Semua Bab THE ALPHA’S BROKEN MATE: Bab 11 - Bab 20

AthenaThe east wing was nice.I hated that it was nice.I’d been prepared to find something to complain about, some deliberate slight in the room choice, something that would confirm what I already believed about being here. Instead I walked into a suite with high ceilings and wide windows overlooking a garden, furniture that was heavy and dark and clearly expensive, and a connecting room that had already been set up for a child.Amara walked into it and stopped dead.There was a small bed with carved wolves on the headboard. A window seat. A shelf with books on it that someone had clearly placed there recently because the spines were too neat, too deliberate.“Mama.” Her voice came out hushed.“I see it.”“There are wolves on my bed.”“I see that too.”She turned to me with an expression that was trying very hard not to be delighted and failing completely. Then she ran and threw herself on the bed and the stuffed rabbit flew somewhere and I stood in the doorway watching her and felt

RowanVera had apologized.I hadn’t told her to. Lake had, apparently, on his own initiative, which meant I was going to have to have a conversation with him about overstepping, except that the outcome had been fine so the conversation was going to be difficult to frame correctly.I’d watched it happen from across the dining hall. Athena walking over, sitting down, the whole thing done quietly and without spectacle, no raised voice, no scene. Just her, a chair, and whatever she’d said that had made Vera’s face do what it did.Then Vera crossing the room twenty minutes later to apologize and Athena accepting it like she was signing off on a document.Lake slid into the seat across from me. “She handled that well.”“I saw.”“Better than expected.”“I expected her to handle it well.” That wasn’t entirely true but I wasn’t going to say that out loud.“Rurik wants a meeting.” Lake said, moving on with the efficiency of someone who knew when not to linger on a topic.“Of course he does.”“T

RowanHe was already in the east hall when I arrived.Sitting at the far end of the table like he owned it, one ankle crossed over his knee, a glass of something dark in his hand at eleven in the morning. That was Rurik. Always already there, always already comfortable, always making sure you noticed both things.We shared a father. That was the beginning and end of what we shared.He looked up when I walked in, smiled with all his teeth. “Brother.”“Rurik.” I pulled out a chair on my side of the table and sat. Didn’t pour a drink. Kept my hands visible and still, an old habit from negotiation training. Show them your hands, show them nothing’s coming, let them relax just enough.“Congratulations are in order I hear.” He swirled his glass. “The runaway princess has returned. And with a gift.”“Watch your mouth.”He raised both hands, the picture of innocence. “I only meant the child. A daughter, yes? She has your eyes, they say.”“Who says.”“People talk.” He shrugged. “Palaces talk.

RowanIt happened at two in the morning.I was at my desk, which was where I usually was at two in the morning, working through the rogue activity reports that kept not making sense no matter how many times I read them. Three incidents, outer territories, no clean pattern, no demands, just damage and disappearance.The pain came without warning.Not the dull pulse I’d gotten used to, the low constant reminder that the curse was there and moving. This was different. This was every nerve in my left arm lighting up at once, a white hot thing that started at my wrist and drove straight up to my shoulder, and I knocked the report off the desk getting my sleeve up.The veins had crossed my elbow.I sat very still and breathed through it, both hands flat on the desk, watching the black lines pulse visibly under my skin. Moving. I could actually see them moving, slow and deliberate, branching.I had maybe eight months before they reached my heart.The witch had been specific about that part.

RowanThe third rogue incident made no sense.I had the report spread across my desk alongside the two previous ones, all three side by side, and I’d been staring at them for the better part of an hour trying to find the thread that connected them. Location, timing, targets, method. Nothing lined up cleanly enough to be a pattern but nothing was random enough to be coincidence either.Someone was feeding information to the rogues.That was the conclusion I kept arriving at and kept not wanting to sit with because of what it meant. An inside source. Someone with access to border patrol schedules, pack movement, enough operational detail to keep the incidents just below the threshold of a full response while still doing consistent damage.I pushed the reports aside and looked at the map on the wall.Three incidents. Outer territories, different sectors, nothing taken, two wolves injured. It looked like probing. Testing response times, testing coverage gaps, building a picture of where w