Free Web NovelChapter 64: Chapter 64 A Banquet
_Author’s POV_ freeωebnovēl.c૦m
Nana Seraphine called Celeste at eight in the morning the next day.
Celeste was in the car on the way back from the Moonreign estate, which had been, as she had told Rowena it would be, a brief and professional visit.
She had delivered her message to Kaelen, no, her warning to him and his entire household. She knew she couldn’t go against an Alpha, but she wouldn’t mind burning all resources just to punish him dearly.
Kaelen had received the news and was scared, but as an Alpha, he didn’t let it show.
Plus, he felt Celeste was a woman, she wouldn’t do anything.
Celeste considered the visit a success.
She answered Seraphine’s call and listened for four minutes without interrupting, which was how long it took Seraphine to lay out the plan. When the older woman finished, Celeste was quiet for a moment.
“Three days from now,” she said.
“Three days is sufficient preparation time for an initial gathering,” Seraphine said. “The formal selection doesn’t need to happen at the first event. The first event is introduction. Rowena meets the candidates, the family sees who is worth considering further, and we proceed from there at Rowena’s pace.”
“She doesn’t know about this, does she? Celeste asked calmly.
“No,” Seraphine replied. “I thought it was better to have the framework in place before we discuss it with her. If we bring it to her as a question, she’ll say no and we’ll never get further than that conversation.”
Celeste considered this. It was, she thought, probably accurate. Even though this was a modern generation and things like this were considered absurd, she also knew Rowena wouldn’t agree to get committed again, and this was the only way to secure her happiness and future. She needed pups of her own to make her happy.
But again, she thought about Alaric and his feelings for Rowena. Celeste felt Alaric was wasting time confessing his feelings, so there was no need waiting around for him.
Rowena’s current state, injured, absorbed in the investigation, running on insufficient sleep and the trace compound exposure that the doctor was currently assessing, was not the state in which she would receive the idea of a formal husband selection with anything resembling openness.
She would see the urgency behind it, assume it was pressure rather than care, and close the door on it with the same decisive ideas she applied to everything else she had decided wasn’t worth her time.
Seraphine was right that the framework needed to exist before the conversation happened.
“Unmarried, under twenty-eight, fifth rank or above,” Celeste said, repeating the criteria back.
“From families with clean records and genuine standing,” Seraphine added. “No political alliances being managed through the invitation list. This is for Rowena, not for the family’s external relationships.”
“I’ll have the estate prepared,” Celeste said. “But grandmother, she chooses. Completely and without pressure. If she meets every candidate and wants none of them, the answer is none of them.”
“Naturally,” Seraphine agreed, even she wouldn’t want her granddaughter being pressured and forced into something that would end up like Kaelen and her first marriage.
Celeste hung up and looked out the car window at the city moving past and thought about her cousin.
Rowena deserved someone good.
She deserved someone who saw her properly, who didn’t require her to be smaller than she was, who could stand beside her without needing to be in front of her.
The banquet wasn’t a bad idea.
The timing was terrible.
The timing was also, Celeste thought, not going to get better on its own, and Seraphine had been right that waiting for Rowena to initiate this herself was waiting for something that would not happen.
She called the estate manager and began the preparations.
Alice, three days into the slow burn of her messaging campaign through the social contact near the Alpha King’s packhouse, received confirmation that the information had moved in the right direction.
The rumor now circulating in the circles adjacent to Alaric’s court was specific and pointed, was that the Ashthorne family was organizing a formal husband selection for the Marchioness, that candidates had been invited from across the region’s noble families, and that the family’s intention was to settle the question of her future definitively and away from any existing entanglements.
Alice had added one flourish of her own: that the family found the rumors of her connection to the Alpha King embarrassing and wished to dispel them publicly and permanently.
She did not know whether this would provoke Alaric into action. She thought it probably would. A man with a genuine interest did not respond well to being characterized as an embarrassment.
What action he would take was not something she could predict with certainty.
But disruption, in her experience, created opportunity. And opportunity was what she needed.
Her chest hurt consistently now. The deep ache had developed a secondary sharpness in the past forty-eight hours that she was managing. She had been given information from Celeste’s doctor about the compound’s reversibility, which was less reassuring than she had hoped, reversible at this stage meant possible, not guaranteed, and the timeline for treatment was shorter than she would have liked.
She needed her position in this house to remain tenable long enough for the treatment to be confirmed and initiated.
The banquet disruption bought her time.
Rowena had been at the werewolf police station for an hour when she confirmed what she had suspected.
The man in custody under Corby’s name was not Manager Corby.
He was a substitute, good enough to pass intake processing, carrying documentation that had been prepared carefully, placed in the cell before Gabriel’s transfer team arrived to formalize the custody. The real Corby had been moved out of the station through a channel that had been arranged before the arrest was even filed.
Rowena stood in the station’s evidence review room and looked at the intake photo and compared it to the image she had taken on her phone at the facility and felt cold as she realized she had found the gap in their plan and understood exactly what it cost.
Drake had planned for this. Before Dickson died, before the facility was discovered, someone in the network had arranged for a substitute to be in place if Corby’s arrest became necessary. Which meant the network had anticipated the investigation getting this far. Which meant someone inside the investigation had been feeding information out.
She thought about who had known about the arrest.
She thought about timing.
She thought about Gabriel’s office and the chain of custody and the window between her call to Kasper and Gabriel’s arrival.
She did not arrive at a conclusion, but she filed the question in the place where she kept things that needed answering.
She thanked the station officer, who had been cooperative and clearly embarrassed, and walked out to the car.
Kyra was quiet, not confused anymore, something more watchful.
“Someone is still inside,” Kyra said.
“I know,” Rowena thought.
She got in the car and told the driver to take her home.
There was work to do, and now there was more of it, and somewhere in the next three days a banquet was being prepared in her house for a purpose she didn’t know yet, and Manager Corby was moving through the world with his freedom and whatever he had decided to do with it.
She looked out the window at the city and thought about what to do at the moment.
Then she picked up her phone and started making a list.
