All Chapters of The Lycan King's Silver Mate: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Nobody moved.The entire banquet hall had frozen into that particular kind of silence that only happens when every person in the room decides at the same moment that even breathing too loudly might be dangerous. A hundred people. Candles burning. Wine sitting untouched. The only sounds left were the low crackle of the fire in the far hearth and the hard, uneven beat of my own pulse.Elder Soren was still standing. Still looking straight at me. I forced myself to look back.Don’t flinch. Whatever you do, don’t flinch.My hands stayed flat on the table in front of me, visible and steady, even though something under my ribs had pulled tight enough to hurt.“The wolfless werewolf,” Soren said, letting the words hang in the air so every ear could catch them. “She brings no wolf, no bloodline of standing, no alliance, no strength that serves this pack. She is a liability dressed as a guest.” He turned slowly, gathering eyes, gathering agreement. “Several of us have discussed this at length.

I wrote the first letter while the sky was still black.I settled at the small desk beneath my window, a candle sputtering weakly at my side, the grounds outside swallowed in darkness and silence. The note went to Maren, who had overseen grain distribution for the Moonstone Pack across three years, and whom I trusted above nearly everyone else still bound to that place.I kept my words sparse and businesslike — the sort of message that would pass as unremarkable if someone else got hold of it. I inquired about the harvest tallies. I mentioned the eastern trade ledgers. Phrased lightly, I wondered whether the sums still matched the arrangement I'd left behind.I creased it shut, pressed my seal into wax, and drafted two more after.Afterward I lingered, watching wax pool and drip, avoiding the question of why these letters had felt so urgent to send.For weeks now, something had gnawed quietly at the edges of my thoughts. I knew this sensation — I'd carried it through my years under El

Bella's POVSleep found me again — and again, it didn't stay.I sat hunched over my desk, Jesse's signature spread out before me, watching the candle burn itself down to nothing while I combed through every page of those records. Twice. Then a third time. Not because I believed I'd overlooked something.But because some stubborn part of me kept hoping that if I stared long enough, the ink would rearrange itself, the handwriting would morph into someone else's, and what I was looking at would turn out to be anything other than what it clearly was.It never changed.By the time the pale light of morning began creeping under the curtains, I had the whole ugly picture laid bare across my desk — organized into neat, damning columns. And it was so much worse than what I'd feared the night before.This wasn't a single account skimmed here or there. It wasn't just the cooperative reserve quietly bled dry. This was systematic. Deliberate. The kind of financial unraveling that only someone with

Ronan's POVI read the report three times.Not because the words themselves were unclear — they were precise, exactly what I'd come to expect from Drev. Clean sentences. Specific detail. No unnecessary embellishment. I read it three times because my mind kept refusing it, sliding off the central fact of it the way water slides off stone, unable to find purchase anywhere.Bella. In Thor's palace. Not passing through. Not seeking temporary shelter. *Living* there. For weeks. Under the Lycan King's personal protection, seated at his table, moving freely through his halls.I set the paper down carefully.Then I picked up the heavy inkwell resting at the corner of my desk and hurled it at the wall.It struck with a crack like thunder, ink bleeding down the stone in a dark stain that looked disturbingly like a wound. I stood there breathing hard, my wolf roaring inside my chest with nowhere to go — no outlet, no direction, nothing to tear apart that would actually change anything.*Thor.* O

Bella's POVI didn't cry right away.That was the strange part. I stood at the war room table with my mother's name in front of me, the file open, the evidence laid out in neat, damning columns — and I didn't cry. I just stood there and read it again. And then again. As if reading it enough times would rearrange the words into something that made a different kind of sense.It never did.Four times. Four separate times, someone had looked at a list, seen her name, and made a choice.I kept thinking about the last year. How small she'd looked in the mornings, as though the illness were quietly taking up more space than she was.How she still tried to smile when I walked in, still asked about my day, still wanted to hear about the accounts and the cooperative and the small victories I brought her like offerings — as if enough evidence that things were getting better might convince her to stay a little longer.I'd told her the treatments were coming. Every single visit.*The treatments ar