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Chapter Thirty-One: Reunion

Author: Orion Vale
last update publish date: 2026-08-18 19:08:03

The second Sterling territory came into view, Ivy felt it a rush of warmth, the bond flaring so bright it nearly stole her breath. Not Kaelan beside her. Something ahead. Familiar. Steady. Her chest ached with relief before her mind could even catch up.

Rhys.

By the time they reached the gate, he was already moving, crossing the courtyard fast, like he couldn't get to her soon enough. Five days of dread and sleepless nights clung to him, tight around his eyes, but the relief when he saw her was
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  • MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET   Chapter One Hundred and Twenty: Home

    The ceremony grounds were smaller than I remembered.I’d spent a year imagining them huge. A dais as tall as a mountain. A hall that held two hundred wolves and swallowed me whole. In the gray light of early morning, with nobody here, it was just a plain stone floor, a raised platform, and benches stacked against the wall for spring cleaning.I walked to the centre and stood where I’d stood.I didn’t know what I expected. Laughter, maybe. The sharp cold taste of pine and smoke. But the air only smelled of old wood, wax, and the faint damp of a place closed for the season. Nothing here to haunt me. Just a room.I thought of the girl who’d stood here in her ceremonial dress. For one breath, she believed the Moon Goddess had seen her. She spent twenty-two years making herself smaller so her sister could shine, and for one breath she thought it might be over.I used to wish I could go back and tell her it would be all right. Standing here, I knew I’d been wrong. That wasn’t what she neede

  • MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET   Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen: What Kaelan Said

    Kaelan found me on the balcony where we’d always had our hardest conversations. It was early evening, the capital below us loud and ordinary, a city remembering how to argue.“You look different,” he said.“I’m not different. I’m just not carrying it.”“That’s what I meant.” He leaned on the railing, not close and not far. In the years I’d known him, he had never once stood in a way that took up more space than the moment needed, and I realised I’d stopped noticing that, which meant it had become who he was. “I’ve been thinking about what Corvin said. About the fourth thread. That the bond isn’t the answer, and neither is the choice, but that the two of them together are what held.”“I’ve been thinking about it too.”“The bond is still there,” Kaelan said. “I can feel it. I always will, I think. It isn’t going to go away because we’d both like it to be simpler.”“I know.”“I’m not going to ask you to ignore it. That would be a lie, and you’d hear it.” He almost smiled. “Well. You used

  • MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET   Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen: What the Light Left Behind

    The silver left my arm over the course of one night, like frost thawing from a window.By morning it was gone from my elbow. By noon, my wrist. I sat on the edge of Lady Wexford’s guest bed and watched the last thread fade from my palm. I waited for the grief. It never came. Instead, there was a quiet so deep it felt like hearing the world for the first time.The Unmaking was gone. So was the hum behind my ribs, the current under every word people spoke. For the first time since that night in the ceremony hall, I couldn’t tell when someone was lying.“Does it hurt?” Corvin asked, lowering himself into the chair beside me. He looked a decade older and entirely alive.“No.” I turned my hand over, empty and warm. “Is that strange? I thought I’d feel like something had been cut out of me.”“What did the first Seer tell you? That the gift wasn’t entirely theirs.” He smiled, the tired, fond smile I’d learned to read as pride. “I think what you gave tonight was never yours to keep. You lent

  • MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET   Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen: Remembered

    “I can’t give you back what you were,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t have it.”I know.“But I can tell you what unmaking is.” My voice didn’t echo. I spoke slow, like every word had to be carved out. “I spent a year learning it. It’s not just tearing lies apart. It’s finding what’s false and letting the truth stand. And the worst lie is the one that says you’re nothing. That there’s nothing left of you to find.”The dark trembled.“Something is left,” I said. “Because you’re still asking. Something with no self doesn’t ask to be finished.”I reached for the mark with everything I had left, but not to pull this time. I opened my hand.The silver rushed up my arm, cold as ice. I felt what it had carried alone for longer than anyone could remember a hole shaped like a name. A hollow in the world, the size of a person.“I can’t do this alone,” I said, and turned.I’d never let anyone carry this with me. Until now.Wren stepped forward first and laid her palm over my shoulder. “I see the edg

  • MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET   Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen: What It Wanted

    The chamber swallowed every sound. My words just vanished, snuffed out like a candle dropped in water. Whatever this thing was, it didn’t need a world where voices mattered anymore.What I want, it said, is to be finished."Finished with what," I asked.Being partial.The shape in the dark moved. For a split second, I glimpsed something beneath the stillness, a ghost of what it used to be. Maybe it once had a name, a place in someone’s memory, before it erased even that.I was not always this, it said. I had a shape once. A place. A kind, like your Hollow, like your Watchers. I don’t remember which kind. That’s the cruelty of what I am. I unmake. But I was unmade first. I don’t have the pieces left to tell you what I was, before forgetting was all I had."The first Seers," Corvin said slowly, understanding arriving even through the chamber's strange, sound-swallowing dark. "You're what they actually fought. Not a monster. A wound. Something that lost its own name so completely it star

  • MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET   Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen: The City That Forgot Itself

    Something was off about the capital. I felt it crawling under my skin before I could even see what it was.At first, I thought it was the buildings. But it was the people. The market in the lower district was still open, stalls lined up, coins passing from hand to hand. But nobody spoke. No laughter, no greetings, just a heavy silence that pressed down on everything. Vendors didn't call out. Customers didn't smile. Everyone just moved like ghosts, like they were stuck in a life they couldn't remember choosing."They're not afraid," Wren said, watching a woman hand bread to a child without once looking at the child's face. "That's what's wrong. They should be afraid. Something's taking pieces out of them every hour, and they're just continuing.""You can't be afraid of a gap you don't remember having," Corvin said quietly. "Fear requires knowing what you've lost. This isn't fear. This is simply what's left once fear has nothing to attach to."Lady Wexford waited at the palace gates. Fo

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