Mag-log inShare
The Truth
Petsa ng paglalathala:
2025-08-04 17:14:27The tall doors of the court creaked open just as the afternoon sun cast long shadows across the floor. Draven sat at the head of the long marble table, sipping dark wine from a silver goblet, bored and half-lost in thought, when Lord Varek barged in without being announced.
Draven raised an eyebrow lazily. “Someone forgot how to knock.”
Varek ignored the remark. His face was flushed with anger, his jaw tight.
“You’re not going to believe what happened,” he hissed.
“Then say it already,” Draven said, twirling his goblet in his hand.
Varek walked towards Draven, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “Garrick… he interfered. I was delivering punishment to that defiant slave, Sara, the rebel, and he dared to stop me. He stood between us like some savior… and defended her.” His eyes burned with restrained fury.
The wine in Draven’s goblet stilled. He leaned forward slightly. “Defended her?”
“Yes,” Varek snapped. “Pulled me away like I was the villain. Told me I’d kill her. Said she was just a girl.”
A long silence followed. Draven’s face hardened, his wine now forgotten.
“And?” Draven asked slowly.
“She spat in his face,” Varek continued. “Told him we’re all the same. But he just looked at her like, like he admired her.” He stepped closer. “There was something in his eyes, Draven. That wasn’t the Garrick we knew. The Garrick who slaughtered rebels without blinking wouldn’t hesitate. This one hesitated. He protected her.”
Draven rose from his seat, setting his goblet aside with a gentle clink. His voice dropped low. “Do you think he’s not who he says he is?”
“I’m saying,” Varek growled, “that we brought a serpent into our nest.”
Draven walked slowly toward the tall window, looking out over the walls of Bloodthorn. The wind stirred the heavy drapes beside him.
“I had my doubts,” he muttered. “But the markings... the eyes... the voice... it all felt like Garrick.”
“People can be made to look like anyone with the right tricks and spells,” Varek said sharply. “What if he’s someone else entirely? A spy. A pretender.”
Draven clenched his fists behind his back. His jaw ticked.
“If he’s not Garrick,” he said coldly, “then someone went through a lot of trouble to plant him in our midst.”
Varek stepped forward again. “We should strip him of his title. Lock him up until we find out the truth.”
“No,” Draven said quickly, turning back. “Not yet. If he is Garrick, we’d lose him. And if he’s not...” he smiled faintly, “then we watch. We wait. We let him believe he’s safe. That’s when people make mistakes.”
“And if he tries something again?”
“Let him,” Draven said, voice dark and sharp. “But next time, I’ll deal with him myself.”
Varek nodded, though his anger still simmered. “What about the girl? Sara?”
“She’s no concern. Let her rot,” Draven said dismissively. “But keep an eye on her. If she ever gets close to him again, kill her quietly.”
As Varek turned to leave, Draven poured himself another goblet of wine and murmured to himself, “Let’s see who you really are, Garrick... or whatever your name is.”
Pinakabagong kabanata
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance Vareks Performance
The morning after the poisoned cup, Varek became James's friend.Not gradually. Not with the tentative, testing quality of someone feeling their way toward trust. All at once, completely, with the confident ease of a man who has decided on a performance and committed to it so thoroughly that doubt has been entirely evacuated from the execution. He arrived at James's chamber door before he had finished dressing, carrying two cups of water and a smile the young man had never seen on his face before, warm and open and entirely, devastatingly false."Garrick," he said, extending one of the cups with the casual warmth of a man greeting a longtime companion. "You look tired. I thought you might need this."James looked at him.In the years he had spent inside this fortress he had catalogued every expression Varek's face was capable of producing, the sneer, the cold assessment, the barely contained fury, the smooth professional neutrality he deployed in Draven's presence. He had never seen t
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance The poisoned Cup
She came to his chamber in the late afternoon, two days after the morning she had stood at his door with red eyes and a trembling lip and a hidden knife. She came differently this time. No trembling. No performance of distress. She came with a cup of wine carried in both hands and a smile that was soft and warm and carefully chosen.James was at his desk when she knocked. Writing the daily ledger that Draven expected from the overseer of the slave camp, the columns of numbers that translated human suffering into the administrative language of productivity. He set down the quill and turned."Selena.""I wanted to thank you," she said, stepping inside, moving with her usual fluid grace, nothing in her body suggesting anything other than warm social intention. "For the other day. For being there when I needed someone." She extended the cup. "A small thing. But I thought of you when I saw it."James looked at the cup. Dark wine, the kind Draven kept for his officers, richer and deeper tha
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance The Glimmering Vial
