Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Rejected Plump Mate Was Pregnant : Kabanata 131 - Kabanata 140

Raven's POV Sable sent the message at 7:00 a.m. It said Rendell Coas studies in the east wing of the library every Tuesday, between ten and twelve, and sits at the same table near the back left window. I read it and sent back a thank you. She replied, "Good luck and do not let Alaric intimidate him before you finish talking," which told me she had already figured out the plan without being told. We arrived at the library at five past ten, and I spotted Rendell before Alaric did, because I had been looking at people carefully my whole life, picking out the ones who were watching. Rendell had that quality. It was not obviously watchful, but watchful in the way that people are when they have been given a specific task and are waiting for the relevant thing to happen. He was tall and neat with dark hair. He was looking at his laptop when we sat down across from him, and he looked up. His expression shifted immediately into something that was trying very hard to stay neutral and not q

Raven's POV Dara arrived on a Saturday morning and she came alone, which I had not specifically asked for but appreciated, because it meant she understood that this visit was not an occasion that needed an audience. Alaric let her in and she came into the dorm room. She looked around at the portable crib in the corner, the course notes spread across both desks, and the ,general evidence of three people living in a space designed for one. Then she said, "You have made this work." "We are managing," I said. Managing was the closest thing we had to stability, even if it still required constant small corrections to keep from drifting out of alignment. "No," she said. "You have made it work, there is a difference." Cael was on the floor between the desks. He looked up when she came in and she looked down at him and went still for a moment in the way people did when they saw him for the first time. She crouched down to his level and he looked at her face with the focused serious expre

Raven's POV Sable was waiting outside the archive building at half past seven the following morning, with two coffees and the archive assistant beside her. She handed me a cup and said, "This is Petra, not the Petra you know, a different one. She owes me a favor." Sable said it in a way that suggested the favor had already been negotiated and settled in advance, and that this meeting was simply the practical execution of something that had been agreed upon earlier without needing further explanation. The archive Petra looked slightly tired, but cooperative. She unlocked the building and let us in and said she had two hours before regular access hours began. The way she said it made it clear that the time limit was not flexible and that anything we needed to find would have to be identified, extracted, and verified within that strict window without expectation of extension. Then she went to sit at her desk and left us to it. The historical succession records for Thorne territory

Raven's POV The panel chair looked at his notes, then at the room, and said the panel had reached a unanimous decision in favor of the petitioner. The inquiry brought by Forin Coas was dismissed in full on grounds of bad faith and insufficient evidence. The official record acknowledgment submitted by Dara Coas would stand permanently without challenge. He also said the panel was referring to Forin's conduct across the full scope of the proceedings, the secondary claimant funding, the council faction lobbying, and the original inquiry itself, to the senior ethics board for review, and that the outcome of that review would be added to his permanent record alongside the existing censure. The room was quiet for a moment and then it wasn't. People were moving, talking and Forin's representative was gathering papers with the specific efficiency of someone who wants to leave before anyone looks at them directly. Forin himself sat for a moment longer than everyone else before standing and

Alaric's POV. It happened on a Sunday morning. I was the only one awake. Raven was in the shower, Cael was on the floor of the dorm room doing what he had been doing for the past week where he pulled himself up on any available surface higher than him and stood holding on with both hands looking around with the expression of someone who had recently discovered they were taller than they thought. I was at the desk going through a reading for Monday's lecture, keeping half an eye on him the way I always did when he was on the floor. He had pulled himself up against the edge of the coffee table and stood there holding the edge. He then looked at me and let go. He took three steps away from the table. They were not steady steps. The third one was more of a controlled fall than an actual step, but they were steps nonetheless. He sat down with a thump and looked up at me with an expression of complete satisfaction like he had been planning that for some time and had decided today was the