Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 105: Selara’s Offer

~LYRA’S POV~

I didn’t sit on it.

I walked back from the Silver Forest and I found Ryland first, he was in the corridor outside the operations room, still in the same clothes from the cleansing, which told me he hadn’t slept, and I said: "I need you and Eren and Cade in the strategy room right now."

He read my face and didn’t ask questions.

Ten minutes later all four of us were at the table. I told them everything. The clearing, Kael appearing faster this time, what he’d said before I could speak. Selara’s offer: she can push me out herself. Without the exchange. If I agree to bring something back with me.

I said it in sequence and I said all of it and I stopped talking and let them have it.

Eren was the first to respond. He was already looking at the documentation in front of him before I finished the last sentence, which meant he’d been running the analysis from the moment I said Selara’s name.

"She can’t be trusted," he said. He said it without looking up. "Not in any version of this. Whatever she wants brought out of the in-between, it is not a gift. It serves her. It serves whatever she’s been working toward for eight months of patience in a liminal space." He looked up then, at me specifically.

"She’s trying to bypass the soul exchange because the soul exchange is a controlled process. If Kael comes out through Tyran’s willing exchange, the transaction is clean, the Goddess’s balance is satisfied, the terms are met, what comes back is Kael and nothing else. If Selara pushes him out..."

He paused. "She controls what condition he’s in when he arrives. And she controls what comes with him."

"No," Ryland said.

I looked at him. He was looking at the table with the expression he got when he’d already decided something and the only remaining question was how to implement it.

"We don’t make deals with Selara," he said. "There is no version of this where we make deals with Selara. That’s not a debate."

"I agree," I said. "I’m not proposing we consider it. I’m telling you what she offered so we all know what she’s working toward." I looked around the table. "She approached him. She’s been patient for eight months and she finally made a move. That means something."

Cade had been quiet, running his own analysis in the specific way he ran things, building from available facts toward actionable conclusions. "What does the alternative timeline look like without Tyran’s exchange?" he said. "If we hold to the controlled process, what are we working with?"

Eren opened his notes. "Kael’s manifestations are becoming stronger and more frequent," he said. "Which sounds like a positive development..."

"But it isn’t," I said. Because I’d been waiting for him to say this since the last clearing visit, and I’d been thinking about what the acceleration actually meant.

"It isn’t," Eren confirmed. "The in-between adheres to whatever exists in it over time. The longer a soul stabilises in the liminal space, the more of the supernatural realm incorporates into it. In small quantities, this is what allows the manifestations to become clearer, he’s learning the channel, as I told Lyra. But the accumulation doesn’t stop at useful. It continues." He looked at the notes directly.

"At a certain threshold, the soul becomes too deeply integrated with the in-between for physical return to be possible. The soul becomes of that space rather than a visitor passing through it."

The table was quiet.

"How long?" I asked.

He looked at his notes for a moment. Not because he needed to verify the number, I could see he knew it, but because saying it out loud required the specific weight of having checked it again.

"Weeks," he said. "Possibly six. Possibly less, depending on the rate of the accumulation."

Nobody said anything.

Six weeks. Maybe less. After which bringing Kael back became physically impossible regardless of what exchange was offered.

"The decision is already made," I said. Not as a statement about authority. As a statement about what was already true in the room. "We proceed with Tyran’s exchange. The question now is timing, and the question is getting a message to Kael."

Eren nodded. "Yes."

"How do I tell him to refuse her?" I said. "He can’t just hear my voice in a clearing, he needs to understand why, and he needs to not take anything from her in the time between now and when the exchange happens."

"You go back to the clearing," Eren said. "Tonight. The channel is established now, it’ll be easier than the first contact. You speak to him directly and you tell him exactly what we’re telling you: Selara’s offer is a trap, the exchange is happening through the clean process, he needs to wait."

"And if she’s already..."

"He came to you first," Eren said. "He told you about her approach before he gave her an answer. That means he’s asking for guidance. He hasn’t accepted anything yet."

That landed where it needed to land.

—

I went back to the clearing that night.

He appeared within minutes. The channel was faster now, the frequency easier to hold and easier for him to find. Human form, ten feet away, the wide-open expression that I was still learning to receive without my chest doing something complicated.

"I know she approached you," I said. "Don’t accept anything from her. We’re coming for you the right way." I held his gaze across the distance. "Give us time."

He was quiet for a moment, the particular quiet of someone who was listening to something and checking it against everything else they’d been told.

"How much time?" he said. The water-distortion was less than it had been. Learning the channel from both sides now.

"Enough," I said. "We have the process. We have what the exchange requires. We just need to execute it."

He held my gaze steadily. The wide-open expression doing the thing it did now when he was thinking about something carefully, a stillness within the openness.

"Lyra," he said.

"Yes."

"She came to me in form of you."

The clearing was very quiet.

I stood with that for a moment. The specific quality of what that information was, the shape of it, what it meant, landed in the part of me that processed threat assessments and context simultaneously.

"She’s appearing as me to persuade you. Nice trick."

Kael was quiet

I came back from the forest with my mind running very fast in a very specific direction. Eren was in the archive, still working, he’d been there when I left and he was there when I returned, which was Eren.

He looked up when I came in. His expression did the thing it did when he was running information. Not surprise. The specific quality of a person who has been carrying a piece of something for a while and has just felt the moment arrive when it needed to be put down.

"Sit down," he said.

I sat.

"There’s something about Selara I found two weeks ago," he said. "Something I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you." He looked at me steadily.

"I think I’ve just found the moment."