LOGINShare
Chapter 43: When Names Become Trap
Last Updated:
2025-05-21 20:13:21
Latest chapter
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 45: Fleeing the Gilded Cage
Lucian Blackwood.He appeared like he’d always been there, watching. His presence was neither violent nor warm—it was measured, like a sword weighed before battle. Lucian Blackwood strode forward, not to Atlas’s side, but in front of him, intercepting Theo’s gaze like a well-trained hound catching a thrown blade mid-air.He looked at Theo with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “We won’t indulge your performances tonight, Voss. This isn’t your court.”Theo’s grin widened—something wolfish and theatrical, designed to needle under the skin.“Oh, Lucian blackwood. You speak like you still own the script.” He leaned in slightly, eyes glinting. “But the curtain’s already rising. Whether you like it or not.”I didn’t realize I had started to tremble. Just a little. The kind of shake that starts in your lungs before it touches your hands.I didn’t wait for the tension to ease or for someone to notice the way my chest rose and fell like I’d just surfaced from drowning. As Lucian Blackwood’s
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 44: Where Wolves Don’t Bow
The ballroom held its breath.The violins gave a startled whimper, bowstrings faltering against strings as if even the music recoiled. Conversations—once effervescent, polished with flirtation and politics—snapped mid-laugh, clipped in half, scattered like porcelain shattered against marble.And then, like a rip through silk, the heavy gilded doors at the far end groaned open—not with grace, but with challenge. No attendant opened them. No steward announced a name. They parted on their own, pushed wide by the kind of presence that made tradition flinch.A voice echoed through the hush, too loud, too smug, slicing through the stillness like a blade across velvet.“Well, well,” Theo Voss drawled, arms spread in theatrical delight. “It appears the party has started without me.”The words hung there, coated in venomous charm and mock surprise, but it was no simple greeting. It was a declaration. A provocation. A spark tossed into a ballroom drenched in ancestral oil.I didn’t need to see
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 43: When Names Become Trap
I didn’t want to turn around.Every instinct in my body screamed against it—told me to stay perfectly still, to let the moment pass like a bad dream or a flicker of thunder you pretend not to hear. But the way Ingrid’s face had gone pale, how her lips parted slightly like a caught breath and her eyes locked over my shoulder with something between reverence and panic—it made the dread crawl up my spine in slow, icy increments, prickling beneath the skin like snowmelt sliding between shoulder blades.I turned. Slowly. As if pivoting too quickly might trigger some ancient trap woven into the opulence of the ballroom floor.And there he was.Atlas Blackwood.Standing just a few feet away, framed by the dim grandeur of the chandeliers above and the shimmer of legacy-blooded heirs behind him, he looked impossibly composed—his posture regal without stiffness, his expression unreadable but not unkind, the sharp lines of his jaw softened only slightly by the warm light cascading from the float
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 42: An Omega’s Guide to Swift Social Suicide
A hand landed on my shoulder.Not gently. Not ominously. Just suddenly—without warning, without ceremony, without the dignity of a whisper before intrusion—and it might as well have been a dagger driven between my ribs.For a moment—just one—after the hand landed on my shoulder, time did not merely pause. It fractured. Shattered into brittle slivers that pierced my ribs, each heartbeat a sharp, unrelenting thud against the delicate glass of my composure. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t turn. Couldn’t blink. My body had seized with the certainty of ruin, paralyzed by the thought that Headmistress Greta had found me, had dragged Lucian Blackwood across the marble floor to deliver judgment in full view of Ashwood’s elite.But when I spun—too fast, my cloak snagging briefly on the edge of the pillar—it wasn’t the Headmistress.It was Ingrid. Of course it was.“You gods-damned—!” I hissed, hand flying to my chest, as if I could scold the panic back into submission. “Ingrid, I swear on every s
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 41: Where Legacy Wore Its Own Reflection
I didn’t remember walking through the threshold.One moment, I was a girl unclasping her cloak at the estate’s entrance—bare fingers brushing against the woolen collar, the air too warm, the lighting too gold—and the next, I was somewhere else entirely. Drenched in sound and shimmer. Light blooming across every surface. The air perfumed with spellwork and winter citrus, honeyed wine and something older, darker, threaded beneath it all like a memory you couldn’t quite name but still somehow feared.I stood at the top of a shallow descending stair, just past the vestibule’s inner arch, and the ballroom stretched before me like something pulled from the ruins of a half-forgotten myth. Grand didn’t feel like the right word. Grand was a cathedral. A palace. This was older. Hungrier. A monument to power so ancient it had forgotten how to speak in anything less than opulence. Everything gleamed—walls panelled in lacquered ashwood so dark it caught reflections like a still lake at night, floo
