All Chapters of Mated to My Rival Step Brother: Chapter 281 - Chapter 290

Lyra's POV:Nobody asked Maya anything.That was the agreement that nobody stated out loud but everyone in the room honored. Selene looked at the map. Gregory looked at the tracker. I looked at Maya and Maya looked at the floor and the silence that followed her revelation was not the cold kind. It was the kind that came when a room full of people had received something significant and had decided that the receiving was enough for now.There would be time for the rest.Blake and Alex were in rogue alpha territory with an unknown substance in Alex's system and the afternoon was moving toward evening and that was the only thing with a deadline on it.Everything else could wait.We split to prepare.Selene and Gregory went to coordinate with the pack representatives who had been at the competition and were now redirected to something considerably more serious than a competition. I watched them move through the administrative block corridor side by side, not touching but close enough that

Selene's POV:I knew the voice before I saw the face.That was the thing about voices that belonged to specific memories. They did not age the way faces did. They arrived exactly as they had been preserved, sharp and immediate and carrying everything they had carried the first time you heard them, and this one carried twenty years of things I had spent considerable effort not thinking about.I stepped out of the cave first.The forest was dim in the evening light and he was standing ten meters away with the easy posture of someone who had been waiting and had known the waiting would end exactly this way. He looked older than the last time I had seen him and the same age simultaneously in the way that certain people existed outside the normal progression of time because they had never allowed the world to fully touch them.He was not large. That had always been the thing people got wrong about him when they tried to imagine the rogue alpha based on his reputation. Average height. Lean.

Blake's POV:Alex's face was in my hands.The forest was loud around us and the fight was real and present and none of it was what existed in this specific circle of space between the rock face and the cave entrance where I was kneeling in front of Alex Thorne with his face in my hands and everything else receding to the edges.He was looking at me.His eyes were the problem. Not the color or the expression but the softness at the edges of them that should not have been there. Alex's eyes were never soft at the edges. They were sharp and dark and carrying the specific focused intelligence that had been the first thing I noticed about him years ago and had never stopped noticing.The softness was the wolfsbane.Moving through him slowly and steadily and doing the specific work of something that had been designed to take down an Alpha and was succeeding at a measured pace."Blake," he said."I know," I said."You do not have to."I looked at him."Alex Thorne," I said quietly. "I have b

Selene's POV:I saw Maya go down.From across the clearing I saw it and I felt it the way you felt things that involved people you had decided mattered to you and Maya had been deciding to matter to me for longer than she knew. The claw marks. Both sides. The specific terrible precision of someone who understood anatomy and had used that understanding as a weapon.She shifted and put herself between Aldric and Lyra.Still standing.Still holding her position with everything she had left which was not much and was somehow enough.I was already moving.Gregory was beside me and Blake was coming in from the right and Alex from the left and the four of us converged on the same point with the specific quality of people who had been fighting separately and had just become one thing.Aldric turned and saw us.And hesitated.I had been waiting for that hesitation for thirty years."It is over, Aldric," I said.He looked at me.The flat expression was still there but underneath it something ha

Maya's POV:The medical wing had a particular quality in the mornings.The light came in at a low angle through the east windows and sat on the white walls in a way that was neither harsh nor warm but simply present and I had spent enough mornings in this room over the past two weeks to know every variation of it. The early grey. The pale gold that followed. The full morning light that arrived around eight and stayed until the window angle shifted at noon.I knew the ceiling very well.I knew the pattern of the beams and the small irregularity in the third panel from the left where the wood had been replaced at some point with a slightly different grain. I knew the sound of the morning healer's footsteps versus the afternoon healer's footsteps. I knew that Lyra arrived seven minutes before the shift changed every morning without fail.I was getting better.Not quickly. The right side was slower than the left which the healers had explained was related to the rib involvement and the sp