Selena delivered the hair to Varek that same evening.By then her composure had returned so completely that anyone looking at her would have believed she had spent the day in perfect peace.Only her hands betrayed her.Even then, barely.A slight trembling.A tiny instability in movements that were usually precise.The kind of thing most people would blame on cold weather.Or exhaustion.Or nothing at all.She carried the folded piece of linen through the corridors of Bloodthorn Keep like a person carrying an ordinary object.Not evidence.Not betrayal.Not the first stone in an avalanche.The corridors were quiet.Most of the clan had already retired to evening meals or private chambers.Torchlight danced against ancient walls.Shadows stretched long and thin across the floor.Every footstep seemed louder than it should have been.Every turn of the corridor felt significant.As though the fortress itself knew what she carried.As though the stones were watching.By the time she reach
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance False Tears
She came in the morning.The knock at James's door was light.Not hesitant.Not urgent.Familiar.Yet something about it made the muscles between his shoulders tighten.James had been awake long before dawn.Sleep had come to him in fragments over the past few days, thin and unreliable, dissolving whenever his mind drifted too close to the unease that had settled inside him since Tuesday.It remained there now.A quiet thing.A patient thing.Like an animal hiding in tall grass.Watching.Waiting.The camp below his window was beginning to wake.Smoke rose from cook fires.Soldiers crossed training yards.Servants moved between buildings carrying baskets and water pails.The fortress breathed around him.A living thing made of stone and secrets.He had spent the better part of an hour standing at the window, studying movements that most people would never notice.Who walked with whom.Who avoided whom.Which guards exchanged words.Which messengers traveled faster than necessary.The
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance The Woman With The Knife
Varek chose his moment with the precision of a man who understood that timing was the difference between manipulation and revelation, and that the most effective manipulation was the kind that never felt like manipulation at all.He found Selena in the east garden on a quiet afternoon.The day itself seemed suspended between seasons. Golden light filtered through the tall ash trees that lined the stone pathways, painting shifting patterns across the ground. A gentle breeze wandered through the garden, stirring petals from the late-blooming roses and carrying their fragrance through the air.Selena sat alone on a weathered stone bench beneath an arch of climbing ivy.A book rested open in her lap.She was not reading it.Her eyes moved over the page from time to time, but her thoughts were elsewhere.Far away.Varek watched her for several moments before approaching.Most people mistook solitude for loneliness.Varek knew better.Solitude was a fortress.And every fortress had a gate.
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance The High priest
Varek left Bloodthorn on a night when the moon had hidden itself entirely behind a wall of cloud, as though even the sky understood that what he was doing required darkness to move through properly.He told no one where he was going.This was not unusual. Varek had always operated with a degree of privacy that the others in the fortress had learned, over time, not to question. He moved through the world like a man who had decided very early that information was the only currency that mattered and had spent his entire life accumulating it and releasing none. He informed Draven only that he had business in the outer territories, the kind of vague, administrative explanation that Draven accepted without interest because Draven had always trusted Varek's management of the things he himself found tedious.Draven would regret that trust eventually.But not yet.Varek rode hard for the first hour, until the lights of Bloodthorn had disappeared entirely behind the curve of the forest road and
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance The price for survival
James had barely closed his eyes when the unease began gnawing at him. The plan had been simple, Sara would surrender to Draven, bow her head, pledge her loyalty, and live to fight another day. He had convinced her of it the night before, though she had fought him with every ounce of spirit she ha
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance James revealed
The dungeon was alive with silence.Not the peaceful kind, but the thick, oppressive silence that pressed against the ears until it felt like a weight on the skull. The only sound came from a slow, rhythmic drip… drip… drip of water falling from the stone ceiling into a puddle near the far wall. Th
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance The bargain
The morning air was sharp with frost. A cruel wind howled through the high towers of the Bloodthorn fortress, biting at exposed skin and rattling the iron-framed windows like the dead begging to be remembered. But inside the Alpha’s court, the chill was nothing compared to the cold that settled int
Game of Alpha; Battle for Vengeance unbroken
The prison reeked of blood, rot, and forgotten souls.Chains clanked in the distance. Water dripped from somewhere unseen, the sound rhythmic, taunting. The deeper they dragged Sara into the underbelly of the Bloodthorn fortress, the colder the air became, like she was being swallowed whole by the
Maaari mong magustuhan
The Pack's Doctor
Cooper720.6K viewsAccidentally Pregnant By My Alpha Best friends
Alexis Dee534.4K viewsThe Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna
Jane Above Story2.1M viewsAlpha Leo and the Heart of Fire
Moonlight Muse851.2K viewsSurrogate for the CEO Alpha
Jamie Price153 viewsThe Ex-Luna's Return: No Longer His Doormat
Grace Grandi95 viewsMoonbound
Sophie Lane38 viewsThe Runaway Omega Bride
Nova Writes26 views
