The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 671

Chapter 671: Gentlemen, Meet Serena Frostborne

She picked up the first document.

Her eyes moved across the page at a velocity that had nothing to do with skimming and everything to do with Alpha speed.

Her body went still. Her breathing slowed to a rate that suggested meditation or mild catatonia. Her eyes tracked left to right at a speed that made the motion blur, each page turned with a flick of her wrist that was mechanical, rhythmic, the metronome of a woman consuming information at a rate that would have concerned a healer if the healer knew what he was looking at.

Document after document. Trade proposals. Border reports. Alliance correspondence. A dispute between two minor houses over grazing rights that had escalated into something requiring the Alpha’s seal.

She sorted as she read. Three piles emerged on the desk. Left pile: decisions that required the Alpha’s authority and would wait for Fin to wake. Center pile: decisions that the Beta or Gamma could handle with the correct information. Right pile: decisions that were already made and just needed the seal applied, the kind of administrative debris that accumulated when a king was too busy with everything else to rubber-stamp the things that were already resolved.

The right pile was the largest. Fin had been carrying thirty decisions that were already decided and just needed his signature.

She finished the desk in forty minutes. The filing cabinets took another twenty. The correspondence drawer, which contained sixteen unanswered letters in various stages of urgency, took ten, because Serena read each one, identified the required response, and drafted the response on a separate sheet with the sender’s name and the relevant context noted at the top so whoever signed it would know what they were agreeing to.

She stood. Straightened the piles.

She opened the study door.

Griffin and Knox were in the corridor. Both of them had come to check on her.

"Perfect timing."

Serena stepped into the corridor carrying three stacks. She dealt them like cards.

"Beta Sharpe. This stack contains decisions within your authority. The garrison supply request on top is urgent and has been waiting six days. The grazing dispute beneath it needs mediation rather than a ruling, and I have drafted talking points for both parties on the attached sheet. The remaining four are administrative approvals that require your seal in the Alpha’s absence."

Griffin took the stack. His eyebrows climbed by a fraction.

"Gamma Rainer." She handed Knox the second pile. "Intelligence briefs. Three of them contain information that needs cross-referencing with your eastern border reports from last month. I have flagged the relevant sections. The fourth is a routine surveillance update that can wait, but the fifth, on the bottom, references troop movements near the Viremont border that I would prioritize if I were you."

Knox took the stack. His eyebrows did something more subtle than climbing. They held perfectly still, which on Knox Rainer was the equivalent of a standing ovation and a parade.

"The third stack stays on the Alpha’s desk. Those require his authority and his alone. When he wakes, they will be organized by urgency with context summaries attached."

She paused. One question. Practical. The kind of question that confirmed she knew the system well enough to identify the one piece she was missing.

"Who handles the western trade correspondence? The drafts reference a contact I’m unfamiliar with, and I want to make sure the response template matches whatever relationship the Alpha has established."

"That would be Commander Ravenhall," Griffin said. "He manages the western trade corridor."

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