The Professor's Mate Clause novel Chapter 144

Chapter 7: KADE’S POV

KADES POV

I tell myself I was just passing through that corridor.

It’s not entirely a lie. I do have business in that wing most evenings, checking in with the night guard rotation before I retire. But I also know, if I’m honest with myself, that some part of me had been keeping track of exactly where Aurora’s dinner conversation ended and exactly how long it would take her to walk back to the guest wing, and that’s not the kind of awareness a man develops by accident.

“You didn’t have to intervene,” Rhys says the next morning, dropping into the chair across from me in the war room. “Bram runs his mouth. He always has. He wouldn’t have actually touched her.”

“He was threatening a Council delegate under our roof.”

“He was grieving loudly at a wolf who happened to be standing nearby. There’s a difference, and you know it.” Rhys studies me over his tea. “You didn’t intervene last month when Lady Corwin cornered the trade envoy from the coastal territories over tariffs. You let that play out for twenty minutes before anyone stepped in.”

“That was a trade dispute. This was personal.”

“Everything with Bram is personal. That’s my point.” He sets his cup down. “You went from zero to fury in under a minute for a woman you claim doesn’t matter to these negotiations beyond politics.”

“I didn’t say she doesn’t matter.”

“You’ve been very careful not to say much of anything about her at all.” Rhys leans back, arms crossed, wearing the expression he’s worn since we were children, the one that means he’s already decided he’s right and is simply waiting for me to catch up. “Which, frankly, tells me more than if you’d just answered my questions honestly in the first place.”

I don’t have a good response to that, so I don’t give him one. He lets it go, mostly, though I catch him watching me more closely for the rest of the morning briefing, like he’s waiting for the next crack in the careful wall I’ve been building around this entire situation.

The truth is, I don’t fully understand my own reaction either.

I’ve spent ten years training myself out of impulsive instinct. Every decision I make as king gets weighed, measured, considered from every angle before I act – that’s how you survive leading a territory that’s spent two decades being circled by wolves who’d love an excuse to say the Lycans can’t govern themselves. I don’t do reckless. I don’t do unconsidered. I have never, not once in a decade of rule, physically inserted myself into a confrontation between two nobles the way I did last night, cutting through a hallway the second I heard Bram’s voice go sharp.

I just knew, somehow, before I even saw them, that something was wrong.

It should terrify me more than it does.

+15 Bonus

I find her in the eastern garden that afternoon, reviewing treaty documents with a level of focus that suggests she hasn’t slept particularly well. She looks up when my shadow falls across the page, and something in her expression goes carefully neutral in a way I’m starting to recognize as deliberate

“Your Majesty.”

“Kade,” I remind her.

“We’re outside the fortress. I assumed the title still applied to public spaces.”

“The garden’s private enough.” I gesture at the bench across from her. “May I?”

She hesitates, just slightly, before nodding. I take the seat, close enough to see the tension still sitting in her shoulders from the night before.

“You didn’t sleep,” I say.

“I slept fine.”

“You’ve got the same look my Beta gets after a bad watch shift. Restless. Wound too tight.” I study her carefully. “Bram get to you more than you let on?”

“No.” She sets the documents aside, meeting my eyes properly for the first time since I sat down. “It wasn’t him. Not really. I’ve handled worse than a grieving noble venting at a dinner table.”

“Then what.”

She’s quiet for a long moment, and I watch her decide, visibly, how much of the truth she’s willing to give

“This whole thing is a lot,” she says finally. “Every person in that hall was watching me like I might set something on fire. And you-” She stops herself.

“And me?”

“You keep switching,” she says, frustration bleeding into her voice. “One minute you’re teasing me in a corridor like it’s a game, the next you’re defending me from Bram like it actually matters to you, and I don’t know which version of you I’m supposed to be negotiating with. It’s exhausting, trying to read someone who won’t stay consistent long enough to be read.”

It’s a fair point. It’s more honest than anything either of us has managed to say to the other since that summit hall, and something about the directness of it, the lack of armor in it, makes something in my chest loosen slightly.

“I don’t know either,” I admit. “Which version I am, I mean. I’ve spent ten years being exactly one thing, all the time, no exceptions. Controlled. Cautious. And then you sat down across a negotiating table and none of that held the way it usually does.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only honest one I have.” I meet her eyes. “I don’t know what to do with wanting to protect

+7 KADE POV

+15 Bonus

someone I’m supposed to be treating as a political obstacle. It’s not a category I’ve had to navigate

before.”

Something shifts in her expression, guarded still, but less brittle than it was a moment ago.

“I don’t need protecting,” she says. “I can handle Bram. I can handle all of them.”

“I know you can.” I stand, because staying any longer feels like a risk neither of us is ready to take. That’s not why I stepped in.”

“Then why?”

I don’t have a clean answer for that, or if I do, it’s not one I’m willing to hand her yet, not with everything

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