All Chapters of The Alpha Prince's Obsession: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

|HIS POV|The scholarship documentation was confirmed complete at eleven-forty Wednesday night.Vaelindor sent the confirmation in three words: Documentation secured. Filed.Kaevrix read it twice, set his phone down, and looked at the window. The December campus was dark and wet below — rain had started around nine and hadn't stopped, hitting the iron gate fixtures in thin grey lines.Three days.He picked up the phone again.She knows it's handled? he typed.Vaelindor's response came after a pause that communicated deliberate consideration: I assumed you would tell her yourself. Given the circumstances.He set the phone face-down.He had not told her yet because telling her meant standing in front of her and saying it's done and watching her face do the thing it did when she received something she hadn't expected to need, the brief unguarded thing that she closed immediately after — and he was managing, with considerable effort, his awareness of how close three days was to becoming t

|HIS POV|The network's administrative move collapsed at nine-seventeen Thursday morning.Vaelindor sent the timestamp with his characteristic economy: Administrative inquiry request withdrawn. Network contact has gone quiet. Suggest the situation has resolved itself.Kaevrix read it at his desk, set the phone down, and sat very still for approximately thirty seconds.Then he picked up the phone and typed: The assessment release performed as expected.It performed exceptionally, Vaelindor replied. Twenty-two point margin is not something anyone argues with. Particularly when the documentation is timestamped two weeks prior to any inquiry attempt. A pause. You planned this before she knew there was a threat.I planned this when I confirmed her enrollment, he typed back. Three months ago.The response took longer than usual.Your Highness, Vaelindor finally wrote. I have been your head of security for twenty-two years. I have filed reports on approximately four hundred and thirty-seven

|HER POV|I almost didn't go to the library.Saturday. The last day before term ended. The day before he told me everything.I sat at my desk at seven in the evening with my notebook open and my coffee going cold and the grey scarf around my neck and the specific internal argument of someone who has decided something and is still performing the debate for reasons of personal dignity.You don't need to go tonight. He knows you'll be there. Going confirms it.You've been going every evening for four months.That's different.How.I didn't have an answer for that.I closed the notebook, picked up the coffee — still cold, I drank it anyway — and put on my coat.He was there when I arrived. Of course he was.Dark coat, turtleneck, the glasses. Notebook open. He looked up when the door opened, and his expression did the thing it had been doing for a week now — the barely-managed thing, the one I'd stopped pretending not to see."You came early," I said, sitting down across from him and pull

|HIS POV|He told her about the archive at eleven-fourteen in the morning.She didn't speak once while he laid it out. She sat with both hands around the cold coffee cup and her eyes on his face and she listened the way she listened to everything — with the focused, unfrightened attention of someone who had decided that truth was always better than managed comfort, regardless of the cost.She didn't flinch.He'd known she wouldn't. He'd known since she was twelve years old and had looked at him bleeding on her kitchen floor with grey-blue eyes that contained no fear whatsoever and considerable irritation about the blood on her linoleum. He'd known. He'd still been watching her face while he talked because watching her face had become as involuntary as breathing.The second archive. The anomalous incidents around her that weren't caused by his guards. The energy signatures his contact had flagged — not wolf, not human, something older and less categorized. The bloodline report filed si

|HER POV|I found her in her room at one in the afternoon, eating leftover takeaway and reading something on her phone with the focused absorption of someone who had been waiting for a knock on her door all morning and was performing patience.She looked up when I came in and her eyes did the assessment thing — three seconds, head to toe — and whatever she saw made her set the phone face-down immediately."Sit," she said, pointing at the end of her bed.I sat. She sat cross-legged on her pillow, takeaway container in her lap, and looked at me with the specific direct attention of someone who had been cataloguing things since September and was about to receive the index."How much," she said."Enough," I said. "More than I've given you before."She nodded once. "Go."I told her.Not the wolf world — not yet, not all of it, because some of it wasn't mine to give and some of it I was still processing myself. But the shape of it. The archive. The scholarship. The contact. The four years o