All Chapters of The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Lucian’s POVThe new year comes quietly.This is different from last year, which I spent in the study with correspondence I was using as an excuse not to think about the fact that somewhere in this house Selene was in her small third floor room carrying something I had put there and I was doing nothing about it. I remember the specific quality of that midnight, the way it sat on me, the understanding I could not yet name that I had made a mistake so fundamental it had rearranged the architecture of everything.This year midnight finds me on the stone bench.Selene beside me. Close, the way she is close now, without either of us managing the distance. The hall behind us has just finished the pack’s traditional midnight acknowledgment, which I led and which felt different from any version I have led before, something settled in it that has not always been there.The grounds are quiet.The mountains are where they always are.“Last year,” Selene says. Not a full sentence. Just the openin

Selene’s POVI read the founding registry that night.Not all of it. It is long and the handwriting of one hundred and twelve years ago is not always easy to parse, the specific difficulty of old script that was not written for future readers but for the people who were there. I sit in the study at the desk with the book open and a lamp pulled close and I work through it slowly, which is the only way it wants to be read.Lucian is in the chair across from me.He is not reading. He is doing the thing he does in the evenings sometimes, the thing I noticed three months ago and have never commented on because commenting on it would make him self-conscious about it, which is simply being in the room. Not working. Not performing rest. Just present, in the specific way of someone who is content to exist inside an hour without requiring it to produce anything.I find Calla’s entry on page forty-three.Calla Avery, age twenty-two, settler from the northern foothills, bonded to Edrin Blackthorn

Selene’s POVLucian brings the proposal to the council on a Thursday morning in the third week of February.I sit in the room.Not at the head of the table, not in the chair I have been occupying for four months in my advisory capacity, but in the chair beside Lucian’s, which is a different thing, and every person in the room understands that it is a different thing before a single word has been said.There are seven council members.I know all of them. Not as friends exactly, but as the specific kind of known that comes from seven months of correspondence and meeting preparation and the occasional conversation that started as logistical and became something more. I know which ones take their coffee strong and which ones arrive early to read the agenda and which ones need the last five minutes of any meeting to ask the question they have been sitting on for the previous hour.Elder Bowen is at the far end of the table.He has his hands folded and his face arranged into the expression

Selene’s POVBowen is in his room by noon.Getting him there required the specific combination of Edna’s medical authority and my three words, which were not dramatic — I said please, for me — and which worked because Bowen has spent seven months building the habit of listening to me and habits, once built, are difficult to override even when you want to.He is asleep by half past twelve.Edna comes out of his room and closes the door and looks at me with the expression of a woman who has been managing difficult patients her entire career and has developed a specific gratitude for anyone who can do in three words what she cannot do in thirty.“Four days minimum,” she says. “Real rest. No governance documents.”“I will manage it,” I say.She nods and goes.I stand in the corridor outside Bowen’s room for a moment with my hand on the doorframe and the specific weight of this morning sitting on me — the council vote, the six to one, the record with my name in it, and then Mara in the cor

Selene’s POVThe assembly is scheduled for the last Friday of February.This gives us ten days from the council vote, which Lucian says is enough time and which Bowen says is barely sufficient and which I say is what we have so we should use it rather than discuss it, which ends the conversation.The pack house has a specific quality in the days leading up to something. Not anxious exactly. Expectant, the way places get when they know something is coming and are adjusting themselves accordingly. Reina starts planning food three days early. Mara reorganises the main hall without being asked, moving chairs and testing the lighting and standing in various positions to assess sightlines, which is not technically her job and which nobody mentions because Mara reorganising things is one of the ways she processes significance.I go about the ordinary work of the week.This is deliberate.The temptation, when something is coming that matters, is to let it expand and fill all the available tim