All Chapters of The Alpha's Forbidden Auction Mate : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Rowan's POVMaren found me in my study a little before sundown, which was unusual enough on its own to put me on alert before she'd said a single word.She rarely came to the pack house. In all the years she'd served as the pack's head healer, I could count on one hand the number of times she'd climbed the hill from the infirmary to seek me out directly, rather than sending word through one of the younger healers or simply waiting for me to visit her instead. Maren didn't chase problems. She let them come to her, the way she'd always done, patient and unhurried, certain the world would eventually arrange itself in front of her without her needing to go looking for it.The fact that she was standing in my doorway now told me exactly how much this particular problem mattered."Maren." I set down the report I'd been reading. "This is a surprise.""I imagine it is." She closed the door behind her, which she also never did, and lowered herself into the chair across from my desk without wai

Rowan's POVI woke before dawn with Mira still curled in the chair across from mine, the candles long since burned down to nothing, gray morning light beginning to seep through the library windows in place of the storm that had raged all night.I hadn't meant to fall asleep watching her.I told myself that as I stood, careful not to wake her, gathering the blanket someone had left draped over the back of a nearby chair and settling it gently over her shoulders instead. She stirred slightly, murmured something I couldn't make out, and settled again, and I stood there a moment longer than I should have, looking at her in the pale light, before forcing myself to leave the room entirely.The power had returned sometime in the night. The lamps in the hallway glowed steady now, and the household had already begun its usual early movement, servants carrying trays, guards changing shift near the front entrance. Ordinary. Familiar.Which was exactly why the sight waiting for me in my study sto

Rowan's POVSomething had changed, and I couldn't decide whether I was grateful for it or unsettled by it.It started small enough that I nearly convinced myself I'd imagined it. Mira lingering a beat too long in doorways before entering a room, studying me the way a person studies a locked door they've decided to eventually pick open. Conversations that used to move quickly, full of her sharp comebacks and my equally sharp deflections, now carried pauses that hadn't existed before, gaps where she seemed to be weighing something before deciding whether to voice it.I told myself it was nothing.By the third day, I stopped believing that.She caught me at breakfast, watching me over the rim of her cup with an expression I hadn't seen from her before, careful and assessing, nothing like the easy irritation or open curiosity I'd grown accustomed to. When I asked what she was thinking about, she simply shrugged and looked away, offering some vague comment about the weather that fooled nei

Rowan's POVSleep came late that night, and when it finally arrived, it didn't feel like sleep at all.I stood somewhere I had never been, and yet somehow already knew.A temple, vast and ancient, its stone columns rising into darkness overhead, worn smooth by centuries I couldn't begin to count. Moonlight poured through an opening far above, silver and heavy, pooling across a floor carved with symbols I recognized instantly, the same crescent shape branching into thin veined lines that had been spreading slowly across Mira's wrist for weeks now.Except here, carved into ancient stone, the symbol didn't feel unfinished.It felt whole. Complete. Waiting.The air smelled of something I couldn't quite place, cold stone and old incense and beneath it, faintly, the particular warmth I'd come to associate with Mira herself, impossible as that seemed in a place I had never actually stood in.I turned, searching the shadows between the columns, and found nothing. No movement. No sound beyond

Rowan's POVThe light faded slower than it had arrived, silver fading back into the ordinary gray of early morning, and when the archive finally settled into stillness again, the stranger hadn't moved an inch from where he'd been standing the entire time."You should probably sit down," he said, entirely too calm for a man who had just watched an entire room flare with magic he apparently had no trouble standing in the middle of. "Both of you look like you're about to do something regrettable.""Start with your name," I said, "before I decide something regrettable myself."He inclined his head slightly, unbothered. "Adrian.""That's not enough.""It's a start." He glanced around the archive, taking in the shelves, the scattered books still lying open on the table where Mira had left them days earlier, with the particular ease of someone who had walked this room before. "Lyra invited me here, several months ago now, to study the symbols carved into this section. I'm a historian. Or I w