Alle Kapitel von The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: Kapitel 91 – Kapitel 100

Selene’s POVI read my mother’s letter last.Not because I am avoiding it. Because I read eleven documents first and I want to understand the full context before I read what she wrote, the way you do not read the last page of something important until you are ready to carry what it says.The eleven documents take forty minutes.I sit at the study desk and read them in order, Aldric’s order, which is chronological and begins with the first letter between Harren Calloway and Caden’s father, a man named Drest Voss, dated approximately four months before my birth.The letters are not dramatic.This is the thing about documents that record harmful things — they are almost always ordinary. Business-like. Two men discussing a financial arrangement and an administrative problem in the language of people who have done this kind of thing before and consider it routine. Harren describes the filing. Drest describes his contact in the eastern archive. The money changes hands in two transfers, both

Selene’s POVI pick up.“Ms. Avery,” Reth says. “I apologise for calling on a Tuesday afternoon without warning.”“You called on a Friday evening without warning last week,” I say. “Tuesday afternoon is an improvement.”A brief pause that contains something close to amusement. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose it is.” He pauses. “I have just come from a meeting with Director Crane.”“He told you about the preliminary finding,” I say.“Yes,” he says. “And about the referral to the misconduct review panel.” He pauses. “He also told me about the formal conversation I am going to be having about my extended regional presence.”“How was that conversation,” I say.“Thorough,” he says. “He was precise about the protocol I should have followed and accurate about the fact that I did not follow it and then he said, off the record, that the flag I filed Friday afternoon was the thing that moved the case.” He pauses. “He said it as a fact, not a commendation. But I understood what he meant.”“Good,” I s

Lucian’s POVFriday morning.The council meets at nine.I have been in the study since five-thirty, which is where I go when I cannot sleep and have stopped pretending that not sleeping is a problem. Selene came down at six and made coffee and sat in her chair and we worked in the parallel quiet of the study for ninety minutes before she went to prepare for the meeting and I stayed to finish reading the last of the testimony submissions Crane’s office has been forwarding.The submissions are thorough.Fenn’s documentation from the southern council. Aldric Voss’s twelve documents. Dain’s account, which arrived yesterday and which is the most detailed of any of them, a thirty-page account of two years of watching the northern petitioners build their strategy and of the moment Dain understood what it was and decided he was not going to be part of it anymore.Dain writes well.He writes the way Selene writes, directly and without softening the difficult parts, and reading his account of t

Selene’s POVHe arrives on a Wednesday.Not the dramatic arrival of the first time, which was overnight and urgent and designed to reach me before anyone else could manage the information on my behalf. This is different. A car at the gate at eleven in the morning, unhurried, driven by Talia who came from the eastern territories to make the journey with him because she was not willing to let him travel alone.I am on the front steps.Not because I planned to be. Because Corvin was in the entrance hall when the gate notification came and looked at me and I found myself at the door and then on the steps, the same reflex that put me on the steps when Lena arrived, when Talia arrived the first time, when all the people who are now in my life arrived and I went to meet them because meeting things directly has become the approach this year and I do not intend to change it.The car parks.Talia gets out first.She looks at me over the roof of the car with the expression she uses when somethin

Selene’s POVI look at the word for a long time.Together.Sixteen years ago my mother wrapped something in brown paper and gave it to Petra and said wait until she finds someone worth opening it with and Petra has been carrying that instruction for sixteen years and brought it this morning on a Tuesday in March when the grounds are showing through the last of the snow.My mother knew.Not who. Not Lucian specifically. Not the fullbond or the founding record or any of the specific shape of what this year became. But she knew the shape of the thing itself — that there would be someone, that I would find them, that some things are meant to be opened in company rather than alone.She left me something to open together.I look at Lucian.He is standing beside me and his face is doing the thing it does when something has landed somewhere that matters and he is giving it the space it deserves.I look at Bowen and Mara.Bowen says, “We will be in the library.”He goes.Mara squeezes my arm o