All Chapters of The Alpha's Forbidden Auction Mate : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Mira's POVSleep refused to come that night, no matter how many times I turned over or how carefully I arranged the pillows or how firmly I told myself that exhaustion would eventually win out regardless of what my mind wanted.Everything Lyra had said kept circling instead, refusing to settle into anything resembling rest. The bond accelerating beyond anyone's control. Someone, somewhere, orchestrating all of it for reasons still hidden from us. The mark spreading across Rowan's skin the same way it had spread across mine, evidence that whatever force had set this entire chain of events into motion had no intention of waiting for either of us to catch up.Eventually I gave up entirely, pulling a shawl around my shoulders and slipping quietly out of my room, down through the manor's darkened corridors, out into the cool night air of the garden that overlooked the training fields.Rowan was already there.He sat on the low stone wall, exactly where I'd found him weeks earlier during ou

Mira's POVThe search for Adrian stretched into its third day without a single trace of him turning up, and by the time Rowan finally admitted the trail had gone cold, at least for now, I'd already decided I needed something to occupy my hands and my mind besides pacing the manor's corridors waiting for news that refused to arrive.The pack library became that something, mostly by accident.I'd wandered in one afternoon looking for a distraction, and found old Mr. Ferris, the librarian, standing in the middle of an absolute avalanche of books, muttering under his breath about a shipment of new records that had arrived without any clear indication of where they belonged."You look like you could use a hand," I said.He glanced up, startled, then relieved in a way that suggested he'd been fighting this particular battle alone for considerably longer than he probably should have."I would never turn down help," he admitted, gesturing at the chaos surrounding him. "Though I should warn yo

Mira's POVI'd expected Rowan's office to look the way he did during pack meetings, controlled and precise, everything arranged exactly where it belonged, nothing out of place. That was the version of him everyone saw, the Alpha who commanded rooms without raising his voice, whose composure never seemed to crack no matter how tense the circumstances.So when I stepped into his study one afternoon to leave a report he'd asked for, and actually looked around properly instead of simply passing through, I stopped in the doorway, genuinely surprised.It was a disaster.Maps covered nearly every surface, some pinned to the walls, others rolled loosely and stacked in precarious towers against the bookshelves. Books lay open in multiple places, forgotten mid-read, their pages marked with whatever scraps of paper had been closest at hand when he'd apparently needed to set them down urgently. Half-finished reports spread across the desk in overlapping layers, some clearly abandoned partway thro

Mira's POVI should have known better than to agree to anything proposed by a group of younger warriors with too much free time and clearly too little supervision."You're objective," one of them, a lanky boy named Finn who couldn't have been more than seventeen, insisted, cornering me near the training fields with an earnestness that made refusing considerably harder than it should have been. "You're not a pack, not exactly, so nobody can accuse you of favoritism.""That's not actually reassuring.""It's the best offer you're getting," said another, a girl named Reya who I'd noticed sparring impressively during earlier drills. "Please. We've been planning this cooking competition for weeks, and Old Maren refused the moment we asked her, said she'd 'already survived enough disasters in her lifetime.'"I should have taken that as a warning.I didn't, mostly because their enthusiasm proved considerably more persuasive than good judgment, and by that afternoon I found myself standing in

Mira's POVI noticed the watching before I understood what it meant.It started small, easy to dismiss. A pause in conversation whenever I passed a group of women near the well. A lingering glance from someone at the market, quickly redirected the moment I looked back. Nothing hostile in any of it, nothing that made my skin prickle the way genuine suspicion usually did. Just attention, quiet and persistent, following me through the ordinary business of an ordinary week.I mentioned it to Petra at the infirmary, mostly because the accumulated weight of it had started making me self-conscious in a way I couldn't quite name."They're curious," Petra said simply, not looking up from the bandages she was rolling."Curious about what?""You." She glanced up then, something amused flickering across her face at my obvious confusion. "You've been here weeks now. Helping at the infirmary, teaching the children, reorganizing the entire library, apparently judging cooking disasters. People notice