All Chapters of The Alpha's Forbidden Plus-Size Mate : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Killian's POVCorvus lived at the very edge of the pack grounds in a house that had no official age in the archive because the records that would've contained that information predated the current system and nobody had ever bothered to close the gap. The house was low, dark stone, built into the hillside rather than placed on top of it — the kind of structure that looks like someone found the building already inside the slope and just took away what didn't belong. Garden on three sides that produced useful things whether or not anyone paid attention to it. And the air around it had a quality I'd been aware of since I was old enough to be aware of anything — a pressure, barely there but consistent, like the hour before a storm when the atmosphere is making decisions.She had outlived four Alphas. She told me this when I was eight, flat and without drama, as a statement of fact. Four Alphas and the pack is still here. She left the conclusion to me, which was characteristic.I found her

Killian's POVThe south approach was not comfortable terrain and I hadn't expected it to be.It was an old supply route, unmaintained for years, reclaimed by the forest in the way forests reclaim everything when you stop fighting them — soft and treacherous underfoot, roots disguised by years of fallen needles, the kind of path that punishes inattention and requires a specific quality of deliberate movement that prioritizes silence and stability over speed. The trees closed in from both sides with the complete indifference of growth that has been proceeding without human concern for longer than any pack in this territory had existed.We moved without light. No moon, overcast sky, the dense layered dark of a closed canopy at midnight. Dax moved at my left shoulder with the silence that belongs to people who've been doing this kind of work long enough that silence is no longer a discipline but a condition. Sera was on point, reading the terrain three steps ahead, communicating through t

Killian's POVI had been in wars. Real ones, not the border skirmishes that Silver Moon called wars when they wanted to sound serious. I had stood on actual battlefields and watched actual Alphas in full power — the kind of power that makes the air change, that drops the temperature, that makes every wolf in a quarter-mile radius feel it in their spine before they see it with their eyes. I had seen things that left marks. Things I still thought about in the dark hours of the night when sleep didn't come easily.I had never seen anything like Kaia.When she shifted, I was thrown back against the corridor wall by the pressure change. The torches blew out. For one half-second the passage was completely dark and completely silent, which was its own kind of terrifying — the silence of something enormous drawing breath before it moves.Then the light came back, and it wasn't the torches.She was silver in a way that generated its own illumination, a cold and self-sustaining light that had n

Killian's POVShe was on her feet the whole way through the forest. I want to say that clearly because it mattered to me then and it matters to me now — she was on her feet, moving under her own power, despite the hip and the ribs and the absolute depletion of a first full Matriarch shift. I had offered to carry her. Once, quietly, in the first few minutes after we cleared the camp. She had looked at me with an expression that communicated several things simultaneously, most of them variations on the theme of absolutely not, and I had respected this and not offered again.She did accept my arm. Not as support — she made that distinction clear without saying it, the way she made most distinctions clear, through the specific quality of how she held herself. She took my arm because she wanted to, because we were moving through dark forest terrain and two points of balance are better than one, because something between us had shifted in the corridor and the touching felt right. Those were

Kaia's POVI woke with my cheek against Killian's shoulder and for one disoriented second I had no idea where I was.Then the hip told me. It had a detailed report ready and delivered it immediately. I let it finish, then took a slow breath and did a proper accounting. Hip was bad but I'd walked on worse. Ribs unhappy but manageable. Head clear. The rest of me was in the specific hollow state that follows doing something enormous, when the body has spent everything it had and is now waiting quietly for instructions.Killian was awake. I could tell by the quality of the stillness. Not the loose, unguarded stillness of sleep but the present kind, alert underneath, the way someone is still when they're keeping watch and not wanting to make a thing of it.His arm was around me. He'd been keeping me from sliding for however long I'd been out.I sat up slowly. The arm loosened but stayed near, and I let it.Dax was across from us on a log, eating something from his pack with the relaxed con