LOGINAndrew's POVI knew Bella was lying.I had known she'd lie the moment she walked through that door with her spine straight and her face arranged into that blank composed expression she had been wearing since she woke up from that fall. Something had shifted in Bella since she lost her memory and I hadn't been able to put my finger on the exact shape of it but I felt it every time she looked at me, a steadiness that hadn't been there before, a quality in her eyes that was different from the crying obsessive woman I had been married to for two years.That woman had never been able to hide anything from me.This one was trying.The guards losing track of the carriage was the part that sat with me most. I had put my best men on her this morning, men who knew this territory the way they knew their own hands, and they had lost a single carriage on roads they had traveled their entire lives. That didn't happen by accident. Either Lucas had taken a route that made no sense for where she claim
Bella's POV "I don't understand what you're saying, Andrew." I kept my voice completely steady and looked at him with the blankest expression I could manufacture. "What do you mean?" My brain was running fast behind that blank face, turning over every possible angle, every direction this could go, every version of what he might know versus what he thought he knew, and none of the calculations were producing anything I could comfortably stand on. Andrew looked at me for one long moment. "My guards lost track of your carriage, you scheming bitch!" His voice cracked through the sitting room and I flinched, not dramatically, just a small involuntary movement in my shoulders that I couldn't stop before it happened, and Hailey looked up at him with those wide eyes and said nothing and I stood there and let the echo of it settle in the room. "Where did you go?" he demanded. Somewhere underneath the fear and the racing calculations and the flinch I hadn't been able to stop, something wa
Bella's POVThe packhouse told me everything before anyone opened their mouth.The servants were moving differently. Quieter than usual, smaller somehow, the way people make themselves small when something heavy is sitting in a room and they need to not be in the path of it. Nobody met my eyes when the carriage pulled through the gate. Everyone found somewhere else to be. I had been in this packhouse long enough to read that particular energy and what it meant was that Andrew was home and in a mood and everyone within his range was managing their distance carefully.I sat with that information for a second before the carriage fully stopped.Lucas brought it to a halt and I pushed the door open and climbed down and when my feet hit the ground I turned and looked at him directly where he sat at the front."Thank you, Lucas," I said.I looked him in the eyes when I said it, held his gaze long enough for him to understand that I meant it and that the weight behind it was real, that I reme
Bella's POVHe fell asleep before the transfusion even finished.I was watching it happen in real time and still couldn't fully make sense of it. One moment Ethan was sitting in that chair with his arm extended and his face doing its usual thing of giving nothing away, and then somewhere in the middle of the transfusion his eyes just closed. His breathing shifted and deepened and his whole body released from whatever constant effort holding himself at that particular level of control required, and he was just…gone. Asleep in the chair with his head tipped slightly back and his face finally, completely unguarded in a way I had never seen it when he was conscious.I stared at him.The physician finished everything quietly, disconnecting the line from my arm with practiced efficiency, and I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my free hand flat against the mattress and took stock of how my body felt. Dizzy was the most accurate word for it. Not dramatically, not in a way that made the
Ethan's POVI watched her hands shake against the fabric of her gown and said nothing.She was trying to put herself back together with the urgency of someone who had come undone in front of a person they weren't supposed to come undone in front of, and the effort she was putting into looking composed while her fingers trembled against the hem was something I filed away without letting anything show on my face about it.I kept my expression exactly where it always was.Still and unreadable. The same face I wore in war rooms and throne rooms and every room where the wrong flicker of expression gave people information they could use against you. I had been wearing it so long it no longer required effort.Serena had been dealt with.That was the primary outcome of the last few minutes and it had been cleaner than I had expected when I heard her voice at that door. She had cheated. That was the fact and the fact was all there was, I had no interest in her explanation or her regret or the
I did not turn around.The woman's voice was behind me and Ethan's eyes were in front of me and I kept my gaze exactly where it was because the look he was giving me left absolutely no room for anything except doing what he had just told me to do. It wasn't a request dressed up as an instruction. It was just an instruction, sitting in his amber eyes with the full weight of everything he was behind it, and every part of me that had a survival instinct understood that there was no version of this moment where I said no.I reached for the hem of my gown.My hands were not steady and there was nothing I could do about that. I pulled the gown up slowly and lifted it over my head and the air of the room touched my skin and I was standing in just my bra and my lace panties in front of the Lycan King and I kept my chin up because dropping it wasn't going to help anything."What the fuck, Ethan?"The woman's voice split through the room from behind me sharp and loud and I kept my eyes on Ethan







