Free Web NovelChapter 63: Chapter 63 A replacement
_Author’s POV_
Rowena vomited blood three minutes after Kaelen left.
She had made it to the small bathroom off the study before it happened, which meant Kaelen didn’t see it and Kasper didn’t see it and for approximately four minutes she managed to keep it entirely to herself.
She stood over the sink and looked at what had come up and felt two things simultaneously, the physical shock of it and a cold, clear fury at her own body for doing this now, in the middle of everything, when she had too much left to do to be genuinely unwell.
She cleaned up, straightened, and walked back to the desk.
Velvet was in the study when she returned, carefully arranging documents, actually watching the door from the study to the bathroom without being obvious.
She saw Rowena’s face and knew something was definitely wrong.
She said nothing in the room and just left, walked directly to the end of the corridor, and found Celeste.
Celeste arrived in the study in under two minutes, which meant she had been on the same floor and had come at something close to a run while managing to arrive looking like she had walked.
She looked at Rowena.
Rowena looked back at her.
“How much?” Celeste asked.
“Enough to be relevant,” Rowena said.
“How long have you been....”
“It just happened. Once. I’m monitoring it.”
Celeste sat down across from her and said nothing for a moment. She was thinking, which meant her expression was doing very little while considerable activity happened behind it.
“Kyra hasn’t resolved it?” she asked.
“Kyra is confused,” Rowena said, which was the most unsettling part. In the weeks since the seal broke, Kyra’s healing had been restoring steadily, the wrist, the smaller injuries, the general depletion from years of suppression.
But the ribs had been slow, and now this, and Kyra’s confusion made Rowena scared.
“There’s something in your system,” Celeste said.
“That’s my hypothesis too.”
Rowena had been turning this over since the bathroom.
“I need a doctor who knows what is wrong with a wolf,” Rowena said. “Not the pack doctor. Someone who has more knowledge than him.”
“I’ll have someone here by this afternoon,” Celeste said and stood.
“Kaelen was here this morning,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“He was.”
“And before you went to the bathroom.....” freёwebnoѵel.com
“He made me angry,” Rowena said. “Yes. That probably didn’t help.”
Celeste’s jaw tightened in anger.
“Don’t,” Rowena said.
“I’m going to the Moonreign estate,” Celeste blurted out.
“Celeste.....”
“He came to this house, in an official capacity he manufactured, and upset you to the point of.....” She stopped. “I’m going. It will be a brief visit. I will be professional.”
Rowena looked at her cousin and decided that some battles were not winnable and that Celeste visiting Moonreign was considerably less dangerous than several things currently in motion.
“Professional,” Rowena said.
“Entirely,” Celeste said, and left.
Alice had been in the morning sitting room when the news reached her.
She had not been meant to hear it, Velvet had been discreet and the household had been careful, but Alice had been in this house long enough to know which walls carried sound and which doors did not seal completely, and the conversation between Velvet and Celeste in the corridor later on had been audible to anyone standing in the right position near the sitting room’s east wall.
Alice stood at that wall and listened.
Her chest hurt. It had been hurting for three days.
Rowena vomiting blood was information.
Alice sat down and thought about something that even she found pleasing.
By the time Celeste swept through the sitting room on her way out, Alice had a suggestion prepared.
“Why don’t we host a spring banquet,” she said, before Celeste reached the door. “To select a husband for Rowena. Publicly, formally, and from noble werewolf families. It would put an end to Kaelen’s assumptions and address the rumors about her and the Alpha King in one event.” She kept her voice gentle and helpful. “It would position the family well. Show strength rather than......”
“Close your mouth,” Celeste said, without breaking stride.
Alice blinked.
“Whatever you are about to suggest for this family,” Celeste said, at the door, turning for just a moment, “is no longer your concern. Whatever happens in this house, whatever decisions are made about Rowena’s life, none of it has anything to do with you from this point forward.” She looked at Alice directly. “You are here because we haven’t finished with you yet. That’s the only reason. Don’t mistake it for inclusion.”
Then she left.
The room was very quiet.
Alice sat with it.
She thought about the banquet idea. She thought about Rowena, injured and slowed, focused on the investigation and not on the household. She thought about Nana Seraphine, who was Rowena only listened to.
She thought about the fact that Celeste had only told her to be quiet, not that the idea was bad.
Alice picked up her phone.
She sent a message to Nana Seraphine.
Then she sat back and pressed one hand lightly against her aching chest and waited.
Her secrets were out, yes. They already threatened her with legal consequences and she had seen enough of how these things moved to know that old women with performed fragility and complicated family histories were not the first ones anyone wanted to put in front of a court.
She had time and had moves left.
She was not finished.
Nana Seraphine read the message in her private sitting room at her estate on the city’s western edge.
Seraphine had watched Rowena come home and take her family’s house back and dissolve a marriage and unseal her wolf and investigate a criminal network and she had felt, watching all of this, Rowena deserved nothing but happiness.
Not this whole thing.
Rowena needed a mate. A proper one. Someone worthy, chosen on her terms, with the full ceremony that the Ashthorne name deserved.
The spring banquet was the right vehicle.
Seraphine set Alice’s message aside, she did not need Alice’s endorsement to make a decision, and began composing the invitations herself.
Unmarried men of good family and standing, under twenty-eight, fifth rank or above. A gathering at the Ashthorne estate. A formal selection, dignified and unhurried, with Rowena making the choice herself.
She would tell Celeste tomorrow.
She expected Celeste to resist initially and then come around, which was how most conversations with Celeste went.
She did not plan to mention Alice’s involvement.
That part was irrelevant to the plan and would complicate the conversation unnecessarily. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
In her own room, Alice sent a second message through a different channel to a contact she had maintained carefully throughout the past weeks, someone who moved in the social circles adjacent to the Alpha King’s packhouse.
The message was simple. It suggested that the spring banquet was being organized specifically to provide Rowena with alternatives to a certain powerful interest, and that the Ashthorne family was actively working to move her away from that orbit.
Alice knew about Alaric’s feelings for Rowena.
Whether that response helped Rowena or helped Alice’s own situation was something she was comfortable leaving to outcome.
She was old. She had always played long games.
She settled back into her chair and pressed her hand against her chest again and waited for the board to move.
Meanwhile, three floors up, Rowena was reviewing documents about Manager Corby’s transfer and noticing, for the first time, something that made her set everything else down and look very carefully at the chain of custody paperwork that Gabriel’s office had provided.
The signature on Corby’s intake form at the werewolf police station did not match the signature on his original arrest documentation.
She read it twice.
She read it a third time.
Then she picked up her phone and called Kasper.
“Corby,” she said, when he answered. “I need you to pull the intake records from the station personally. Today.”
“What am I looking for?”
“I’ll tell you when you get there,” she said. “But Kasper, go yourself. Don’t send anyone else.”
She hung up and looked at the paperwork again.
The real Manager Corby had not been in that station for days, she suspected.
Someone had replaced him.
And the someone had been in place before Gabriel’s team arrived, which meant the replacement had been planned well in advance of last night.
She put the documents in order and reached for her jacket.
