All Chapters of SILVERBORN: THE ALPHA'S REJECTED MATE: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

We had reinforced every outpost Selene's research flagged as vulnerable, doubled patrols along the pattern her sixty years of cross-referenced data suggested mattered the most, and positioned our strongest warriors at the borders that history said the Nightshade Court favoured when the moon ran full. We had done, by every measure available to us, everything preparation could accomplish.The attack hit the one outpost we hadn't reinforced at all.It came at the southern boundary, a stretch of border so far from every historical incident that Selene's own pattern analysis had ranked it lowest priority, thinly staffed because every other post had seemed to need our attention more urgently. I understood, the moment the alarm reached me, exactly how that particular outpost had been chosen. Nadia's leaked schedule would not have shown troop concentrations from sixty years of pattern analysis. It would have shown, in plain, current detail, exactly where our actual coverage was thinnest tonig

I heard about the southern outpost within hours, word traveling through the Northern Territory's informal channels faster than any official Council notice could have managed, and I abandoned the report I had been drafting the moment the details reached me. An outpost Blackthorn's own pattern analysis had ranked lowest priority, hit with precision that matched no historical incident. That was not coincidence. That was exactly what my own weeks of tracking careful, coordinated inquiries had been warning was coming.My father found me already packing a bag before I'd fully finished processing the news myself. “You're going to Blackthorn.”“I have information that might matter considerably more this morning than it did yesterday.”He studied me a moment, and I braced for the argument I half expected. An argument that this was not Sterling's fight, that I was overextending myself into another pack's internal security matter. Instead he simply nodded. “Take the car. And Isabel … whatever yo

We found Nadia in the small residence Blackthorn provided its unmarried warriors, sitting alone at a kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold in front of her, and I understood, from the way her shoulders dropped the moment she saw the three of us standing in her doorway together, that some part of her had been expecting this exact visit for days.The walk over had been quiet, each of us carrying our own version of what this conversation needed to accomplish. Isabel had reviewed her evidence twice more in the car, murmuring dates under her breath like a woman rehearsing a case she intended to argue flawlessly. My mother had said almost nothing at all, though I recognized, watching her, the particular stillness she wore when she was steadying herself for something that cost more than it appeared to from the outside. I had spent the walk thinking less about Nadia specifically and more about every version of this exact scene that might have played out differently, in other packs, across

The visions had always come to me sideways before.That was the thing I had gotten used to, over months of them; that they arrived the way weather arrives, without invitation and without any particular interest in what I happened to be doing at the time. A clearing gone black-branched at the edge of my sight while I was carrying water. A sky the colour of a bruise pressing itself over the ordinary sky for the length of two heartbeats and then letting go. They had never once felt like something addressed to me. They had felt like standing too close to a wall and hearing the shape of a conversation happening in the next room.This one knocked.I felt it coming the way you feel a hand on your shoulder from someone who has been standing behind you for some time. I was sitting on the low stone step outside Leo's cabin, four days after the southern outpost, watching the light change over the ridge and doing absolutely nothing, which was the only prescription anybody had been able to offer m

I had not stood on Ashwood ground in four months.I had imagined it, in the way you imagine everything you have been thrown out of; badly, and constantly, and always with better lines than I ended up having. In the versions I built at night in the Wilder camp during those first terrible weeks, I always arrived transformed. Sometimes I arrived with an army. Sometimes I arrived with nothing at all and simply stood in the yard until somebody had the decency to be ashamed. In every single version, my mother was the one who spoke first.What actually happened was that I got out of a car on a Tuesday morning, in ordinary clothes, with silver lying under the skin of my forearms and my sister holding my hand, and the first person to see me was a kitchen boy of about eleven who dropped an entire tray of cups."Sorry," I said, which was not in any of the versions.The house had gotten smaller. Everybody says that and I had always assumed it was a figure of speech about memory. It is not. The ma