The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 375

Chapter 375: Her Baby Made Her Do It

The Gamma spoke again. "Drakenfell, Bloodmoon, and Shadowclaw will retaliate. They will send reinforcements."

"Yes. But the response time from any allied kingdom to Darkhowler will be delayed. We will hold the castle in two. Kill the heir before reinforcements arrive. Kill him, kill the matebond clouding my daughter’s judgment, and the political justification for intervention dissolves. No mate, no Luna, no alliance obligation. Darkhowler becomes an internal Viremont matter."

Agnes’s blood went cold. Kill the heir. Kill Garrett. The words landed on her chest and stopped her breathing, because her father had just spoken the death of the man she loved with the same casual efficiency he used to discuss supply lines.

"And ideally," Reginald continued, and the sound of whiskey being poured accompanied the sentence, "the alliance does send reinforcements. Bloodmoon is geographically closest. They are the second weakest. We take Darkhowler, Bloodmoon mobilizes, and we meet them with a force they are unprepared for. Drakenfell and Shadowclaw send support for both. The two most powerful armies on the continent now have troops committed to two separate positions across Skardos, stretched thin, supply lines extended."

The glass set down. The sound was small, precise, the sound of a man placing a piece on a board.

"Orosia invades both."

The silence that followed was the silence of a strategy being admired by the man who had built it.

"The Emperor’s forces hit Drakenfell and Shadowclaw while their armies are deployed south. Two fronts. Two weakened positions. The alliance fractures under the weight of a war it was never designed to fight on multiple axes, and House Viremont sits in Darkhowler with clean hands and a crown and a seat at whatever table the Emperor builds from the rubble."

Footsteps. Her father’s boots, moving across the wooden floor toward the window. Agnes pressed deeper into the hedge, the branches digging into her back, her silver-burned wrists screaming as she pulled her arms tight against her body. The hedge smelled like boxwood and cold soil and her own blood, which was still seeping from her split lip, and the blood was the variable she couldn’t control, because her father was a wolf, and wolves smelled blood the way sharks smelled it: from a distance, with precision, and with interest.

Reginald’s silhouette appeared in the window. He stood there for three seconds, looking out at the grounds, at the darkness, at the hedges that lined the eastern walk. His breath fogged the cracked glass. His eyes moved across the landscape with the practiced sweep of a man who trusted his security but verified anyway.

Agnes didn’t breathe. Her chest locked. Her fingers dug into the frozen soil beneath the hedge. The cold was eating through her dress and into her skin and she couldn’t shiver because shivering made noise and noise carried and the man three feet above her had spent thirty years training his senses to detect exactly the kind of disturbance a shivering body produced.

He shut the window.

Agnes exhaled through her nose in a stream so controlled it was barely visible. The fog of her breath dissipated into the hedge. Her heart was hammering against her ribs with a force that felt audible, and the thing below her ribs was hammering with it, a secondary heartbeat that was either solidarity or panic and was probably both.

She waited for the next rotation. Counted the boots. Watched the second pair round the southern corner and disappear behind the servants’ quarters.

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