“Your Majesty, more small packs came to pledge their allegiance to you!” Commander Landon reported with a smile. “Now the High Priestess won’t worry about us being the invaders anymore!” “So true,” Jace commented as well. “There are also rogue groups joining us too, thanks to Alpha Ethan’s intimidating reputation. They knew better than to fight with the former Rogue King!” I smiled and nodded. It was indeed great news. If this continued, we could expect minimum disruption to the citizens’ lives while achieving our goal of taking over Mirage. Meanwhile, we continue to proactively push Kal’s line south, out of our territory. Ethan and I didn’t see much of each other while we were in attack mode, because he was leading the army and looking over the data to see what was working and what we needed to improve upon now that his strength was more stable. But I thought about him a lot. Seeing him hold our son and rock him back to sleep when the boy was fussy was a permanent memory ingrained in my mind. I wanted to see if Ethan had changed his mind at all about what he had said about me when we were in the temple. He’d said he never loved me, but I had seen evidence that that might not be true. I wanted to find out if there was a chance we could actually be a couple and raise our son as a loving family. Since I didn’t get to see him very often, though, it made it more difficult for us to work on that. I pushed my personal issue aside and focused back on the patrol. I took my team out to scout around and found that everything was secure. I was just about to leave the area where we were patrolling when I heard some moaning in the trees off of the side of the path we were walking on. It sounded like a man in an extreme amount of pain. Exchanging glances with the people with me, I said, “We should check that out.” We were in our human forms at the moment since we were returning from our patrol. “Be careful,” Jace stopped me. “It could be a trap.copy right hot novel pub