, notebook open on his knees, completely unbothered by the fact that half the pack had just spent four frantic minutes convinced someone had taken him.“I wanted to draw the room before everyone’s faces changed it,” Ethan said when he looked up. His expression was the same calm, matter-of-fact one he wore for nearly everything. “I didn’t think anyone would notice I’d gone.”“Everyone noticed,” Sophie said, and sat down hard on the floor beside him because her legs genuinely weren’t ready to hold her upright another second. “Everyone noticed immediately, Ethan. Your father thought”“I’m sorry.” He closed the notebook carefully. The apology was understated, like most of his feelings, but it was genuine. “I didn’t mean to frighten anyone. I just needed to be quiet for a minute. The hall got very loud.”Dominic reached them a beat later

Chapter Sixty-six: Erik Stands

Dominic SteeleDominic read the complaint twice before he trusted himself to speak, and even then the words came out flatter than he intended, stripped of the anger he actually felt.“Callum Draven filed this.”“Not directly,” Lena said. She stood across the desk with her tablet still open to the document that had arrived an hour earlier. “It’s routed through a neighboring pack’s council representative, someone with no obvious connection to Draven on paper. But the language, the specific framing about instability in your household compromising regional security—that’s Draven’s phrasing. I’d stake my reputation on it.”“What’s the actual complaint?”“That your household has demonstrated a pattern of concealment and internal manipulation serious enough to raise legitimate regional concern about your fitness to lead, citing the assembly two nights ago as evidence, and requesting Caius convene an emergency review before the situation, in their words, destabilizes furth

Chapter Sixty-seven: Miriam Stays

Sophie SteeleSophie was folding laundry that had nothing urgent about it—sheets that didn’t strictly need folding that evening,when Miriam appeared in the doorway with an expression Sophie had learned, over the past weeks, to recognize as the specific look Miriam wore right before she said something she’d clearly been rehearsing.“I need to talk to you about something, and I need you to actually let me finish before you respond,” Miriam said, “because I know exactly how you’re going to react to the first sentence, and I’d like the chance to explain the rest before you do.”Sophie set down the sheet she was folding. “That’s an ominous opening.”“It’s not ominous. It’s just something I’ve been circling for two weeks and haven’t said plainly yet.” Miriam came further into the room and sat on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap in a posture that looked, on her, unusually formal. “I don’t want to keep coming here as help who visits and leaves. I want to stay. Pe

Chapter Sixty-eight: A Second Try

Sophie SteeleSophie's phone rang three times before she registered whose name was on the screen, and by the time she actually answered it, her hands had gone unsteady in a way that had nothing to do with the chaos still unfolding downstairs over whatever Caius had found buried in the regional filing system."Helena," she said, stepping into the hallway and pulling the door shut behind her, needing distance from Dominic and Lena's low, urgent conversation before she could give this call any real attention."I wasn't sure you'd pick up," Helena said, and there was none of the composed precision Sophie had always associated with her mother's voice, only something considerably more uncertain. "I know the last time we spoke, I wasn't asking for anything beyond forgiveness for one specific failure. I'm calling now to ask for something bigger, and I want to be upfront about that before you agree to anything.""Go on.""I'd like to visit again," Helena said. "Not to del

Chapter Sixty-nine: Vera's Price

Vera KesslerVera had told Gerald Steele the files would stay sealed, and she had meant it, the way she meant most things she said to clients, right up until the moment her landlord left a second notice under her door and her business account dipped low enough that she found herself doing arithmetic she hadn't done in years, the kind that made promises feel considerably less binding than they had a month ago.She sat at her desk that evening with the Steele file open in front of her, the same file she'd sworn to keep sealed and unused, and told herself she was simply reviewing it, nothing more, an old professional habit of keeping her records organized rather than any actual intention to act on what she found there.The file told a fuller story now than it had when she'd first been hired, months of accumulated observation about the household's rhythms, the boy's supervised lessons on the lower lawn three mornings a week, the specific gaps in the estate's perimete

Chapter Seventy: Something at the Border

Lena MarshLena nearly missed it entirely, buried three layers deep in a routine security sweep she ran every few days out of habit rather than expectation. She would spend the rest of that night grateful, in a way that made her hands unsteady, that she hadn't skipped the sweep the way she'd been tempted to after the exhausting week they'd all just had.The flag was small. A single inquiry logged by the regional network's shared monitoring system, the kind of system pack territories used to track unusual movement or interest near shared borders. This particular inquiry had originated from a location near the northern border, well outside Steele territory, requesting information cross referenced against a name Lena recognized instantly and wished, immediately, that she didn't.Vera Kessler.She sat up straighter at her desk, pulling the log entry closer, reading it twice to make sure she wasn't misreading a coincidence into something significant simply because she

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