ห้องสมุด
ค้นหา
หน้าหลัก / Werewolf / After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen / Chapter 20 — The Keeper of the Stair

แชร์

Chapter 20 — The Keeper of the Stair

ผู้เขียน: Lady Lovelock
last update วันที่เผยแพร่: 2026-08-17 09:15:18

I turned, because there did not seem to be a version of not turning that ended well.

She was standing at the head of a stair that had not been there a moment before, or that I had simply failed to see, which the last five years have taught me is usually the same thing. She was drying her hands on a cloth that did not need it. Idris had gone very still beside me, the particular stillness of a man recalculating his own authority downward in real time.

"Go and see to the damp in the east reading r
อ่านหนังสือเล่มนี้ต่อได้ฟรี
สแกนรหัสเพื่อดาวน์โหลดแอป
บทที่แล้ว บทต่อไป
บทที่ถูกล็อก

บทล่าสุด

  • After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen   Chapter 34 — The White Stair

    It went further than the tunnel stair from my first life ever had. Narrower, too, and colder with every turn, lit by lamps burning a blue-white flame I had not seen used anywhere above ground in either life. The Keeper didn’t speak. I counted steps out of habit, the same habit that counts exits in every room I enter. Forty. Sixty. Past a hundred, and then I stopped counting, because the passage opened out and took the breath straight out of me before I had worked out what I was looking at. Not beds. I had braced for beds. Files. Hundreds of them, shelved from the stone floor to a ceiling too far up to see, in a room built for the keeping of paper rather than people. One plain reading table at the centre. One folder lying open on it, waiting, as though she had known I was coming for hours instead of minutes. The air smelled of dust and old vellum and something mineral underneath. Stone that has never had sun on it has a smell. I hadn’t known that. “The White Stair isn’t a place,”

  • After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen   Chapter 33 — The Fifth Day

    Mara found us at the fish market on the fifth day of the week we had been given, weaving low and fast between the trestles with the look of a woman who has run the entire distance and would prefer nobody worked that out. "They've moved patient one." No greeting. Mara has never seen the point of them. "Lowest entry on the register — Temple seal, the one I could never get near. Her file isn't in the cabinet. No transfer note. No discharge recorded. As though she was never catalogued." She pushed the hair off her face with the back of her wrist. "Except the space where her folder sat has a groove worn into the wood. Nine years of being pulled out and put back." "Moved where?" "I don't know. That's the problem." A gull went for something on the ice beside us and she didn't so much as blink at it. "I asked the way you taught me. Carefully. Boringly. Like a woman with no interest in the answer. What I got was a long silence, and then an invitation to take the rest of the week off. Paid

  • After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen   Chapter 32 — What the Steward Knew

    The ordinary thing on the stair the next morning turned out to be a letter, carried by a runner too young to know he was holding anything worth reading twice. Three lines from Rowan, in a hand that hadn’t slowed down enough to be legible. Found the steward’s grave. Dates are wrong. First light — bring the manifest. We rode out before the sun cleared the ridge, the manifest folded inside Cassian’s coat and pressed flat against his chest as though it might otherwise take its chance and run. Rowan was waiting when we came up the lane. A small churchyard set into the quiet inner edge of the Territory line — half a dozen graves, a wall that had given up somewhere around the middle, grass nobody had cut since spring. He stood over a plain headstone with his arms crossed, wearing an expression I hadn’t seen on him before. Grim satisfaction. The look of a man who has finally caught a comfortable lie holding still long enough to be looked at properly. “Steward of House Thorne,” he said,

  • After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen   Chapter 31 — The Space Between Two People

    Cassian was already at the chandlery stair at six exactly, having walked the last half-mile faster than dignity required, Seraphina's warning still settling across my shoulders with every step. The evening had turned cold — the kind that comes in through a coat's seams rather than announcing itself — and I was grateful for the excuse it gave my face."You're unharmed," he said, not quite a question, and crossed the room to confirm it with his own eyes before either of us said anything else. His gaze went over me the way I imagine he checks a ship after weather, then settled on my face and stayed."Watched. Not harmed. There's a distinction, and I have grown tired of living in the gap between them."I told him everything in order — Darius's warning dressed as tenderness, Seraphina's confession in the garden, the grey coat asking after correspondence in my father's hall as though he had a right to ask — and watched his composure come apart by degrees, until by the end he was standing cl

  • After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen   Chapter 30 — What Seraphina Carried

    Seraphina found me in the garden long after Darius's carriage had gone, on the low stone wall where I'd once waited, in a life she can't remember, for a war to reach me. The evening had gone the blue-grey Moonfall takes on before the lamps, and the garden smelled of cooling stone and the last of the roses.She had a shawl drawn close, and wore the expression I was learning to read as her working up to something — chin lowered, hands busy with the fringe."You entertained the Alpha King's heir for forty minutes, and Father is composing his letter to Aunt Wren about it, word by deliberate word.""Father should save his ink. It was tea, not a proposal.""It's never tea, with a Blackthorn in the room." She sat down beside me, and for a moment neither of us spoke — which, between us, was its own small miracle. Somewhere beyond the wall a night bird tried one note and gave it up. "Elara. I need to tell you something, and I need you not to ask how I know it, because the answer will make you

  • After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen   Chapter 29 — Tea With a King

    Darius arrived at four exactly, which told me the years since the square had taught him punctuality, and he came alone but for two guards left correctly at the gate — which told me he'd thought about how this would look to whoever was watching.Someone is always watching, in this city. He'd learned that much, at least."Miss Vale." He bowed exactly as much as the occasion required and not a degree further, which was new; the boy in the square had bowed like a man who'd never had to measure the distance himself. "Thank you for receiving me on short notice.""You make it sound as though I had engagements to set aside." I poured, because pouring gives a woman something honest to do with her hands and a reason not to meet a man's eyes for as long as she needs."Don't you?""I have a father whose chest ends conversations on its own schedule, and a stepsister who's decided I've developed a scandalous interest in dusty statutes. My calendar is a tragedy this season."He almost laughed — the

บทอื่นๆ

บางทีคุณอาจจะชอบ

สำรวจและอ่านนวนิยายดีๆ ได้ฟรี
เข้าถึงนวนิยายดีๆ จำนวนมากได้ฟรีบนแอป GoodNovel ดาวน์โหลดหนังสือที่คุณชอบและอ่านได้ทุกที่ทุกเวลา
อ่านหนังสือฟรีบนแอป
สแกนรหัสเพื่ออ่านบนแอป
DMCA.com Protection Status