Alle Kapitel von The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: Kapitel 41 – Kapitel 50

Selene’s POVThe room does not move for a moment.I look at Caden. He is looking back at me, steady as always, but there is something underneath the steadiness now that I have not seen from him before — not quite nerves, Caden does not seem built for nerves, but something close to it. The specific stillness of a man who has just had a private intention made public in a room full of people, including the man he is, in some sense, asking it of.“I filed it this morning,” he says, to me, quietly, as if the panel were not three feet away. “Before the hearing. I told you I was not asking for a decision today. I meant that. This was not meant to put you on the spot in front of a council.”“Then why file it today,” I say.“Because Bowen’s letter said I should choose you on my own terms, not as a fallback,” he says. “And I realised waiting for a quieter moment was its own kind of hesitation. I did not want there to be any version of this where you wondered if I meant it, or if it was continge

Selene’s POVI read the message three times before I show it to Lucian.Ms. Avery — in the course of reviewing your pack governance file for the standing designation, my office cross-referenced your registered lineage against the northern territories’ archive, standard procedure for any formal recognition. A discrepancy surfaced that predates this hearing entirely and has nothing to do with the petition. I think you should see it before it becomes administrative paperwork rather than something explained to you directly. Can you come to the council office this afternoon? — HalseyA discrepancy. Predates this hearing entirely.I stand in the corridor with Mara watching my face and Bowen’s voice still tinny and waiting on the phone in her hand, and I feel the particular vertigo of a week that I thought had found its bottom discovering it has not.“What kind of discrepancy,” Lucian says, reading over my shoulder.“I do not know. She does not say.”Mara lowers the phone from her ear. “Bowe

Selene’s POVI do not say anything for a long moment.The woman in front of me — Talia — stands very still on the path, her travel-dusted boots planted like she is bracing for something, and I look at her and try to find the place in myself that should be reacting and find that it is several seconds behind the rest of me, still catching up to what she just said.A sister.I have spent twenty-three years believing I was alone in the particular way an only child of a dead mother is alone. No siblings. No extended family that ever surfaced. Just me and Mireille Avery and then, after she died, just me.“You have been looking for me,” I say. “For a year.”“Since my father died.” Talia’s voice carries an accent I do not recognise, something from further east than Ironveil, clipped in places where mine is not. “He spoke of Mireille on his deathbed. Of a daughter he never met because she vanished with her mother before he could find them. He gave me a name — Selene — and very little else. A r

Selene’s POVWe sit in the study until the light outside the window goes fully dark.Not talking about anything important. That is the thing I notice, and keep noticing, because it is new — we have spent this entire week talking about nothing but important things, crisis stacked on crisis, revelation stacked on revelation, and now we are sitting in two chairs in a quiet study and Lucian is telling me about a dispute between two farming families on Ironveil’s eastern boundary that the council mediated last month, and I am listening, and somehow that is exactly what this hour needed.Ordinary things.I have missed ordinary things.At some point Mara brings tea without being asked, looks at the two of us in our separate chairs with the particular brightness of someone trying very hard to have no visible opinion, leaves the tray, and closes the door behind her with exactly the amount of care that tells me she is very pleased about something and is containing it through sheer willpower.“S

Selene’s POVI look at the phone.Everyone in the entrance hall looks at the phone.Eastern territories prefix, unknown number, ringing in my hand at six-thirty in the morning the day after a council hearing and thirty seconds after a man claiming to be my father walked through my front door.I pick up.“Ms. Avery.” The voice is male, older, carrying the clipped eastern accent I have now heard twice in the last twelve hours. Professional, controlled, but underneath it something that has the specific texture of urgency being managed carefully. “My name is Aldric Vane. I am the administrative head of the Calloway family’s eastern council seat.”I look at Edrin Calloway standing four feet from me in my entrance hall.He is watching my face and something in his expression has changed — not guilt exactly, but the specific look of a man who has just realised a variable he was tracking has moved faster than he accounted for.“Mr. Vane,” I say. My voice is even. I am very tired of having to m