All Chapters of Alpha's Caged Mate: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

“Sometimes I can’t breath at the thought of the shit you’ve gone through because of me,” Xavier said. “It keeps me up at night. Eats me up inside. I’m a coward, Ava, and I failed us both.”Ava shifted from one bare foot to the other, focusing on the pricking sensation of the sticks and pebbles that bore her weight, preferring the physical pain to the floodgate of stabbing emotions that filled her at his confession. She gritted her teeth against the wash of tears threatening to overtake her.“If you want me to deny that just to make you feel better, I won’t do that, Xavier,” She said, her voice harsh with suppressed by years’ worth of bitter sentiment she didn’t have the words to voice. “I don’t…I’ve had to learn to live with a lot. It’s only fair that you do the same.”“If that will get me on the path to atonement, I swear to the goddess that I’ll do whatever you need from me, Ava.”“I don’t need anything from you.” Even as she said it, her feet brought her closer to where Xavier sat

Ava didn’t want to think about how she’d had Aiden stop by Marnie’s for one final favor of a piping hot shower to wash the scent of her mate off of her skin before she made her way back to her boyfriend’s home. It felt too much like a secret.She also didn’t want to examine too closely how she’d come to find herself sneaking back into the bedroom she shared with Noah, not to mention the fact that even after she’d been gone for hours in the dead of night, the light in his office was still on, and the sounds of his typing were still the only sounds in the large, lonely house. It just felt sad.No, life in the lake house was certainly not the same candy-coated dream it had been the day before. As it always did, reality had wormed its way into the cracks in the foundation of her perceived happy home and settled in like a giant, ugly earworm.And while it was true that she didn’t have the full picture at her disposal, the information Xavier had shared with her just made too much damn sense

“Think there are enough flowers here?” Dylan muttered, casting a derisive glare around the impressive field of assorted fae-approved flora and fungi gathered around the moonlit lake. “There has to be enough fort parfum de fleurs here to choke a bull elephant.”Xavier snorted but opted to keep his opinions on that particular matter to himself. “I wouldn’t say that too loudly if I were you, Miller,” he advised. “All of this shit was a special order.”“And they’d better fucking appreciate it,” Dylan spat. “The last two weeks of my life have been hell, putting together this dumbass little garden party. Do you know how hard it was to find flowering rowan trees in October? Apparently, plants don’t just bloom whenever you want them to.”Xavier nodded, acknowledging the impressive showing. And to think that it had been cobbled together on such short notice, no less. Three days ago, the field of flowers surrounding this pond hadn’t been here, and given the fact that they’d had to complete this

“What exactly are you hoping to find, Ava?” Bella’s voice rang through the speaker of her smartwatch, filling the spacious void that became of the lake house every time she found herself alone within its warm timber walls. With Noah away planning espionage, Ava had given Aiden the go-ahead to spend the weekend with Bren, leaving her all to her lonesome. The idea of being completely alone was a foreign concept to Ava, one that she quickly realized she was not a fan of. The house seemed to double in size in the dark, perfectly mundane objects she walked past every day, casting threatening shadows.Every time lake breeze rattled the trees outside or the home’s massive bones settled, Ava’s muscles tensed, convinced that one of the dozens of demons she’d left trailing behind her was just around the next corner.Noah’s office lay a perfectly lit beacon in front of her, but as she stood at the threshold, it was painfully clear that this was the most dangerous room in the house. To her. To

“What are you saying, Ava?” Xavier demanded from the other end of the line, but Ava was already on her feet and racing upstairs to Noah’s office.It was the work of mere minutes before she was back inside of Noah’s hidden study, where he had several live feeds of the Eclipse compound running on several monitors. As she watched, the cameras flipped through different areas around the Eclipse Alpha’s estate, from his study to an angle situated above the front and back gates.The small table in this tiny study was much more cluttered than Noah’s actual desk and, among the various notes and documents scattered around the area, Ava remembered seeing several maps. She exclaimed as she picked one up, realizing that she’d been right. Among the maps detailing the layout of the estate and its surrounding property was one that looked much less detailed and way more complicated.“It’s here,” she breathed, almost completely forgetting who was listening in on the other end of her cast aside phone. “