All Chapters of Marked By The Rival Alphas: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

122 Chapters

The Pack Lord in the Shadows

POV: DorianI had started the trace the morning after Draven's warning. Not because I was asked to. Nobody had asked me to. But Draven had said there was a player in the situation that none of us had identified, and unidentified players in situations with this many moving parts were the specific kind of problem that got worse the longer they stayed unidentified. So I had started the trace the way I started all traces. Quietly, methodically, from the outside in.The name Aldric Voss had been a deliberate misdirection. I understood that within the first three days. The commercial treaties that Draven had referenced were real, but the name attached to them in the public record was a registration alias, a legitimate business identity used by a holding structure that sat two layers above the actual controlling party. It was not illegal. It was the kind of arrangement used by people who wanted to move through public record without their name being the first thing a search returned.I found

112; Sable's Father

POV: LyraDorian told me at breakfast, He sat down across from me with his tray and his usual morning expression, which was the expression of someone who had already been awake and working for two hours and was now choosing the right moment to deliver something he had been sitting with since last night. I had learned to read that expression accurately. It meant the information was significant and he had already decided how to present it.He presented it quietly and completely, between the first and second cup of tea, with the dining hall noise around us providing the kind of cover that made certain conversations easier in public than in private. Caius Thorne. The ring of commercial treaties. The three bordering territories already in his orbit. The positioning strategy built across two years to take advantage of exactly the kind of instability the misconduct finding was going to create.I listened without interrupting. Then he told me about the meeting. I put my cup down."Edran Ashve

113; The Leak

POV: RonanDorian laid it out at seven in the morning. He had been awake most of the night. I could tell from the quality of his focus, the particular sharpness that came not from rest but from sustained concentration, the way a blade gets its edge from friction rather than stillness. He had the documents arranged on the study room table and a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago and the expression he wore when he had followed something to its end and was ready to show someone else the path.I sat across from him and listened. The suspect was a council administrative assistant named Holt. Three years in the reform division's outer office. Unremarkable record, competent performance evaluations, the kind of presence that accumulated in institutional settings without drawing particular attention. Nobody's primary focus. Nobody's concerned."Family connections," I said."Two territories," Dorian said. He placed a document on the table and pointed to two names. "His mother's side is f

114; Feeding the Leak

POV: LyraDorian explained the plan on Monday evening. We were all in the study room. Ronan at the end of the table, Cassian beside him with his notebook open and his pen ready, Sable in the chair by the window that had become her chair over the past weeks, and me across from Dorian, who had the documents arranged in front of him with the precision of a man who had rehearsed the presentation in his head and was now simply executing it.He laid it out clearly and without ornamentation. The reform division filing system had a document management layer that administrative staff used to process, log, and cross-reference hearing preparation materials. Holt had been using his access to this layer to pull documents and pass their contents to an intermediary. The access was legitimate. The use of it was not. But because the access was legitimate, introducing a new document into the system through the same layer would appear entirely routine to anyone watching the system from the outside."We

115; Thorne Moves

POV: LyraThe filing came through at eight in the morning. Petra Solan's office sent the notification simultaneously to every party with formal standing in the hearing. I read it on my phone standing in the corridor outside the study room with Ronan beside me and Cassian coming through the door at the other end of the corridor and all three of us reading the same document on three separate screens in the particular silence of people receiving something they had been told was coming and finding that being told does not make the arrival smaller.Caius Thorne. Lord of the Thornmark pack. Filing for formal pack council intervention in the Nightbane territory administrative situation.The grounds were carefully constructed. I read them twice and then read them again because the first two times my mind kept sliding off the legal language looking for the centre of it. The centre, when I found it, was this: Thorne was arguing that the combination of a formal Alpha misconduct finding, an activ

116; Lyra Goes to Her Father

POV: LyraRonan found the hotel in twenty minutes. It was a formal pack residence near the council building, the kind of place that existed for Alpha-level visitors to the city who needed accommodation without the political weight of staying in another pack's formal guest quarters. Neutral ground. Appropriate for a man who no longer had a clear pack position and had not yet worked out what that meant for where he was allowed to be.He waited in the car without being asked. I did not need to explain it. He had looked at the building when we pulled up and then looked at me and understood that this was the version of the conversation that needed walls and only two people inside them.I went in alone. The front desk directed me to the third floor. I took the stairs because the lift felt too enclosed for whatever I was carrying up there with me. The corridor was quiet and carpeted and impersonal in the way of formal residence buildings, no character, no warmth, just the functional dignity

117; Kieran Becomes Alpha

POV: KieranI had been in formal rooms before. Pack council chambers, summit halls, territory administration offices. Rooms that expected a particular quality of presence from the people inside them and communicated that expectation through high ceilings and formal seating and the weight of documents on heavy tables. I had learned young how to walk into those rooms and be the thing they required.This room was small. That was the first thing I noticed. Not a chamber or a hall. A formal filing room in the council's secondary building, four walls and a table and chairs and a single window that looked out over a courtyard where nothing in particular was happening. The kind of room that processed significant things without making a production of them.Petra Solan had arranged it. She stood at the head of the table with the document in front of her and the particular efficient calm of a woman who had been working toward this specific moment for longer than any of us had understood when we

118; The Night Before the Hearing

POV: RonanSleep did not come. I had known it would not. I had lain on my back for an hour with the ceiling above me and the hearing twelve hours away and the particular quality of wakefulness that had nothing to do with anxiety and everything to do with the specific alertness of a body that understood something significant was coming and refused to go offline for it.At midnight I got up.I sat at the desk without turning on the lamp. The room had enough light from the window, the pale ambient light of a campus that never went fully dark, to see the outline of things. The desk. The chair. The papers I had stopped working on three hours ago because my mind had stopped being useful to them.I looked at the room.It had stopped feeling like my room. That was the precise truth of it and I had been aware of it for weeks without naming it. It had started feeling like the room where Lyra was not, which was its own kind of information about how the past three months had rearranged certain th

119; The Full Council Hearing

POV: LyraI dressed carefully, Not because appearance was the point. Because it was the last morning before and I wanted to be deliberate about it. I had spent eight months being deliberate about every morning, every layer, every careful preparation of the person I was going to be when I walked through a door. This morning I was deliberate about being myself. My clothes. My name. My face without anything laid over it.Ronan was in the corridor when I came out. He looked at me once, completely, the way he looked at things that mattered. He did not say anything. He offered his arm and I took it and we walked down to the cars together in the early morning quiet.++++++The council chamber in the central pack authority building was the largest formal room I had ever been in. I had seen it described in the pack council procedural documents that Dorian had assembled. I had looked at diagrams of the layout, the panel bench at the front, the petitioner's table, the gallery seating, the second

120; The Findings

POV: LyraThe three hours after the hearing were the strangest of the whole eight months. Not the most difficult. Not the most frightening. The strangest, because there was nothing to do in them. Every action that could be taken had been taken. Every argument had been made, every document filed, every testimony given. The thing that had been in motion for twenty years and in my particular hands for eight months was now in the hands of five council members in a deliberation room, and I was sitting in a corridor outside Petra Solan's office drinking cold tea and waiting.Waiting has never been my strongest discipline. Cassian sat beside me for the first hour with his notebook and a pen, working through something, and his presence was useful in the specific way his presence was always useful, grounding and uncomplicated. He did not try to fill the silence with reassurance. He just sat there being methodical about whatever he was working on and let the corridor be what it was.Dorian was

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