บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha Who Threw Me Away: บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

Selene’s POVLena arrives at half past two.I know it is her before I see her because Mara comes to find me in the east wing where I have been doing the thing I always do when I need to think — checking fixtures, straightening linens, putting my hands to ordinary work while my mind does what it needs to do without supervision.“There is a car at the gate,” Mara says. “Western plates.”I set down the pillowcase I am folding.We go to the front entrance together and I stand on the top step while the gate opens and the car comes slowly up the drive, and I watch it park, and I watch the door open, and I watch Lena Avery get out.She is taller than her voice suggested. That is the first thing I notice — she has height the way some women have it, easily, without apology, carrying it the way my mother apparently carried everything, which is without drama. She is perhaps forty-five, with grey threaded through dark hair she has not bothered to manage, and she looks at the pack house and then a

Selene’s POVThree weeks later.The mornings are different now.Not dramatically. Not in the way this week changed things, which was dramatic enough to last several years of ordinary mornings. Just different in the small accumulating way of things that have shifted and settled into their new positions and stayed there.I still make coffee at five-thirty.I still carry it upstairs.The difference is that some mornings Lucian is already in the kitchen when I come down, and we make it together without discussing whose job it is, and some mornings I am already in the study when he arrives, and he does not look surprised to find me there, and some mornings we are both late because the night before went long and the morning agreed to wait.These are small things.They are not small things.Bowen is better.Edna cleared him for full activity two weeks ago with the specific reluctance of a woman who knows her patient will immediately use the clearance to do too much, which he has done, and wh

Lucian’s POVThree days after Corvin arrives I find Bowen in the library.This is not unusual. Bowen is always in the library when he is not in the kitchen or the council chamber or a corridor he was not supposed to be standing in. What is unusual is that he looks up when I come in and closes his book immediately, which means he was expecting me.“Sit down, Lucian,” he says.I sit.He looks at me with those reading-ahead eyes and I look back and we do not perform anything at each other, which is one of the things I have come to value about Bowen, that he does not require performance and does not produce it.“You are going to ask her something,” he says.I look at him.“Not a question about the border dispute,” he says. “Not about Corvin or the eastern governance review or the Calloway waiver.” He folds his hands. “The other question.”I look at the books on the shelf behind him, old and worn and arranged with the care of someone who considers their order meaningful.“Yes,” I say.“When

Selene’s POVSeven months after the rejection, Ironveil has its first snowfall.It comes overnight, the way the first snow always comes, quietly and without announcement, and in the morning everything is different and exactly the same. The mountains are white at the peaks and the grounds are covered in the particular unmarked stillness of snow that has not yet been walked through, and I stand at the study window with my coffee and look at it and feel something I have been feeling increasingly this season.Contentment.Not happiness exactly, which has always seemed to me a word that overpromises. Contentment is more honest. The specific settled feeling of someone who is in the right place doing the right things with the right people and knows it without needing to announce it.Lucian comes in at twenty past six.He stops when he sees me at the window and then comes to stand beside me, and we look at the snow together without speaking, and the morning does what mornings do now, which is

Selene’s POVTalia arrives four days before the solstice.She comes through the front gate in the early afternoon with a bag over one shoulder and a woman beside her who is perhaps thirty, with the kind of face that pays attention to everything it looks at and does not advertise that it is doing so. Talia introduces her as Wren, simply, without the qualifying explanation that people usually attach to introductions when the relationship is new and they are still deciding what to call it.I notice the not-explaining.Wren notices me noticing.We understand each other immediately, which is the best possible beginning.The pack house fills in the way it has been filling in this season, gradually and without drama, people arriving and fitting themselves into the space without requiring the space to rearrange entirely around them. Corvin comes two days after Talia, which I did not know to expect because he did not tell me he was coming until he was already on the road, which is apparently a