All Chapters of SILVERBORN: THE ALPHA'S REJECTED MATE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Nobody had warned me that Blackthorn required a completely different set of instincts than the Wilder camp did, and I discovered the gap the hard way, at a formal dinner I hadn't fully understood the stakes of until I was already seated at the wrong end of a table that apparently had very specific opinions about where people were and weren't permitted to sit.The dinner itself was meant to be a quiet, low-stakes affair; senior Blackthorn staff, a handful of visiting dignitaries from a minor allied family, nothing resembling the scale of a full Council gathering. I had dressed carefully, coached the night before by Damien on which fork belonged to which course, and had felt, walking in, something almost like confidence. That confidence lasted exactly as long as it took me to sit down in the wrong chair.“You're in Beta Corwin's seat,” the server murmured, with the particular delicacy of someone trying not to embarrass a guest who clearly had no idea she'd committed a violation.“Oh! I'

I found the discrepancy at two in the morning, which was, I had come to accept over the last several weeks, simply the hour my mind now preferred for its most useful work.It was a small thing. A supply requisition, logged three weeks ago, for a rotation shift near the western outposts that did not quite match the corresponding patrol schedule I had cross-referenced against it. Small discrepancies of this kind occurred constantly in an operation the size of Blackthorn's, most of them nothing more than clerical carelessness. I had built my entire adult life on the discipline of noticing which ones weren't.I had taken to running these reviews myself rather than delegating them, in the weeks since the Council session, and I understood plainly why. It was not because I distrusted the staff whose job this technically was, but because I no longer trusted myself to sit comfortably at a distance from anything that might matter this much. Twenty-six years of managing Blackthorn from behind ca

I summoned Nadia to my study the morning after the festival, giving myself a full night to decide how to approach the conversation before I had to actually have it. I had gone back and forth between direct confrontation and careful, patient questioning, and settled, in the end, on something closer to the second. It was not because I doubted my instincts about what her absence might mean, but because I had watched my mother's careful investigative work these past weeks and understood, finally, the value of gathering rather than accusing.The festival's aftermath had consumed most of the previous night regardless; frightened families to reassure, a security review to launch, a conversation with Kira that had left me watching her carefully for signs of the particular wound I recognized in her more easily now than I once had, the old, familiar ache of being looked at like something rather than someone. She had insisted she was fine. I hadn't fully believed her, and hadn't pushed, understa

I heard the rumour from a kitchen girl who didn't know better than to gossip in front of me, the same way Kira had once heard the truth about the Wilders from a border guard who hadn't recognized who he was talking to. My mother, apparently, had spent the two weeks since the Council's formal recognition quietly reassuring select members of Ashwood's inner circle that the ruling changed nothing about her own private assessment of my sister's stability.I had been spending most of my time between Blackthorn and the Wilder camp these past weeks, close enough to Kira's daily life that Ashwood's internal gossip had started reaching me second-hand and delayed, filtered through whoever happened to be visiting when the news broke. It meant I was always the last to learn what my own mother was actually saying about my own sister behind closed doors, which felt, the more I turned it over on the drive home, like its own small, deliberate cruelty even if she hadn't planned it that specifically.I

There is a scar beneath my left collarbone that I have spent twenty-five years explaining away as an old training injury, and tonight, alone in the room my son has never been permitted to enter, I finally allowed myself to look at it directly for longer than the few seconds I usually permit.It does not look like much. A thin, silver-white line, faintly raised, easy to mistake for the ordinary cost of a life spent occasionally in dangerous proximity to claws and teeth. Only I know what actually made it, and I have never told a single living soul the truth of it, not my husband, not my son, not even in the depths of grief when confession might have cost me less than the silence eventually did.I had chosen tonight deliberately, one night before the moon my own research flagged as dangerous, because I understood, watching Kira train these past weeks with a patience and guidance I had never once had access to myself, that I owed her considerably more honesty than I had yet managed to giv