บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

Selene’s POVI am already moving before Lucian fully turns around.The sentinel is at the edge of the tree line, near the path that runs along the outer wall toward the east wing, and he is not doing anything that would look wrong to a casual glance. Standing. Watching the house. The posture of a man waiting for instructions rather than a man who got left behind by accident.Nobody gets left behind by accident in a convoy like that.“He came with your father,” I say, keeping my voice low. “Which means he either has instructions to wait, or he was told to stay regardless of how the conversation went.”Lucian’s jaw is tight. “Or Corrin told him to.”Corrin.I had almost let myself forget, for the length of that conversation at the gate, that there is a man sitting in Lucian’s study chair with a filed petition on the arm of his chair and an unfinished gesture toward his coat that Mara’s voice interrupted.“Corrin is still upstairs,” I say.Lucian’s eyes go to the house. To the study wind

Selene’s POVHe talks for longer than I expected.Not in a way that drags. In a way that costs him, visibly, sentence by sentence, like a man walking across ground that keeps shifting under his feet and refusing to stop walking anyway. He tells the pack about the clearing. About what he said, almost word for word, and I watch several people in the crowd flinch at hearing it spoken aloud in his own voice, in this hall, three months later.He does not soften it.That is the thing I notice most. Bowen’s original plan, the one from the corridor this morning, had a shape to it — an Alpha who recognised his error, words chosen to manage a narrative. What Lucian is doing now does not have that shape. He says the word cruel about his own choice. He says I was wrong without qualifying it, without immediately following it with what he has learned, the way people do when they want credit for the lesson before they have finished admitting the mistake.He talks about his father last.He does not n

Selene’s POVI do not sleep much again.This is becoming a pattern I do not like, but for once the reason is not entirely bad. Last night, after the hall emptied and Halsey’s attendants had been settled into the east wing — the same wing Caden’s delegation occupied, which feels significant in a way I do not have time to examine — I lay in my room replaying the applause. The sound of it. The healer near the front, clapping first, before anyone else dared.Three months of being a ghost in this house, and last night I was not one.I get up before five anyway. Old habit. I make coffee for the study out of pure muscle memory before I remember that this morning is different, that I am not bringing it to Lucian, that I have somewhere else to be.I bring it anyway. I leave it on his desk. Two sugars, no cream.Some things do not need to change just because everything else is.Halsey has set up in one of the smaller meeting rooms off the main hall — not the study, not anywhere that belongs to

Selene’s POVNobody speaks.The room holds the specific silence of people who are all separately trying to work out what they do not yet know, and the answer, in this case, is the same for everyone. Whatever is in that letter — the full version, the part Bowen did not mention in the library — nobody in this room has heard it yet.Except Halsey.And from the expression on her face it is not nothing.I look at Bowen. He is standing very still beside me and his hands, usually folded, are at his sides, and that small detail tells me more than his face does because Bowen always has his hands folded. He is surprised. Whatever Halsey is holding, it is not the letter he wrote.Or it is, and there is a part of it he did not tell me about either.“Where did it come from,” Lucian says. His voice is controlled, but the flatness in it is the kind that sits on top of something that is not controlled at all. He has not looked up from the floor yet, and I notice, and I file it away.“Anonymous commun

Selene’s POVTomorrow.I say the word in my head the way you say something you are trying to make feel real by repeating it. It does not feel real. Twenty-four hours ago we had thirty days and a plan that needed compressing and last night we compressed it and now we have tomorrow and no plan at all, just whatever Halsey put in a preliminary report an hour ago and sent to a council that apparently does not believe in giving people time to breathe.“Why would she file preliminary findings already,” I say. “She has been here less than a day.”Lucian is still looking at his phone. “She said my report will reflect what I found here.” He sets it down. “She found enough to file something. Whether that something is in our favour or against us—”“If it were against us she would not have filed it at midnight,” I say. “She would have waited until after she had spoken to everyone. She filed it after speaking to Bowen. After speaking to me.” I think about the way she looked at me in the meeting ro