The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Chapter 263: Spy, Liar, Protector, Mine

"The Emperor is occupied with his own campaign. Our arrangement remains intact." Viremont’s voice dropped half a register. "But things are accelerating. I’ll have more for you next time."

"When?"

"I’ll send word."

He looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that should have been paternal and instead felt like an inspection. Checking for the daughter he built and making sure she was still standing where he put her.

"You’ve done well, Agnes."

The words landed on her chest, and she hated that they still mattered. Hated that somewhere beneath the manipulation and the lies and the girl she was becoming in spite of him, there was still a version of her that craved exactly this: his approval. A currency she had been collecting her whole life and could never spend.

"Thank you, Father."

He kissed her forehead. Mechanical. A stamp on a document. ƒreewebɳovel.com

"Go back before you’re missed."

Agnes turned and walked into the trees without looking back.

✦✦✦

Garrett Darkhowler had woken to a cold mattress and a missing mate.

The matebond had pulled him out of sleep the way a rope pulls a drowning man to shore: suddenly, violently, and with no regard for comfort. Agnes’s emotions had been broadcasting on a frequency he had never felt from her before. Fear, layered beneath control. Performance, layered beneath fear. And underneath all of it, a grief so tightly compressed it barely registered as a feeling at all, more like pressure in a sealed room.

He had followed her.

Through the eastern gate, past the patrol rotation she had memorized, into the tree line where the canopy swallowed sound and a father waited for his daughter like a handler waiting for an asset.

He had heard everything.

Every word. Every flat, efficient report delivered in the voice of a woman he loved and the voice of a stranger, simultaneously. Status. Position. Usefulness. The mechanical vocabulary of a girl raised on assignments instead of affection, delivering intelligence to a man who kissed her forehead the way clerks stamped documents.

He had heard ’Garrett trusts me’ and felt the matebond fracture around it, because the words were true and the context made them a weapon, and the woman saying them had chosen that weapon deliberately while standing six feet from the man who had built her into one.

He had heard ’Serena and I are on civil terms’ and felt nothing through the matebond at all, which meant Agnes had locked it down for that sentence specifically, which meant the sentence was a lie. Either she still hated Serena or she was lying to protect her. And if she still hated Serena, Garrett would have felt that too. He knew Agnes well now to know her tics.

That was the part Garrett couldn’t stop turning over. freewebnøvel.com

She had lied to Reginald Viremont. She had lied to the most dangerous man in her life, the man who had conditioned her since birth to fear the consequences of disobedience, and she had done it to keep a girl safe. A girl she had once poisoned. A girl she had drugged a prince to replace. A girl whose matebond she had systematically destroyed.

Agnes Viremont had chosen Serena Frostborne over her father’s approval, and Garrett had heard it happen, and the sound of it had cracked something open in his chest that he was never going to be able to close.

But she hadn’t told him.

That was the other part. The part that sat in his ribs like a blade turned sideways. She had been leaving this castle before dawn, meeting her father in clearings, filing intelligence, running a double operation inside his own territory, and she had done all of it without telling the man sleeping beside her. The man whose arm she crawled back under every morning. The man who had staked his name, his reputation, and his seat at a table of kings on the belief that Agnes Viremont had changed.

She had changed. He had just heard the proof of it. She was protecting the people she once tried to destroy, omitting information that would have handed Serena to Orosia, feeding her father a version of the truth that was carefully, surgically defanged.

She was doing the right thing. In the wrong way. Without him.

And the part that made his jaw ache from clenching was that he understood why. Because Agnes had never, in her entire life, had a man she could bring the full truth to. Every relationship she had ever been in, with her father, with Dexmon, with the crown she had chased across two kingdoms, had required a performance. Honesty was a luxury she had never been offered, and you cannot spend currency you’ve never been given.

She didn’t tell him because she didn’t know how. She didn’t tell him because she was protecting him the same way she was protecting Serena: by carrying the weight alone and calling it control.

He recognized it. Because it was exactly what his mother used to do did. The two women in his life who mattered most had the same disease, and the disease was called ’I will handle this myself and love the people around me by never letting them see what it costs.’

His arm tightened around her. She pressed closer, fitting herself against his chest with the unconscious ease of a woman who had learned, in spite of everything, that this body was safe.

"You’re cold," he said into her hair. The same words he always said. The same tone. The same warmth.

"My wolf needed fresh air," she said against his chest. The same lie she always told.

He pulled the blanket over both of them. Tucked it around her shoulders. Pressed his lips to the top of her head and held them there.

Agnes’s breathing evened out within minutes. The matebond settled into the low, steady hum of a woman who felt safe enough to sleep, and the guilt she carried was so familiar to her body that it didn’t even register as an elevated heartbeat anymore.

Garrett stared at the ceiling.

He was going to have to decide what to do with this. The honorable thing was to confront her. The strategic thing was to let it play out and feed the intelligence to Tiberon. The kind thing was to wait until she was ready to tell him herself, however long that took, however many mornings she crawled back into his bed smelling like pine and frost and her father’s cologne.

The Garrett Darkhowler thing was to do all three, in an order he hadn’t figured out yet, and to do them without breaking the woman who was, for the first time in her life, learning that love could exist without conditions.

His jaw tightened. His arm held.

Outside, dawn crept across Darkhowler’s walls, and the cook who had seen Agnes return looked away from the window, and the guard who had nodded resumed his post, and the world continued to turn for everyone who didn’t know what Garrett Darkhowler now knew.

Which was that his mate was a spy. His mate was a liar. His mate was the only reason Serena Frostborne’s location hadn’t been sold to Orosia.

And his mate had no idea that the man she was lying to was the only man alive who would love her for it.