Home / Werewolf / Marked by the forbidden mate / Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

All Chapters of Marked by the forbidden mate: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

70 Chapters

Chapter 51: The Price of Diminished Blood

CELLAThe attack comes on the eighth day after the fae's arrival, in the gray hour just before dawn when the estate is at its quietest, guards changing shift and the kitchens not yet stirring, and I am alone in the eastern garden because sleep abandoned me sometime after midnight and walking has always been the only remedy I trust for a mind that won't settle.I don't hear them until it's almost too late.The first sign is wrong before I fully understand why, a stillness in the birdsong that should have started stirring by now, the particular silence of creatures that have already sensed something the rest of us haven't caught up to yet. I stop walking, some old, half-trained instinct sharpening beneath the fog of exhaustion, and it's that instinct alone, thin as it is, that saves me from the first strike entirely.The net comes from the hedge to my left, weighted and fast, meant to close over me before I've registered the threat at all, and I throw myself sideways on nothing but refl

Chapter 52: The Terms of an Uneasy Peace

DARIANI spend the hour after the attack doing what an Alpha is supposed to do in the wake of near catastrophe, directing the search along the tree line, setting Simon to track whatever trail the retreat left behind, sending Mira to see Cella's shoulder properly tended before the wound has a chance to worsen from neglect. It's careful, necessary work, and it keeps my hands occupied long enough that I don't have to examine too closely what I watched happen in that garden, what Aeden became in the handful of seconds it took him to cross the distance between the hedge and the woman holding a blade toward Cella's throat.I find him afterward in the training yard, alone, sitting on the low stone wall with his hands loosely clasped and his gaze fixed somewhere past the middle distance, the particular stillness of a man working through the aftermath of something that frightened him more than he's willing to say aloud yet."You should be with her." I say it without preamble, settling onto the

Chapter 53: Two Fronts

CELLAThe council convenes at midday, sooner than I expected given how little time has passed since the rider left with my answer still fresh in his ears, and I understand the moment I step into the hall and feel the weight of every gaze turning toward me that this gathering isn't only about the attack in the garden. It's about everything that's happened since, stacked one on top of the other until the accumulated weight has finally forced the elders to demand a reckoning Darian can no longer postpone.Fennick sits at the council's right hand, and beside him are three elders I recognize only by reputation, wolves whose voices carry weight in Silverroot's affairs even when they rarely trouble themselves to attend gatherings this far beneath their usual concerns. Their presence alone tells me how seriously this pack has begun taking the shape of what's closing in around us, and not entirely in a way that favors either Aeden or myself."Lady Cella." The eldest of the three, a woman named

Chapter 54: What I Am Becoming

AEDENSimon finds me on the second morning of the council's three-day deadline, in the small room off the training yard he's claimed for the work of trying to understand what's surfacing in me, jars and old texts spread across a table that's grown steadily more cluttered with every hour he's spent poring over accounts of the veil and what it's known to leave behind in the rare few who've survived crossing it while carrying something unfinished inside them."I think I understand it now." He says it without preamble, the particular bluntness of a man who has decided kindness would only slow down information I need urgently. "Enough to give you a real answer, at least. Whether you want it plainly or gently is entirely your choice.""Plainly." I don't hesitate. "I've had enough gentleness wrapped around bad news this month to last considerably longer than I'd like."Simon nods, spreading one of the older texts flat across the table, a passage marked with a strip of frayed ribbon that look

Chapter 55: Small, Borrowed Things

CELLAI don't know, that first morning, that Aeden went out to the training yard alone in the night and tested himself against something Simon's warnings should have kept him from touching without anyone standing near enough to help if it went badly. I only know that he comes to breakfast looking more tired than sleep should account for, and that when I ask, gently, whether he rested well, he tells me yes with a steadiness that doesn't quite match the shadows under his eyes, and I let it go, because I have learned, this past month, that some mornings are better spent protecting a fragile peace than interrogating the cracks already forming underneath it.We have three days, Ysolde's deadline sitting over all of us like weather that hasn't decided yet whether to break, and something in the pressure of that ticking clock makes the ordinary hours between crises feel suddenly, achingly precious in a way they didn't before. I find myself hoarding them. Small things. The particular quality o

