All Chapters of The Alpha’s college Mate : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Clara's POV The song had no words I knew, and I understood every one of them. It rose out of the silver the way warmth rises off a stone at dusk, low and unhurried, a woman's voice with a thousand years of weather in it. It wasn't beautiful so much as true. Wherever it passed, the threads stopped trembling and leaned in to listen. Lucan's hands were still on my face. I held on to them. Then the loom gently loosened him, and he stood an arm's length away with his eyes closed and a faint, strange peace on his face, like a man who has set down something heavy and doesn't yet know how light he is. The gold thread at his feet had stopped bleeding. A red line ran from it to my wrist, bright and taut and humming. He is anchored, said the pressure behind my eyes. It had changed. It had a shape now, a stillness with a woman's outline standing in the weave where no one had been. I couldn't see her face. I saw bare feet, a hem stained with old mud, and hands cupped as if carrying water.

Clara's POV The weave gave us until dawn. Eliza told us so from the foot of the stair, swaying, her bloody hand finally lowered. The verses had run out of her like water from a cracked jug. "It begins at the edges and works inward," she said. "Slowly, so that the world can get used to itself. By sunrise it will reach us. Whatever you mean to say, child, say it now, in order, while you still have the words to say it with." I didn't argue. I had a list. I'd written it in my head on the way down the stair, and it had only one rule: nobody got a speech. Jasmine came first. Milo had laid her against the pillar before he fell, and she'd woken there with vine burns on her wrists and a bruise rising on her temple. She was sitting up when I reached her, staring at the ink along her forearm. HE IS YOURS. HE IS WAITING. The letters had smeared where she'd been crying on them. "I got it all wrong," she said hoarsely. "I ran at a knife." "You ran at a knife for him. It's the best bad

Clara's POV "Clara," I said. "You told me to call you Clara." "Clara." He said it carefully, like a man setting down something hot. "Thank you. I'm sorry. I keep dropping it." "You can drop it as often as you like. I'll keep picking it up." He looked at me for a moment longer. Then he laughed, short and wrecked, and led me up the rest of the stairs by the hand. Gail had cleared the guest quarters in the east wing and left a kettle on the stove, three mismatched mugs, and a note in her cramped hand. Milo is alive and swearing. Do not come to the infirmary. That is a medical instruction. Someone had lit the little fire. Someone had also, God bless her, left a plate of Victoria's rolls under a dish towel. We spent the first hour pretending. Lucan made tea badly and put the milk in first, and I told him so. He said it was a family tradition. I said it was a crime. He sat on the sofa, a lumpy green thing with one cushion permanently sunk, and I curled into his side with my fe

Clara's POV I kept my hand raised long after he'd walked out of sight. The lawn lay empty under the new palms. A thin mist drifted across the grass where he had stood, and I watched it close over his footprints one by one until the quad looked as though nobody had ever crossed it. My arm began to shake. I lowered it. My palm still tingled with the shape of his, and I pressed it against my mouth, because I knew I would not be allowed to keep that either. Courteous, I thought. He nodded to me the way you nod to a stranger. It should have been the worst thing I'd ever felt. It was only the second. The worst was still waiting inside me, and it was my turn. I slid down the wall until I sat on the floorboards with my back against the bed and the jar of Pea in my lap. The room was gray and gold and utterly quiet. Someone had folded Lucan's sweater over the chair. It still smelled of him: cedar, smoke, a faint ghost of clove from Gail's bandages. I didn't touch it. I'd decided that

Clara's POV The name was on my tongue. Then there was only the drip of water and a ceiling I didn't recognize. I lay still and waited for it to come to me. Water-stained, with a long brown crack running from the corner like a river on a map. Metal walls, a window the size of a dinner tray, and a thin mattress propped on a stack of textbooks where one leg of the frame had given out. A kettle ticked on a two-ring stove six feet from my head. The whole room hummed with a damp, warm, insect-loud morning, like a held breath finally let go. My trailer. Sundown Court, lot nine. I knew that. I knew it the way I knew my own birthday and the price of ramen, and I let the knowledge settle over me like a blanket I'd always owned. I was twenty-three years old. I was in my final year of pre-med. I had a poster on an easel, a showcase on Thursday, and a rent notice taped to the fridge with a smiley-face magnet I'd bought to make myself feel better. My face was wet. I touched my cheek and