All Chapters of Too Late To Love: I'm Gone Alpha: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Chapter 61CHRISTIANAI thanked her and let the call end there because that was enough. I had planted the question in the mind of the person best positioned to ask it formally.The conflict of interest review would slow the process, make the council doubt whether anything filed by Annalisa Voss should be taken seriously. This alone would require additional documentation, before the panel reached its conclusions about whether to pursue the case seriously or brush it aside as a jealous woman misgivings.Time was what I needed.The secondary campaign was already moving by the time I finished the council calls.I had not started it myself. I had started it through three people who were connected enough to the regional network to seed a narrative without it being traceable back to me as the origin point. I made sure not to be tied back to any rumors generated by me, to make sure that I was innocent.Two of the women that I had chosen for the job of spreading the fake rumors- that Annali

Chapter 63ANNALISAHe did not put music on, which told me he had assessed the quality of the silence I needed and had correctly identified it as the kind that should not be filled. He drove with the focused ease he brought to most things, one hand on the wheel, his eyes on the road, and I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window and let the territory move past.The phone was in my bag.I could feel it buzzing intermittently even through the fabric.I did not take it out.The evidence was documented. The council process would resolve it. Those two sentences were the shape I was holding and I was going to keep holding it because the alternative was to let the notifications tell me how the story was being told and I was not going to be useful to anyone if I spent the drive home reading things I could not currently address.We stopped once.The fuel station was on the main road about eight minutes from the estate, a small practical sto

Chapter 65ANNALISAI sat with the phone in my hand and the silence of the room around me and I let myself feel what the call had done.I had expected to feel anger.Anger was familiar and useful and I had gotten good at working with it over the past four years, knowing its shape and its weight and how long it lasted and what it meant when it arrived. Anger I could manage.What arrived instead was something quieter and considerably more inconvenient.He is settled. Compliant. Mine.I sat with those three words and felt them do what they were going to do regardless of whether I wanted them to.There was an ache.I noticed it the way you noticed something you had been successfully not noticing, the moment when the thing you had been working around became too present to work around anymore. It sat in the middle of my chest and it was not large and it was not dramatic and it was not the devastating grief of someone who had lost something they treasured.It was smaller than that.And small

Chapter 67ANNALISAThe council chamber was colder than I expected.Not in temperature, though it was that too, some quality of the stone that held onto a chill regardless of the season. Colder in the way the room had been built. High ceilings, no windows at eye level, the seven seats at the raised table arranged so that anyone standing at the floor level had to look up to address them. It was architecture designed to remind you, before a single word was spoken, who held the position of judgment and who did not.I had read about chambers like this. I had never stood in one.Dominic was beside me, in formal dress, his expression doing the thing it did before difficult negotiations, settled and unreadable and entirely present. Dr. Henare was on my other side, her case files organized in a leather folder she had not opened once on the drive, because she had told me the night before that if she needed to open it during testimony she had already lost the thread of her own argument.We took

Chapter 69ANNALISADr. Maren spoke for twenty minutes without interruption.I let him.There was a version of cross-examination that came from cutting someone off, scoring small points in the moment, and there was a version that came from letting a witness build their full structure first so you could see exactly where the load-bearing walls were before you tested them. I had decided, somewhere in the five days of preparation, that I trusted the second version more, and watching him talk, I was glad I had.He walked the council through the timeline with the comfortable precision of a man reciting something he knew well. Eighteen months ago, Antonio had come to him with sleep disruption, a pattern of difficulty settling and frequent waking, compounded by what Dr. Maren described as "the predictable pressures of pack leadership." He had run the standard assessments. He had ruled out the standard concerns. He had arrived at a treatment plan involving a moderat