Chapter 56: What the Veil Kept

AEDENI expect the heat.That is what I brace for as I lie on top of the covers that night, boots still on, listening to the estate settle into its long hush, one hand pressed flat against my sternum as though I could hold whatever lives beneath it in place by force alone. Simon warned me the marking would surface when the bond was strained, and tonight the bond is the opposite of strained. Cella's laughter is still in my ears. Her weight is still against my side from the corridor, and the smile I have spent a month learning to earn is still somewhere behind my eyes. If the veil's debt feeds on closeness, it has been fed well tonight, and I wait for the reckoning with the grim patience of a man watching a storm gather over open ground.It doesn't come. An hour passes, then two, and there is only the dark and the sound of my own breathing and the slow dread of a quiet that feels less like peace than like an animal holding perfectly still. Somewhere past the third hour, exhaustion close

CHAPTER 57:THE MERCY

AEDENI should have been enough. That is the thought that settles lowest, and stays. I should have been steady enough, strong enough, whole enough that she never needed her father's stone or anyone's mercy. And while I was away she had labored alone in a room that smelled of sulfur, and her sister had put a knife into her child, and I had been kneeling in the ash listening.The marking, I think then, with a cold that has nothing to do with the dawn coming grey at the window. Simon said it feeds on the bond. Whatever came for that child, whatever hunted her through two realms and wore her body like a coat, it had to find her somehow. And the only thing in all of this that has been leaking power into the dark like a lantern left burning on a cliff is me.I am on my feet before I have decided to stand. I wash my hands in the cooling basin and cannot get the black out from under my nails, and then I am in the corridor, and then I am outside her door, and I have no memory of crossing the d

Chapter 58: The Weight of the Wall

DARIANAeden Virell's chair stands empty at the long table, and every person in the hall has noticed.I noticed it first, because I am the one who counted the chairs when I came in. Eleven seats, eleven names, the Silverroot paw carved into the back of mine and the cold grey light of the last hour before dusk falling across the oak in long, tired bars. Mira sits at the foot with her hands folded over a ledger she has not opened. Fennick has taken the seat nearest the hearth, the one that lets him watch the door without appearing to, and he has been watching it for a quarter of an hour with the patience of a man who already knows what he intends to say.Simon stands before the table with his jars of notes and his old, careful voice, and he tells us about the veil.He tells it well. He tells us of the marking, of the way it answers the bond, of the texts that disagree with each other and the few lines on which they do not. I listen the way I have trained myself to listen, with my weight

CHAPTER 59:THE BODY

DARIANAeden drops the body between us. His chest is heaving. There is blood across his cheek that is not his, and his eyes meet mine through the dark, and there is no hatred in them at all. There is only a flat, exhausted readiness, as if he has been waiting for something like this for a very long time."Behind you," he says.I turn and cut down the one that was about to take me from the rear. When I look back he has already moved on.We do not speak after that. There is no time and, I realize later, no need. He takes the left of the doorway and I take the right, and the creatures that reach one of us find the other waiting. When one of mine staggers, Aeden is there before I have drawn breath to call for aid. When he goes down on one knee under the weight of a creature twice his size, I put my sword through its spine without deciding to, and he gets up and drives it off the stones and says nothing, and neither do I. It is the most honest exchange I have had with anyone in a year.The

Chapter 60: The Price of Help

CELLAThe ink is still wet on my fingers when the shouting starts.I have been bent over Mira's ledgers since noon, copying columns of grain and wool and lamp oil into a fair hand because it gives my hands something to do, and the third line of the third column is half finished when the candle flame leans hard to one side and the whole window rattles in its frame. I hear a man cry out in the yard. I hear a sound I know from the forest, the wet, tearing sound of something with claws finding something that cannot stop it.I am on my feet before the pen has finished rolling off the desk.I make it as far as the corridor. Simon catches me at the turning by the stairs with both hands on my shoulders and more strength in them than any man his age should have, and he says my name twice before I hear him. His face is grey. There is dust in his hair, and his eyes keep sliding toward the stairwell as though he is listening for something I cannot hear."Stay inside," he says. "Cella, please. Sta

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP