The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 263

Chapter 263: Spy, Liar, Protector, Mine

"The Emperor is occupied with his own campaign. Our arrangement remains intact." Viremont’s voice dropped half a register. "But things are accelerating. I’ll have more for you next time."

"When?"

"I’ll send word."

He looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that should have been paternal and instead felt like an inspection. Checking for the daughter he built and making sure she was still standing where he put her.

"You’ve done well, Agnes."

The words landed on her chest, and she hated that they still mattered. Hated that somewhere beneath the manipulation and the lies and the girl she was becoming in spite of him, there was still a version of her that craved exactly this: his approval. A currency she had been collecting her whole life and could never spend.

"Thank you, Father."

He kissed her forehead. Mechanical. A stamp on a document.

"Go back before you’re missed."

Agnes turned and walked into the trees without looking back.

✦✦✦

Garrett Darkhowler had woken to a cold mattress and a missing mate.

The matebond had pulled him out of sleep the way a rope pulls a drowning man to shore: suddenly, violently, and with no regard for comfort. Agnes’s emotions had been broadcasting on a frequency he had never felt from her before. Fear, layered beneath control. Performance, layered beneath fear. And underneath all of it, a grief so tightly compressed it barely registered as a feeling at all, more like pressure in a sealed room.

He had followed her.

Through the eastern gate, past the patrol rotation she had memorized, into the tree line where the canopy swallowed sound and a father waited for his daughter like a handler waiting for an asset.

He had heard everything.

Every word. Every flat, efficient report delivered in the voice of a woman he loved and the voice of a stranger, simultaneously. Status. Position. Usefulness. The mechanical vocabulary of a girl raised on assignments instead of affection, delivering intelligence to a man who kissed her forehead the way clerks stamped documents.

He had heard ’Garrett trusts me’ and felt the matebond fracture around it, because the words were true and the context made them a weapon, and the woman saying them had chosen that weapon deliberately while standing six feet from the man who had built her into one.

He had heard ’Serena and I are on civil terms’ and felt nothing through the matebond at all, which meant Agnes had locked it down for that sentence specifically, which meant the sentence was a lie. Either she still hated Serena or she was lying to protect her. And if she still hated Serena, Garrett would have felt that too. He knew Agnes well now to know her tics.

That was the part Garrett couldn’t stop turning over.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify