บททั้งหมดของ The Mate Who Marked Me : บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 49

WREN'S POVI didn't sleep that night, not really. I lay beside Kade in the dark, listening to the slow, even rhythm of his breathing gradually deepen into something like rest, and felt the weight of the day settle into my bones instead of easing with the hour. Torrin's careful, hedged testimony kept replaying itself behind my closed eyes, the particular, deliberate space he'd left where certainty should have stood, and no amount of reasoning with myself, telling myself it was only caution, only a man being honest about the limits of what he'd witnessed, quite managed to loosen the cold thread of unease it had left behind.Somewhere past midnight, I gave up on sleep entirely and slipped out from under Kade's arm, careful not to wake him, and made my way out onto the small balcony off his quarters, needing the night air more than I needed the warmth of the bed I'd left behind. The packhouse below sat mostly dark, a few scattered lights marking the night patrol's slow circuit along the f

WREN'S POVKade walked me back to his quarters in silence, his arm firm around my shoulders, and I let him, too exhausted to manage anything beyond the simple, mechanical act of putting one foot in front of the other. The packhouse felt different moving through it that night, doors closing a beat too quickly as we passed, voices dropping to murmurs behind walls that hadn't quite finished absorbing what half this territory had just watched happen at a dead man's funeral. I kept my eyes fixed ahead, refusing to let myself catalogue every flinch, every averted gaze, though the accumulated weight of them settled into my chest regardless, heavier with every step.He drew a bath for me without asking, the kind of small, practical care I'd have found almost unbearably tender on an ordinary night, and left me to it with a gentle press of his lips to my temple and a promise to be just beyond the door if I needed him. I sat in the water long after it had cooled past comfortable, staring at noth

WREN'S POVIt started small, the way these things always seemed to start, a silence that lingered a beat too long when I entered a room, a conversation that resumed only after I'd passed far enough beyond earshot to be safely out of it. I told myself, the first few times, that I was imagining the shift, exhaustion and lingering fear from the border making me read cruelty into ordinary caution. But by the third day after Julian's appearance before the council, the pattern had grown too consistent, too deliberate, to explain away any longer.I heard the word for the first time properly outside the kitchens, two younger pack members I didn't recognize pausing their conversation only after I was already close enough to catch the tail end of it. Wolfless. Said quietly, almost carelessly, the way you might mention weather or an ordinary chore. Somehow that casualness cut deeper than open cruelty would have managed, the sense that my absence of a wolf had become, once again, a simple fact ra

WREN'S POVI didn't tell Kade about Elder Maren the next morning.I told myself, lying awake beside him as the gray light crept in through the shutters, that it was caution rather than the promise breaking itself, that accusing a council elder of manipulating patrol rotations to enable a killing spree was not the kind of thing a person said aloud without something more solid to stand behind it than a pattern of dates in a dead man's ledger. I had watched, closely enough now to understand it in my bones, exactly what happened to a person's credibility in this territory once fear decided what to believe about them. I was not about to hand Elder Maren the same weapon I'd been struggling to defend myself against for weeks, not without proof considerably more solid than a coincidence I might have talked myself into seeing.Kade stirred beside me sometime near dawn, his arm tightening around my waist before he was fully awake, and I lay still against him for a long moment, listening to the

WREN'S POV Ivy found me two days later in the corridor outside the kitchens, and I understood, the moment I saw the particular brightness in her eyes, that whatever restraint the council's formal proceedings had imposed on her these past weeks had finally worn through. "I heard you've been busy." Her voice carried the same practiced sweetness she'd always used like a blade, sharp enough to cut and polished enough that anyone overhearing would struggle to name exactly what had been said wrong. "Sneaking around the packhouse at night. Cornering Elder Maren's private records, from what I understand. Careful, Wren. Even Kade's patience has limits, and I'd imagine breaking into a council elder's chambers tests them rather more than he's let on publicly." Cold slid down my spine at that, quick and immediate. "How do you know about that." "This territory isn't nearly as private as you seem to think it is." Her smile widened, satisfied in a way that told me plainly she'd expected exact