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Chapter 14

Author: Callista Ivan
last update publish date: 2026-10-24 11:03:51

Chapter 14

The bell was still ringing when I realized I was running.

I had Alaric's arm over my shoulder, and he weighed a ton. Every step through the pines felt like dragging a wet rug uphill. Smoke thickened with each yard, gray and bitter, and behind it the sky had turned a dull, ugly orange.

"Cass." His voice was a thread. "Leave me. Go."

"Shut up and walk."

"The east wing..."

"I said shut up."

I heard boots crashing through the underbrush and dropped into a crouch, claws out. Catherine was
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  • LEAVING MY BETRAYING ALPHA    Chapter 41

    Catherine would never have said I left her. That was how I knew.The black wolf stood three feet from me, her fur oily and wet-looking in the cold light, and she wasn't looking at me anymore. She was looking at Alaric. Behind her, along the edge of the ring, a hundred red eyes drifted closer, blinking in no particular rhythm, like candles guttering in different drafts."Pull them out!" Mira had both hands on Alaric's arm. Her palms were blistering where they touched the ring's light, and she wasn't letting go. "Alaric, move!""I can't." His voice was strained. "My feet are in the stone.""Then break the bond!""No." He said it so quietly I almost missed it. "That's what it wants."The black wolf smiled. It was an awful thing on Catherine's face."Clever threshold-keeper," she said. "I can taste her fear of you, you know. She thinks you'll sign the seventh paper. She thinks you'll walk away the moment it gets hard.""She doesn't think that.""Doesn't she?" The red eyes slid to me. "Ask

  • LEAVING MY BETRAYING ALPHA    Chapter 40

    The first thing I noticed about Grace's chain was that it wasn't really locked.The shackle sat snug against her ankle, gray moon-iron with a bolt through the wall, and from ten feet away it looked perfect. But the hasp hadn't seated. A thin line of lantern light showed between the clasp and the body of the lock, no wider than a thread. A girl who had spent her life being the bait would know exactly how to make a trap look like a prisoner.I didn't say a word. I only touched Alaric's wrist and tilted my head a fraction toward the floor. His eyes dropped to the hasp. His jaw tightened once, then smoothed out."Nineteen days," Mira murmured behind me, with two fingers pressed to my neck. "By the mark. You've lost a day since yesterday, and I don't like how fast it's moving.""Noted," I said."Talk," Alaric told Grace. His voice was flat and cold. "Quickly."She told us, and she told it well. Catherine wasn't dead. She was in the Hollow's house, a room behind a door, and the ring in the

  • LEAVING MY BETRAYING ALPHA    Chapter 39

    Without Catherine, the world was too quiet.I noticed it at dawn, standing in the gray light behind the healer house with a loaf of warm bread in my hands. I couldn't smell the damp earth the way I should have. I couldn't hear the guards talking at the east gate. Everything was flat and muffled, like a house after someone has taken all the furniture out."Cass?" Alaric's hand settled at the small of my back. "You don't have to do this.""I want to."We buried Garrick Voss under the old pine at the edge of the cemetery, in the grave that had stood empty for seven years, beside the five men he had let die. Six stones in a row, and for the first time, all six had someone under them. Elena stood at the head with her shawl pulled tight. When the last shovelful went in, she stepped forward, took the bread from my hands, and set it on the fresh dirt without a word."Stale," she said quietly. "Every month, for thirteen years. And I never once thought to ask where it came from."Nobody answere

  • LEAVING MY BETRAYING ALPHA    Chapter 38

    The Hollow's idea of mercy was a kitchen.I stood in the middle of it, barefoot, with flour on my hands that I hadn't put there. It was Silvermoon's cookhouse the way it looked when I was twelve. Steam on the windows, copper pots hanging over the stove, a loaf cooling on the sill. Everything smelled right. That was the cruelest part. Whoever built this place knew exactly which smells to use."Do you like it?"The Hollow sat at the worktable with its feet up, a tall shape of black light with a face as smooth as a river stone. It was pouring tea into two chipped cups. Beside me, Catherine pressed against my leg, silver and small, her ears flat."Don't drink it," she whispered. "Don't eat anything.""I'm not an idiot.""You're my favorite idiot," she said. "Still.""I made it from your own memory," the Hollow said, pleasantly. "Nothing here is a lie. I only arranged the furniture." It lifted one hand toward the window over the sink, and the steam on the glass cleared like a breath wiped

  • LEAVING MY BETRAYING ALPHA    Chapter 37 (Alaric's POV)

    The silver went in just above my collar, and it didn't hurt.It was cold. That was all, a thin line of cold pressed into the black crescent on my throat, and then something deep inside me tore like a root being pulled out of frozen ground. The Hollow screamed. It used my mouth to do it, and the sound that came out was nothing a man should be able to make."Hold still, boy." Garrick's voice was rough and very close. His hand was clamped on my shoulder, and the other hand was driving the blade along the mark in one long, steady stroke. "Hold still and let it go.""Alaric!" Cass's voice, high and terrified."Don't come closer!" I tried to shout it. The Hollow shoved the words back down my throat, and for one terrible second, I felt it grab at every part of me, my spine, my lungs, my tongue, clinging like a drowning man."Kael!""Here." My wolf's voice came out of the dark, flat and furious. "I am here. I am pulling.""Pull harder.""I am pulling with everything."The blade finished its s

  • LEAVING MY BETRAYING ALPHA    Chapter 36 (Alaric's POV)

    The worst part was that I remembered every step.I had fallen asleep in the chair with my eyes on Cass, just for a moment, the way you close them in a long conversation. Then my hands moved without me. They gripped the arms of the chair and pushed me upright. My boots found the floor. I walked out of that room like a man wading through a dream, and I could not stop one stride of it."Kael!" I shouted in the dark of my own skull. "Kael, take it back!""Trying." My wolf's voice was a snarl, ragged and strained. "It is wide. It is deep. It is in every bone."I passed Mira asleep in her chair. At the head of the cellar stairs, two Silvermoon guards turned to challenge me, and I watched my own fist take the first one in the jaw. The second got an elbow across the temple. They dropped without a sound. I felt the crunch of it in my knuckles, and I would have vomited if I'd had a stomach to do it with."Peaceful," said the thing wearing my voice. It spoke to no one, almost fondly. "They are o

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