All Chapters of FAT, BARREN, AND REJECTED: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

JASON’S POVI spent most of the morning trying to talk myself out of whatever had happened at that breakfast table.It should have been simple. I had built an entire adult life around the discipline of not letting a woman’s face hold my attention longer than strictly necessary, around treating every candidate my grandmother produced as a puzzle to be solved rather than a person to be felt anything about. It had served me well enough for six years. I didn’t understand why it had suddenly stopped working now, over breakfast, with a woman whose name I still couldn’t fully trust.I sat in my study with the same stack of papers I’d been using as a shield all morning and found I couldn’t focus on a single line of them.I hadn’t looked away first. That was the detail that kept surfacing, unwelcome, every time I tried to redirect my attention back to the trade agreements in front of me. I had held her gaze across that table for several seconds longer than any reasonable explanation required,

JASON’S POVThe full council convened by mid-afternoon, faster than I’d expected given how little notice Aldric had given them, though I understood, watching them file into the meeting hall with grim, purposeful expressions, that word of Ashcombe’s interference had already spread further than I’d have preferred.Nine members took their seats around the long table, representing every branch of Silvermoon’s leadership — trade, security, territory, the older families whose loyalty stretched back generations before my own birth. I’d inherited most of them from my father, and while their counsel had served this pack well over the years, I’d learned early that their patience for uncertainty ran considerably thinner than my own.“I assume you’ve all heard,” I said, opening the meeting without preamble, seeing no benefit in pretending otherwise.“We have.” Councilwoman Merit, the eldest among them and the sharpest, folded her hands on the table with the particular precision of a woman who’d s

JASON’S POV I hadn’t intended to search my grandmother’s study. I want that on record, if only for my own conscience, given what I found once I finally allowed myself to look. It started with something small — a comment from Merit after the council meeting, offhand and probably not meant to carry the weight it did, about how unusually invested my grandmother had seemed in this particular match compared to the dozen others she’d arranged over the years. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. My grandmother invested herself in everything; that was simply the shape of her, had been for as long as I’d known her. But the observation lodged itself somewhere I couldn’t quite dislodge it from, and over the following two days, small details I’d previously dismissed began rearranging themselves into a pattern I didn’t like the look of. She’d been unusually insistent on this specific match, after years of my refusing every candidate she’d produced. She’d defended Chloe’s identity with a

JASON’S POVI found my grandmother in her study the following morning, the folder from her locked cabinet resting in my lap, and watched her face carefully as I set it down on the desk between us.She glanced at it once, her expression barely shifting, though I’d known her long enough to catch the almost imperceptible stillness that settled over her in the half-second before she looked back up at me.“You’ve been in my study,” she said, her voice carrying its usual composed precision, though something underneath it had gone slightly careful.“I have.” I didn’t apologize for it, though I’d rehearsed several versions of this conversation the night before, none of which had survived my actual anger long enough to feel worth using now. “I want to know what this is.”“Correspondence.” She folded her hands with deliberate calm. “Nothing that requires explanation to my own grandson.”“Confirm venue security.” I recited the note back to her from memory, watching her expression for whatever cr

JASON’S POV Word reached me faster than I would have preferred, delivered by a breathless servant who caught me in the corridor outside my study with the kind of urgency that immediately set my pulse racing before I’d even fully processed the message. “The bride collapsed during her fitting, Alpha. They’ve called for the household physician.” I didn’t wait to hear anything further. I turned my chair toward the fitting rooms faster than I’d moved in weeks, the conversation with my grandmother from two days ago still sitting unresolved and heavy in my chest, the near-kiss in the stalled car still lingering somewhere beneath my careful composure no matter how thoroughly I’d tried to bury it under distance and suspicion since. I reached the fitting room to find the door partially open, low voices carrying from inside, and slowed my approach without fully deciding to, some instinct keeping me from barging in the way my urgency had initially demanded. “—her pulse is elevated, thoug