All Chapters of My Rogue Mate, My Captor: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

POV: GraysonThe morning after Ivy’s birthday, the apartment was quiet. She was still asleep, one arm flung over her face, and I stood in the doorway longer than I needed to. The party had gone better than I’d hoped. Her mother had cried, my mom had cornered every guest with a plate, and Ivy had looked overwhelmed in the way people do when they’re loved more than they can absorb. Afterward she’d been so tired she barely spoke.Something had been weighing on her for weeks. Between the hospital shifts and everything we'd uncovered about Ronan's past, she had plenty to worry about. I wished she'd let me help carry some of it.I made coffee with lots of milk, took it to the front porch, and let my mind go where it had been trying to go all week. Leah Carver. Her disappearance, the threatening call, and the use of her credentials in 2022 were all still unanswered. Worse, she had been frightened out of her own home, and the people who did that could still be watching.I dialed her number ex

POV: IvyThe rain had stopped by the time we finished dinner, leaving Grayson’s balcony doors open to a cool, washed-clean evening. The air smelled of wet stone and cut grass. Somewhere below, water dripped from a gutter in a slow, uneven rhythm, and the wind had gone soft.I sat curled on his couch with my feet tucked under me, his sweater hanging off my shoulders. It smelled like him, cedar and soap and warmth. Familiar and safe. Elara went still in the back of my mind. She'd been unusually quiet around Grayson lately, but I was too tired to question it.Grayson sat beside me with his arm along the cushions behind my head, absently twisting a lock of my hair around his finger. He’d done that since the first week we met.“Tomorrow’s Monday,” he said. “You’re really going back?”“I’m really going back.” I glanced at the clock. It was eight o’clock. “I should head home soon. Work outfit, lunch, the whole routine. If I don’t get my head straight tonight, the first shift will eat me aliv

POV: IvyI shut the lid and sat there with my hand flat on top of it, as if it might open on its own.My phone was right beside me. I could call Ronan and tell him exactly what I thought of him, of the gift, of the way he made everything feel like a hand closing around my wrist. Or I could say nothing and let him wonder.Silence won. Anything I said would hand him something, even anger, and he'd take it and turn it into proof that I still thought about him.So I would keep it. I wouldn’t mention it to him, and I wouldn’t mention it to Grayson or my mother or anyone else. It would stay mine, which was a strange thing to want from something Ronan had given me.The drive home was quiet. Elara paced the edges of my mind, restless, not saying much. When I let myself into the apartment, the lights were off and the air smelled like my cologne. It should have comforted me.In the bedroom, I knelt in front of the closet and pulled out my

POV: Ronan Elowyn laid the three documents in a row across my father’s old desk and squared each edge with two fingers, as though the order mattered more than the contents. “Rent,” she said, tapping the first with two fingers. “Transfer. Custody.” I had read all three twice already. A third reading wouldn’t change the ink, but I braced my hands on the wood and looked anyway. The rental ledger was the plainest of them. Ashgrave Estate, leased annually, paid each spring from the Council’s discretionary fund. 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, then this year’s entry, settled in full months before anyone opened the gate for me. Same tidy clerk’s hand every time. “Council money kept that house running for four years,” Elowyn said. “That part isn’t in dispute. Someone budgeted for your confinement every year, and no one questioned the line.” “Then someone signed for it.” “Someone signed for the r

POV: RonanMy father had been dead for six months when he signed the paper that took me out of the world.Elowyn had laid it in front of me on Friday morning, a photocopy from the transfer packet, the endorsement page we had overlooked while we were all busy staring at the August seal. Standing custodial provisions required the consent of the head of a subject’s family line, and the page said, in a clean official hand, that consent had been given. It was dated July 2022.The signature at the bottom read Cassian Draven.“It’s a forgery,” I said.“I know.” Elowyn didn’t look up. “But I need you to say why, so we can be certain we aren’t just angry.”I made myself look at it properly. My father had signed everything the same way for forty years: a hard downstroke on the C, and a long line through the double s in his first name that he swore he never meant to make. The forger had the shape of it. Even the slant was right. But something was wrong. The long stroke through the double s ended