All Chapters of Rejected by My Mate, Claimed by the Triplet Alphas : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70


Viene’s POV Nathan called the meeting before breakfast, which told me how little sleep he’d gotten after the archive. “New rule,” he said, standing at the head of the table instead of sitting. “Everything from last night, everything going forward — every file, every fragment, every reading off the Seal — comes to me first. I review it. Then I decide what reaches her.” “We already tried that,” I said. “It didn’t work.” “It worked well enough that I knew about the file before you did last time. This time I want it earlier. Before the session, not after.” I looked at Neil, expecting the same fight he’d given Nathan over the first file. It didn’t come. “I’ll report everything to you first,” Neil said. “Effective today.” I stared at him. “Neil.” “It’s fine, Viene.” “You spent a week arguing that information belongs to me as much as to him.” “I still believe that. I’m agreeing to the structure, not agreeing that it’s right.” His eyes flicked to Nathan, then back to me, something


Viene’s POV Nathan found out the next morning. Not by accident. He’d pulled the perimeter communications log himself, cross-referenced it against the archive access records, and traced an outbound transmission three weeks old back to a terminal only Neil used. By the time he came to my room, he already had the timestamps memorized. “Three weeks,” he said, closing the door behind him. “You’ve known about the Vantrell channel for three weeks. I found out this morning because I finally thought to check who’d been talking to a foreign archive without my authorization.” “That’s between you and Neil.” “It’s not, actually. Because you sat in that room with him last night reading pages I’ve never seen, and you didn’t tell me either.” “You made a rule about reporting. Go enforce it on the person who agreed to it.” Something moved across his face, there and gone, and I understood I’d just handed him exactly the direction he wanted to go. He found Neil in the archive twenty minutes late


Viene’s POV I avoided all three of them for the rest of that day. Nathan sent word through a guard that dinner would be held for me if I wanted it; I didn’t. Neil left a note under my door about a translation he’d finished; I didn’t read past the first line. Nolan didn’t send anything at all. Somehow that bothered me more than the others. I couldn’t sleep after the training room. Around midnight I gave up trying and sat by the window instead, watching the dark line of trees at the edge of the property, and let my mind do the thing it had been avoiding all week. I thought about Nathan’s hand on my shoulder in the corridor after the border collapse, steady in a way that had nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with wanting. I thought about the training room tonight, the space between us that neither of us had closed, charged with something I still didn’t have a clean word for. Then I thought about Neil’s voice in the archive, low and careful, reading a two-hundred-year


Viene’s POV The crash came hours later, well past the point any of us thought it was still coming. I’d made it back to my room, eaten something small at Nolan’s insistence, even managed to sleep for a stretch before the mark woke me with a pull unlike anything from the chamber — not sharp, not the old bond’s ache, something closer to a system finally failing after running too hot for too long. My vision doubled the second I sat up. I reached for the lamp and missed it twice. “Nolan.” My voice barely made it past a whisper, and I didn’t know if the bond carried it or if I’d simply gotten lucky, but he was through my door within a minute, already moving fast. “Talk to me.” “Everything’s tilting. I can’t — the room won’t hold still.” He got an arm under me before my legs gave out entirely, easing me back down onto the bed, his other hand pressed flat against my collarbone where the mark had gone hot and erratic, pulsing in a rhythm that didn’t match anything I recognized from bef


Viene’s POV I found Neil in the archive two days after the pattern conversation. I’d had two days to notice something about him I hadn’t let myself see before — a hesitation before certain words, an answer that dodged the question right next to the one I’d actually asked. “You do this,” I said, sitting down across from him without being invited. “Every time I get close to something specific, you answer a different question instead. I’ve watched you do it for weeks.” Neil set his pen down. “What do you think I’m avoiding?” “I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m here instead of guessing.” He was quiet a moment, weighing something behind his eyes before he spoke. “There’s a connection I haven’t told you about,” he said finally. “Not a new file. Something I noticed weeks ago comparing the accounts, and I’ve been sitting on it because I don’t know what telling you does to the mark.” “Tell me what kind of connection.” “It involves continuity.” He said the word carefully. “Whether the th