All Chapters of Too Late To Claim Me: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The file was sitting exactly where Caius had left it. Aurora Vance's name typed across the tab in plain block letters, giving nothing away.The woman with the familiar eyes.I opened it and started reading, telling myself it was nothing, that I was simply doing my due diligence on a business partner, the way any careful Alpha would.Her history was sparse. Too sparse. She'd appeared in Millbrook five years ago with nothing but the clothes on her back, no prior address, no family listed, no paper trail leading anywhere before that date, like she'd been born the day she walked into that town. She'd worked as a dishwasher at a diner called Mae's Place. And according to the intake form from the clinic two streets over, she'd been pregnant at the time.I read the page twice, certain the second reading would correct the first. It didn't. The words sat there on the paper, plain and unmoved, refusing to rearrange themselves into anything less devastating.No father listed anywhere in the recor

The drive back to the cabin was a blur of winding roads and racing thoughts.I kept checking my mirrors, certain someone was behind me. Twice I changed direction, cutting through towns I'd never been to, doubling back until I was sure I'd shaken anything following. Every headlight behind me felt like a threat until it turned off onto some side road and proved itself ordinary.The feeling of being watched never fully went away. Not once, the entire drive.It wasn't until the cabin came into view, weathered walls, smoke curling from the chimney, the porch light Mara always left on, that I let myself breathe again.I made it. I'm safe. Caelum is safe.I sat in the car a long moment, hands still locked around the wheel, engine ticking as it cooled in the night air. They were shaking. I hadn't noticed until right then, staring down at my own fingers like they belonged to a stranger who'd borrowed my hands for the day.I'd faced Remus. Walked into the middle of everything I'd spent five year

The tea had gone cold hours ago, but neither of us had moved to refill it.I stared at the dark window over the sink, at my own reflection ghosting back at me, and something in my chest finally snapped into place. Not calm, exactly. Certainty."Mara."She looked up from her mug, reading my face the way she always did before I'd said anything worth reading."I can't stay here anymore."Her spoon stopped halfway to the cup. "What?""This cabin isn't safe. They found me here once." I pushed back from the table, the chair legs scraping loud in the quiet kitchen. "They'll find me again. And next time Caelum might not be asleep down the hall when it happens.""Aria…""I need to go back to my house. My company. My life." I was pacing now, the words picking up speed the longer I let them out, like something in me had been waiting days for permission to say this out loud. "I need to stop running, Mara. I've been running since I was nineteen years old."Mara set her mug down with a click that so

Gerald had a stack of contracts on my desk before I'd even set my coffee down, and for the first hour of the morning I let myself pretend that was the only fire I had to put out.It didn't last.By noon I'd signed four agreements I only half-remembered reading, sat through a budget meeting where I answered questions on autopilot, and caught Lina watching me twice with the particular concern she wore when she thought I wasn't looking. The company was fine. Gerald had held it together better than I had any right to expect. It was everything underneath the company that wasn't fine, and by evening I couldn't pretend otherwise anymore.Mara was already in the kitchen when I got home, two mugs steaming on the table like she'd known exactly when I'd walk through the door."You look like you've been arguing with spreadsheets all day," she said."Worse. I've been agreeing with spreadsheets all day." I dropped into the chair across from her and wrapped both hands around the mug, more for somethi

The stone had been cold under my palm at first, unremarkable, just old rock worn into the shape of an altar by whoever had carved it centuries ago. Then the words had come, not spoken aloud, not exactly, but pressed directly into my mind the way a memory surfaces when you least expect it, uninvited and impossible to ignore.The voice still echoed in my ears as I pulled my hand back from the altar.“Find the truth. Break the cycle. Save him.”Save who? What truth? What cycle was I even supposed to be breaking? The words repeated themselves in my head, over and over, refusing to settle into anything that made sense, no matter how many times I turned them over.I stared down at the words carved into the stone, my fingers still tingling from the contact, like something had passed through my skin and left a current behind, humming just under the surface even now that I'd let go."Ms. Vance?" Lena's voice cut through the fog in my head, closer now, worried. "Are you alright? You look pale."