Caspian’s POV
Garrick was waiting in my office when I arrived, a slim folder held in both hands with the particular care of someone delivering something they suspect will be unwelcome.
“Sir.
The Luna requested Ciara Arvendel’ recent itinerary.”
I sat down, set my pen aside, and looked at him.
“My mother had her followed.”
“The Luna has her ways.”
I took the folder and opened it.
Surveillance photographs, timestamped.
Ciara Arvendel entering the Leif Hotel with Duke Brenna.
According to the notes, this had been happening for at least three months.
I sat with that for a moment.
Disappointment?
No, not quite.
The honest feeling was closer to relief at a clean answer, followed by mild irritation at the time I’d spent in the past month attending events I’d had no particular interest in attending.
“Thank you, Garrick.”
My mother was in the private garden, cutting roses with a focused deliberateness that suggested she’d been expecting me.
“Mother.” I crossed the flagstone path and placed the folder on the bench beside her.
“Ciara Arvendel.”
She snipped a stem before answering.
“What about her?”
“You know what about her.”
She removed her gardening gloves with unhurried precision, her posture as composed as always.
She had the kind of bearing that doesn’t acknowledge the possibility of being caught at anything. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
“The file told you something useful?”
“That she’s been involved with Duke Brenna for three months, yes.” I watched her face, looking for something she didn’t give me.
“I’m not bothered by it.
She can see whoever she wants.”
“Then why,” my mother said, her deep blue eyes—the ones I’d inherited—turning to find mine, “were you attending social functions with her at all?”
I ran a hand through my hair.
“I was assessing her.
As a potential—”
“In six months,” she said, “you formally take the Alpha position and the company.
It would be better to have a stable mate established before that transition.” She touched my arm lightly, her tone softening from strategic to something more genuine.
“I don’t say this to pressure you.
I say it because the right partner strengthens an Alpha.
It matters.”
I looked at the obsidian ring on my right hand—the symbol of succession, the weight of what was coming.
“I’m aware of the timeline.”
“And I appreciate your awareness.” A slight smile.
“Now stop attending social functions with women you have no intention of pursuing, and please ask me before I’m moved to investigate the next one.”
Despite everything, I felt a faint warmth at the familiar shape of her.
“Stop investigating women I’ve barely spoken to,” I said, and it came out more gently than I’d intended, “and I won’t have to.”
Walking back to the car, my thoughts moved on their own to green eyes and a particular honeysuckle scent, and the way she’d sat perfectly still in the examination chair while her whole body trembled with contained rage.
Nothing special, Galen had said.
The slight smile that tugged at the corner of my mouth was inconvenient and entirely involuntary.
Danae’s POV
Eirwen’s apartment in the early evening: throw pillows in three different textures, framed prints of vintage Vogue covers, a small forest of succulents on every flat surface.
It smelled like her perfume and good coffee.
It smelled, in ways I hadn’t let myself register until this moment, like the only safe place currently available to me.
We’d settled on the couch with cups of tea.
Eirwen had changed into comfortable clothes.
The bruising around her bandaged cheek had started to deepen to the honest purple that means healing.
“I cannot believe,” she said, for what was genuinely the fourth or fifth time since we’d gotten home, “that you slept with Caspian Jorah and then told him to go fuck himself.
In that order.”
“Could we retire that sentence?” I asked, wrapping both hands around my mug.
“I’m not sure I ever can.” She looked at me with an expression that mixed awe and genuine concern in equal measure.
“Danae.
Are you trying to get yourself killed?”