Chapter 166: A Vacation Slideshow From Hell

There are meetings that change history. There are meetings that waste time. And then there are meetings where an Alpha has to explain to a room full of elders that a princess straddled him in his sleep and tried to bite him into a permanent matebond, and the elders call it romance.

Rapid fire questions arrived all at once, none waited for an answer before the next.

"Arrested? On what grounds, Alpha?"

"Is she still being held? She is a princess, you cannot simply—"

"Does the High Luna know about any of this?"

"Arrested. That is rash, Alpha. Starborne will take that as—"

"Has Alpha Starborne been notified? Because when he is—"

Nova kept her face neutral. But internally, she was recalibrating because she had not known that the engagement fully ended. She had gathered it was fraying, but ended, on record in a meeting was a different story. And not only that, it ended an entire day before Celeste had showed up with needles. That made the arrest stop looking like a random act of crazy and start looking like the last move in a sequence Nova had only caught the tail end of.

She glanced sideways. Maria wasn’t reacting to a single word of it. Which meant Tavian had either briefed her or she was playing a poker face exactly as Nova was.

Alpha Thunderfang didn’t blink.

"She broke into my chambers."

"A spatial miscommunication, surely," the first elder offered.

Nova turned the phrase ’spatial miscommunication’ over multiple times in her mind and could not quite find how that worked.

The elder took the silence that followed as an opportunity to double down on it. "The royal wing is a maze to newcomers. Doors that look alike. An honest wrong turn—"

"She got through three locks." Alpha Thunderfang lifted three fingers.

"Resourceful. You want a Luna who thinks on her feet, Alpha. That’s initiative," a second elder said warmly, while the one next to him gave a nod like he had scored a point.

Sebastian tilted his head the way a dog tilts its head when it hears a sound that doesn’t belong in nature. Tavian mirrored it a half-second later.

"She was in lingerie. On my lap. While I was asleep," Alpha Thunderfang said slowly.

Nova kept her face neutral, but that was very weird.

"Affection." The third one spread his hands with the confidence of someone no longer listening to himself. "Young love expresses itself clumsily. My own late wife once hid in a wardrobe for—"

Maria leaned forward. Nova’s eyes went wide. Sierra leaned back. All three of them were bracing for impact from different directions.

Alpha Thunderfang cut the story off at its knees.

"She tried to force a marking."

"A grand romantic gesture," the first elder recovered, already rolling. "Permanent. Sincere. You cannot fault the girl for commitment, Alpha, that speaks to—"

Alpha Thunderfang raised his hand.

The elder stopped like his hand was a high-quality mute button.

"She has broken into my room multiple times," he stated into the silence. "I warned her the last time."

An elder down the table spread his palms, reasonable, patient. "Breaking into your room? She is your Luna, Alpha. Surely there is a misunderstanding somewhere in all this."

A dark laugh left Alpha Thunderfang. Beside him, Tavian snorted into his drink, the only honest sound in the room. It came out involuntary, amused, and completely unbothered by the diplomatic catastrophe unfolding in front of him.

"Yeah, no. There’s no mistake. I already had the guards drag her out."

"But she resides in the royal wing now, Alpha," the elder pressed, waving the loophole proudly like a flag that would make a difference. "A woman cannot break into a home she’s been invited to live in. The law requires intent to—"

"That was the appetizer," Tavian chimed in, "outside of the breaking and entering, which, yes, happened more than once. She took holo-images of the Alpha while he was unconscious. Then showed them to him. Like a vacation slideshow nobody asked for."

Three jaws dropped in a row down Nova’s side of the table. Hers. Maria’s. Sierra’s. That part was news to every one of them. None of their poker faces survived.

Tavian set his drink down with a satisfied click like he’d been waiting all meeting to say that and was just getting started.

An elder waved a hand through the air. "That is a woman trying to connect with her mate. Unconventional, I grant you. But if she showed you the images herself, Alpha, then she meant no harm. There was no secrecy in it."

Nova, Maria, and Sierra swung their heads toward the elder at the same instant, wearing the same expression, three identical faces of a thing that would not compute. Under any other circumstances it would have been funny. Not one of them understood the sentence that had just left that man’s mouth.

The logic that photographing an unconscious man was fine as long as you told him about it afterwards was fucked six ways to Sunday.

"She did it on more than one occasion," Alpha Thunderfang added, "and showed them to me on her holo-band after breaking into my chambers. I was unconscious for all of them. I consented to none of them. There is nothing complicated here."

A female elder leaned forward, warm, grandmotherly. "You have to understand, Alpha, a woman that committed to a bond will go to lengths that seem—"

"She walked the halls to reach my room wearing nothing. That is not the message I want a Luna of this pack sending my guards."

Maria’s poker face died. She didn’t try to revive it.

"She was trying to connect with you," the female elder countered. "And in this day and age, Alpha, a woman should not be ashamed of her body."

Alpha Thunderfang was unimpressed.

Maria looked at Nova with the expression of a woman watching a hovercraft drive off a cliff with no power, having no way to stop it. Nova looked back with the expression of a passenger in the hovercraft.