Todos os capítulos de SILVERBORN: THE ALPHA'S REJECTED MATE: Capítulo 61 - Capítulo 70

I was given thirty days to write a recommendation about my mother. I used twenty-eight of them, and I ended up writing two documents, and the second one destroyed my pack's standing in the Northern Territory for a generation.I want to set down how the decision was actually made, because I have already heard three versions of it in circulation and all three of them make me either nobler or more calculating than I was.Isabel came back from that clearing at two in the afternoon with a full transcript, a ledger containing two hundred and forty-one names, and an old woman asleep in the back of the second car under blanket and guard. She put the transcript on my desk and did not expand, which I have come to understand is her single most useful quality.I read it twice. Then I got up and walked out of my own study and stood in the main hall in front of Alaric Cross for the third time that month.Eleven of ninety-four.That is the number that would not leave me. Not the two hundred and fort

They put her in the guest quarters on the east side, two doors from the room that still holds Nadia Reyn, which I understand was a purely practical decision and which I have not been able to stop finding obscene.I did not visit for nineteen days.It was not restraint. It was not dignity, and it certainly was not the advice of my son, who told me plainly that he thought seeing her again would cost me something I could not currently afford and who was, as he increasingly is, correct.I did not go for nineteen days because I was afraid that I would find her likeable.That is the thing nobody prepares you for. I had spent nineteen days constructing a version of Odessa Fane that I could hold in a single hand; an instrument, a hereditary office wearing a woman's clothes, sixty-one years of neat handwriting over two hundred and forty-one names. It was an extremely useful version. It let me sleep for the first time since the clearing.And I knew, with complete certainty, that if I sat down a

Nobody convened it.That is the first thing that has to be said about the night of the full moon, and it is the thing every account written since has got wrong, because every account has been written by people who need there to have been a decision. There was no session. There was no summons. No Council vote was taken, then or since. Not one of the four Alphas of the Northern Territory sent a single letter to any of the others in the twenty-one days between Draven's withdrawal and that night.What happened instead was that Blackthorn announced, publicly and without conditions, that it would be on the treaty grounds at dusk on the twenty-first day, in full strength, and that any pack that wished to be there would find the ground open.It should be understood how irregular that was. The treaty grounds are used once a year. For a hundred and six years no pack has set foot on them outside the Unity Ceremony without the consent of the other three, and the convention has held so completely

My mother came to Blackthorn on the fourth day after the field, and I let her in, and the whole of the argument I had spent four months rehearsing lasted about eleven seconds."You should not be here," I said."No," said Luna Voss. "Almost certainly not. Where would you like to do this?"That was all. No defence, no preamble, no carriage. She had come in a plain coat with a bag over her shoulder and she stood in the yard of a pack that was not hers and asked me where I would like to do it, and I discovered that I had built an entire speech for a woman who no longer existed.We did it in the east field, which is the largest open ground Blackthorn has and which Damien had cleared of every living soul for a mile in four directions after Leo made him.Because Leo was against it. I want that recorded properly, since a great deal of what happened afterward has been laid at his door by people who were not in the room."Two of the line in one place," he had said, the night before, in the flat

My father offered me Sterling on the eleventh day, and I turned it down in my own kitchen over a cold cup of tea, and I have not regretted it for a single hour since.I want to record the offer accurately, because it was not a gesture and he did not make it easy."Not the succession," he said. "You know perfectly well the succession isn't mine to hand anybody, and Corrin has spent nine years earning it and would be a perfectly adequate Alpha. I'm offering you the archive.""You're offering me a records room.""I am offering you Sterling's entire information function, reorganised from nothing, with a seat in my briefings and a budget, and I would appoint you tomorrow." He put his cup down. "Isabel. In four months you have done the single most consequential piece of work anybody in this territory has done in a century, and you did it as a private individual with a folder, and I have spent a fortnight being told by my own Beta that if I do not give you an office somebody else will.""Bla