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 40: Led Like a Lamb
For a moment—a long, aching moment that seemed to suspend itself outside the flow of ordinary time—I sat there, paralyzed by the horror of what I believed I had done. The weight of it bore down on me with a suffocating finality, a terrible certainty that I had spoken the words aloud, that the ugly, jagged truth had torn itself free from the fragile prison of my mind and now hung between us, irreversible, unerasable. I thought I had ruined everything. . My heart hammered against my ribs, wild and frenzied, as if it, too, sought some desperate means of escape. I could already imagine the narrowing of Lord Evander’s pale eyes, the tightening of his mouth into a grim line, the cold shift of his manner from politely indifferent to dangerously intent.But then, very slowly, reality began to filter back through the thick fog of panic—first in the steady rhythm of the carriage wheels slowing against the snow-muffled road, then in the low murmur of voices weaving seamlessly together, so ordina
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 39: A Carriage Built on Lies
I didn’t remember climbing into the carriage.One moment, I stood in the hush of a splintered choice, Ingrid’s plea still echoing between my ribs, and the next I was seated across from Lord Evander Dorne, my gloved hands folded so tightly in my lap that the edges of my nails bit crescent moons into the soft leather. The inside of the carriage was warmer than the outside world, though not by much; a muted cold still clung to the velvet seats and crept beneath the folds of my borrowed cloak, as if even the air itself had second thoughts about the path we had chosen.Ingrid sat to my left, her posture a careful study in relaxed elegance—one ankle tucked just so behind the other, chin lifted at an angle that suggested she had long ago grown accustomed to the attentions of noblemen, even if we both knew that was far from the truth. Lena had, with a kind of shy practicality that I now bitterly envied, refused to come. She had hesitated for only a heartbeat before stepping back from the carr
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 38: The Cost of a Fantasy
Ingrid did not wait for permission.As though the cold had melted from her bones the moment opportunity came calling, she strode forward, leaving behind the half-stilled hush of snow and carriage wheels, the tangled breath of hesitation I still hadn’t exhaled. The hem of her cloak, a faded garnet shade, caught on a patch of slush but she didn’t notice—or perhaps she didn’t care. She had the gleam in her eyes again. The one that meant she’d already decided how the rest of the scene would unfold, and all we were meant to do was follow the script she was writing as she went.“My lord,” she called out, her voice alight with an elegance that felt borrowed but not unfitting, “I do hope we’re not interrupting anything too serious.”The man—Evander Dorne, Lena had said, and the name still clung to the edges of my thoughts like smoke to fabric—turned his head at the sound, the folds of his pale outer cloak shifting ever so slightly as he did. He looked as though he’d stepped out of a portrait
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 37: Silver-Stuck and Southern-Born
The carriage had slowed to an unnerving halt, and I could feel the sudden tension hanging in the air like a thick, suffocating blanket. The quiet rush of the horses’ hooves had dulled, and the rhythmic sway of the carriage had come to an abrupt end. For a moment, all I could hear was the wind howling outside, rattling the windows with icy fingers. It was as though time itself had stopped, and in the stillness, my unease began to grow."Why did we stop?" Lena’s voice sliced through the quiet, sharp and questioning. Her eyes flicked toward the curtained windows, though she could see nothing but the blur of snow outside.Ingrid, sitting opposite me, didn’t immediately answer. Her gaze was distant, though her fingers lightly drummed against the seat, a subtle sign of her own impatience. She stared out the window, though I suspected she could already feel the same oddness in the air that I did. "Maybe the driver noticed something ahead," she said, though her tone was laced with uncertainty
You may also like
Alpha Jax
C.J. Primer782.4K viewsTHE LYCAN KING’S SECOND CHANCE MATE
Sumi606.8K viewsThe Silver Wolf
Ly_123548.7K viewsThe Alpha's Tough Girl
Sadieperez9436.0K viewsDESIRED BY MY LYCAN EX AND THE BETA
Rach's pen94 viewsMated To The Enemy Alpha
Jennifer M. Lopez929 viewsI Came Back For My Alpha and Mate
Ọma Estelle 323 viewsA Night With The Alpha King: Rejected And Reclaimed
C-Emmzy4.9K views
