Semua Bab The Alpha’s Regret: Mommy’s Secret Triplets: Bab 11 - Bab 20

The babies were six weeks old when Alexander made his second offer.He chose his timing deliberately, she had come to understand this about him, that he did not arrive at conversations accidentally. He waited until she was settled, until the immediate crisis of the first weeks had quieted into something more like routine, until she had slept enough consecutive hours to think clearly. Then he knocked twice on the nursery door on a Tuesday afternoon and asked if she had time to talk.She was burping Theo at the time. "If you don't mind the atmosphere," she said.He came in and sat in the chair by the window without any visible discomfort and waited while she finished, which told her something about him she filed away quietly."I want to make a formal proposal," he said, when Theo had been returned to the crib and she had settled into the feeding chair with the particular exhaustion of someone operating on accumulated sleep debt. "Regarding the children."She looked at him. "Go ahead.""

The summit was Chloe's idea.She had proposed it three weeks after the wedding, presenting it to Caleb over breakfast with the particular confidence of someone who had already decided the answer and was simply performing the question. A gathering of the three nearest allied packs. Hosted at Silver Fang. A show of strength for the new Alpha and his Luna.Caleb had approved it.He approved most things Chloe proposed in those early weeks, not because he agreed with all of them but because disagreeing required an energy he was rationing carefully. The pack transition had been more demanding than he anticipated. There were administrative matters the previous Alpha had left incomplete, border agreements that needed renegotiating, two senior pack members who had retired simultaneously and left gaps in the council that needed filling. He was busy in the way that new leaders are busy, where the work comes from every direction at once and none of it waits.Chloe planned the summit.She ordered

It happened on a Tuesday.Theo was eight months old, which was early for first words but not impossibly so, and Aria had been watching him with the particular attention of a mother who had already accepted that her son was going to do things on his own schedule and in his own way and that her job was mostly to pay close enough attention to catch it when it happened.She was in the nursery, feeding Lena, when it occurred. A royal advisor named Pellin had come to deliver documents requiring her signature, which happened with increasing frequency now that her status in the palace had been formally established. Pellin was a thin, precise man who smiled a great deal and meant approximately half of it, and Aria had spent enough time around him to know which half.He was explaining the terms of a minor land registry amendment, standing near the doorway with the documents held in front of him, his voice carrying the smooth, unhurried confidence of someone who considered himself the most infor

It started with the Duke.His name was Aldric, and he arrived at the palace on a Wednesday as part of a routine noble house visitation schedule that Alexander's secretary managed with the precision of someone who understood that proximity to the crown was the primary currency of the aristocracy and had to be rationed accordingly.Aldric was seventy, broad-shouldered in the way that powerful men who have stopped doing anything physical remain broad-shouldered, and he carried himself with the specific confidence of someone who had never once walked into a room and doubted his position in it. He had three territories, two formal alliances, and an opinion about everything that he delivered at consistent volume regardless of whether it had been requested.Aria had been briefed on him by Alexander's secretary the morning of his arrival. She had listened, taken her own notes, and arrived at the formal afternoon reception prepared.Lena had not been briefed on anyone.She was two years old, a

She took three days.Alexander had said take a week. She had intended to take a week. But three days was what it took for her to read everything Seraphine gave her, to sit with it, to turn it over from every angle she could find until she was confident she understood not just what it said but what it meant, and when she reached that point on the third morning she did not see the purpose of waiting four more days simply to demonstrate that she had needed them.She sent a note to Alexander's secretary requesting a meeting at his convenience.His convenience, it turned out, was that same afternoon.She came to his study rather than the sitting room, which she had done only twice before. It was a different kind of space than the rooms they usually occupied together. Larger, more used, the kind of room that accumulated the evidence of actual work rather than the performance of it. Documents on the desk that were not staged for appearance. A wall of reference materials that had clearly been