All Chapters of The Mate Who Marked Me : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Chapter 21: WREN'S POVThe healer's quarters smelled of crushed yarrow and something sharper underneath, the kind of clean, medicinal scent that always seemed to settle into my clothes for hours after I left a room like this one. I sat on the edge of a low stool while Kade stretched out on the table across from me, shirt discarded, the healer's hands moving with quick, practiced efficiency along the graze at his ribs."You're lucky," the healer said, an older woman named Rosalind who I'd only spoken to twice before, both times over minor bruises from training. "Another inch and this would have needed more than stitches.""I've had worse," Kade said, the same tired refrain he'd offered me twice already in the woods, and I found myself glaring at him with an intensity that surprised even me."Stop saying that like it's supposed to comfort me.""It's not meant to comfort you. It's meant to be accurate.""It's meant to make me stop worrying, and it isn't working." I crossed my arms, watc

Chapter 23:WREN'S POVI didn't sleep that night, not really. I lay in the dark of the guest quarters that had somehow become mine without either of us ever saying the word permanent, staring at the ceiling beams while the conversation with Kade replayed itself in pieces I couldn't stop turning over. I've been seeing things in my own reflection I don't have a name for yet. I hadn't meant to say it that plainly. The words had come out of some cracked place I usually kept sealed shut, and once they were loose in the room I couldn't call them back, couldn't soften the fear underneath them into something smaller and easier to carry.Then we'll figure out what it means together.I believed he meant it. That was almost the worst part, the way I kept turning the promise over in my hands like something too fragile to trust and too warm to put down. Every other person who'd ever told me they'd stand beside me had eventually found a reason to step back. Julian had proven that in front of the en

Chapter 25: Too Much, All At OnceWREN'S POVMorning came gray and reluctant, the kind of pale, colorless light that made the whole world look as tired as I felt. I hadn't slept, not for one full minute, and by the time the packhouse began stirring around me I'd given up entirely on pretending otherwise, sitting instead at the edge of my bed with my knees drawn to my chest, still fully dressed from the night before, watching the shadows in the corner of the room shift and lengthen as dawn crept slowly through the shutters.I told myself I would tell Kade about the flash of violet the moment I saw him. I'd rehearsed it half a dozen different ways in my head over the long hours of the night, different openings, different amounts of detail, different degrees of the fear I still hadn't managed to shake. But every version of the conversation ended the same way in my imagination, his expression shifting into something careful and concerned, the pack's whispers growing louder, Ivy's cruel ce

WREN'S POV"My eyes changed." The words came out halting at first, awkward in a way that made me want to take them back and start over, and then, once they'd finally broken loose, the rest followed faster, tumbling out of me before I could second-guess a single detail. "Two nights ago, after the patrol, after we saw that man in the woods. I splashed water on my face at the basin, and when I looked up, they weren't brown anymore. Just for a second. Violet, the same as in my dream. Then it was gone, like it never happened at all."Kade didn't speak right away. His hand stayed steady around mine, his thumb moving once, slowly, over my knuckles, and I forced myself to keep looking at him instead of dropping my gaze the way every old instinct wanted me to, bracing for whatever shift might cross his face once the truth had fully landed."You've been carrying that alone for two days," he said finally, quiet, no anger in it, only something heavier, more careful."I didn't know how to say it."

WREN'S POVKade found me hours later on the small balcony off the eastern wing, a narrow stone ledge overlooking the training yard below, empty now in the deep blue hush of early evening. I'd come there after leaving his study, unable to sit still with Corvin's warning ringing in my ears, and had stayed long past the point where the cold should have driven me back inside, watching the last color drain out of the sky while I turned the letter's words over and over until they'd worn a groove in my thoughts I couldn't seem to climb out of."I thought I might find you somewhere quiet." He came to stand beside me at the railing, close but not crowding, his presence a familiar warmth against the chill of the evening air. "You left before I could ask if you wanted to talk further.""I didn't know what I wanted." I kept my eyes on the darkening yard below, the practice posts standing like patient sentinels in the fading light. "I still don't, really. I think I just needed somewhere that wasn'