THE ALPHA’S BROKEN MATE のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 41 - チャプター 50

AthenaFour days passed in a way that felt both too fast and like they were being stretched thin.I worked in the studio. Longer sessions than usual, the kind where you look up and three hours have gone without announcing themselves. Client designs that needed finishing, pieces I'd been developing since I set the shop up in the palace, two wolves from the inner pack who had come in the week after the ceremony with a quietness that suggested they'd been debating it for a while, and I'd done their work and they'd left without making it strange, and I'd considered that a small step in the right direction.The palace had shifted slightly around me since the ceremony. Nothing dramatic, nothing overnight, just the small recalibrations of people adjusting to a new fact. Fewer sideways looks. Vera had started sitting near me at breakfast, not beside me, near me, close enough that it registered. Bren had stopped being the first one to leave a room when I entered it.Small things. The kind that

AthenaLake called it in at eleven in the morning.I was in the loop the way Rowan had promised, sitting with Lake's second in the communication room off the main corridor, a small room full of equipment I'd spent the first hour learning and the second hour actually using. When the signal came through I was the one who picked it up.Rowan's team. One of the senior members, voice clipped and controlled the way trained people got when things had gone sideways and they were managing it.Compound breached. Operation successful. Two team members injured, non critical. Alpha recovering.Recovering.I set the receiver down carefully."What does recovering mean." I said.The second, a woman called Dena who had the steady eyes of someone who had been in enough situations to know how to be in them, looked at me. "It means he's upright and functional but there's something that needs attention when he's back.""The side." I said."Likely." She said.I nodded. Sat with it for a moment.Then I stoo

AthenaThe thing about Sara was that it kept finding new angles.I'd think I'd processed it, settled it into something I could carry, and then a memory would surface that reframed itself. A conversation we'd had at sixteen about boys. The time she'd talked me out of confronting a council member's daughter who'd called me fat in the corridor. Whether that had been genuine or whether she'd been keeping me contained, keeping me small, keeping me exactly the kind of girl who disappeared when things got hard.I didn't know. That was the part I couldn't resolve. How much of her had been real.Chase had sat with me through two of those evenings, not talking much, just present, bringing food I didn't ask for and eating it himself when I didn't touch it. On the third evening he'd said, quietly, that he thought some of her had probably been real, people who were placed in positions like that still had lives inside the assignment, and that not knowing which parts were which was the specific crue

AthenaThe space was better than I'd expected.That wasn't Amara's influence, or not only. The room had good bones, the builders had understood what I wanted in the way good builders did when you were specific enough about it, and walking through it at two with Rowan behind me I kept finding things that were right.The windows first. Amara had been correct, they were better than the studio, wider, the east light coming in at an angle that would be ideal in the mornings and shift to something warmer by afternoon. I stood in the middle of the main floor and turned slowly and thought about where things would go.The ink shelf. The main station. The waiting area that Amara had declared needed to be more comfortable, which I agreed with, the one in the human quarter had been functional and nothing more.The drawing nook in the corner by the far window. Small, exactly the right size, with a built in seat and the light coming directly onto it.I looked at it for a long moment.Rowan came to

RowanThe open day was Athena's idea executed entirely on her terms and I had stayed out of it in the way she'd made clear she needed me to stay out of it, which was completely, with no input on the format or the timing or who was invited.She'd told me once that the work would answer and I'd believed her and I stood by that.What I had done, without telling her, was make sure that the people who needed to be there were there. Not commanded, not formally invited through official channels. Just mentioned to the right people in the right tone, which in a palace was the equivalent of sending an engraved announcement.Cain had come on his own. I'd known he would. Vera had come with two others from the inner pack. Even Bren had appeared at the entrance of the new shop at ten in the morning with the expression of a man who had decided to make up his own mind about something and was doing so.I stood to the side.Athena was in the center of it, which was the only place she naturally occupied