The Professor's Mate Clause novel Chapter 138

Book 2 Of The Professor’s Mate Clause

Chapter 1

FREYA’S POV

They’re willing to talk,” Elder Miriam says, sliding a folder across the table. “For the first time in twenty years, Ashvel has agreed to send a delegation to discuss treaty inclusion.”

I stare at the folder like it might bite me. Adrian, seated beside me, doesn’t touch his copy either.

“Why now?” he asks. “They’ve turned down every overture we’ve made since the original treaty was signed

“Officially, they cite a change in leadership priorities.” Miriam folds her hands on the table. “Unofficially, our sources suggest border incidents have increased over the past year. Skirmishes, resource disputes, a few incidents that could have escalated into something worse. King Ashveil may simply have decided isolation isn’t sustainable anymore.”

Or someone’s pushing him toward the table for reasons that have nothing to do with peace,” Adrian

says

It’s the kind of thing he would have said twenty years ago, back when every offer of goodwill got run through a filter of pure suspicion first. I used to tease him about it. These days, I don’t, because more often than not, he’s right.

“That’s possible,” Miriam admits. “Which is exactly why I want someone leading this negotiation who understands both diplomacy and danger. Someone the Council trusts completely.”

I already know where this is going before she says it.

I want to suggest Aurora.”

The room goes very quiet. Kai shifts in his seat across the table, glancing at me like he’s waiting for me to object. Adrian’s jaw tightens, just slightly, the way it does when he’s turning something over and not liking any of the angles.

“She’s twenty-four,” I say.

She’s your daughter, Miriam says gently. “Trained since childhood in diplomacy, fluent in three pack dialects, and she’s already handled two successful negotiations with the coastal territories. She’s more than capable, Freya. And symbolically, sending her carries weight. It shows Ashveil we’re serious. That we’re not just sending career politicians – we’re sending family.”

“That’s exactly what worries me,” I say. “You want to send my daughter into a territory that’s spent two decades hating everything her father and I built.”

“I want to send the person best equipped to build a bridge,” Miriam’s voice softens. “You did something no one thought was possible, Freya. You changed an entire supernatural system because you refused to accept the world as it was. Don’t you think Aurora deserves the chance to do something of her own,

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instead of just inheriting yours?”

That lands harder than I want it to

After the meeting ends, Adrian and I walk back through the compound in silence, the kind that isn’t uncomfortable so much as full-both of us turning the same fear over without needing to say it out loud

yet.

“You’re quiet,” he says finally.

“I’m thinking.”

“About Aurora.”

“About all of it.” I stop at the edge of the training yard, watching a group of younger pack members run drills in the afternoon sun. “She’s spent her whole life being ‘Freya and Adrian’s daughter.” Every achievement gets measured against what we did. I don’t want this to be one more thing she has to prove.

“Maybe it isn’t about proving anything.” Adrian comes to stand beside me, his shoulder brushing mine. Maybe it’s about her finally getting to do something that’s actually hers.”

“You’re not worried?”

“I’m terrified,” he admits, and something in his voice cracks just enough to let me see it. “Ashveil territory. Rogue Lycans who’ve spent twenty years refusing everything we stand for. Our daughter walking into the middle of it.” He exhales slowly. “But I remember what it felt like when everyone treated me like I couldn’t handle my own choices. I don’t want to do that to her.”

I lean into him, and his arm comes around my shoulders automatically, the way it has for twenty years now, familiar as breathing.

“When did we get old enough to have a daughter old enough for this,” I murmur.

“I ask myself that daily.”

We find Aurora that evening in the archive room, exactly where I expect her to be – surrounded by files, hair pulled back messily, a cup of cold tea forgotten at her elbow. She looks up when we walk in and immediately straightens, the way she still does sometimes, like she’s bracing for a lecture.

“Miriam already told you,” she says.

“She did.”

“And you’re here to talk me out of it.”

“No,” Adrian says, and I watch something in Aurora’s shoulders ease at that, just slightly. “We’re here because we wanted to be the ones to tell you we support you. Whatever you decide.”

She blinks, clearly not expecting that. “Really?”

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“Really.” I pull out the chair across from her and sit. “It’s dangerous. We’re not going to pretend otherwise, Ashveil is the one territory that never accepted what we built, and that makes it unpredictable in ways the rest of the supernatural world isn’t anymore.”

“But?” Aurora prompts, because she knows me well enough to hear the word coming.

“But you’ve trained for this your whole life. You’re smart, you’re steady under pressure, and you don’t need us standing behind you to prove you can do it.” I reach across the table and cover her hand with mine. “You just need to decide if it’s what you want.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, looking down at our joined hands.

“I want to do something that’s mine,” she says finally, echoing almost exactly what Adrian said an hour ago, and something in my chest aches at how alike they are without either of them realizing it. “Not another chapter in your story. My own thing.”

“Then go build it,” Adrian says.

Kai pokes his head into the archive room a moment later, clearly having been listening from the hallway So it’s happening? You’re doing the Ashveil thing?”

“Looks like it,” Aurora says.

“I’m coming with you.”

“Kai-”

“Not asking permission. Informing you.” He grins, dropping into the chair beside her. “Someone needs to make sure you don’t accidentally insult an entire Lycan court on day one.”

“I would never.”

“You called Ambassador Voss’s centuries-old negotiating style ‘quaint’ to his face last spring

“He was being condescending.”

“He was two hundred years old, Rory.”

Aurora throws a balled-up piece of paper at him, and he catches it laughing, and for a moment the archive room feels less like the site of a dangerous political decision and more like it always has – three siblings and their parents, teasing each other in a house full of love.

Later that night, after Aurora and Kai have gone to bed and the house has settled into quiet, Adrian finds me on the balcony where we’ve had a hundred important conversations over the years.

“Second thoughts?” he asks.

“A thousand of them.”I lean against the railing, looking out over the territory we spent our whole adult lives building. “But I meant what I said to her. She’s not us, Adrian. She gets to make her own choices, even the reckless ones.”

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“Even the ones that terrify us.”

“Especially those.” I glance at him. “Isn’t that exactly what our parents should have let us do, if they’d had the chance?”

He doesn’t answer right away, but his hand finds mine on the railing, and that’s answer enough.

Somewhere out past our borders, in a territory neither of us has ever set foot in, a Lycan King is

preparing to sit across a table from our daughter for the first time. I don’t know yet what that will cost us.

I just know we raised her to walk into rooms like that one without flinching.

I have to trust that’s enough.

D

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