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Chapter 49: Where Rumors Take Root
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2025-05-27 13:18:59
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THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 51: How to Lose a Friend in One Folded Lie
For one perfect moment, I thought he was going to speak.His lips parted just slightly—enough to draw breath, enough to prepare a word. Something hovered there, unspoken, as if it had been waiting for the exact weight of silence between us to slip into. I froze, not with fear this time, but with a kind of morbid anticipation, the kind that blooms only when you know the person in front of you holds a question you’ve buried in your chest for too long.And then—“Atlas,” a voice called. Not mine. Not soft.It was male, clipped, confident—the kind of voice that belonged to someone used to summoning princes and expecting them to come.Atlas’s mouth shut with a quiet finality. His eyes flicked—once—to the edge of the corridor beyond the stairwell. Not annoyed. Not even surprised. Just… resigned. Like he already knew he wouldn’t get the chance to say whatever had been balanced on the tip of his tongue.A pause passed between us like a breath we had both been holding too long.He looked at me
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 50:How to Self-Destruct in Front of an Alpha: A MemoirChapter 50:How to Self-Destruct in Front of an Alpha: A Memoir
I didn’t see him until I was already crashing into him—shoulder to chest, breath to silence, movement to mass.There was a sharp intake of air—his, not mine. Mine had vanished the moment impact registered, the moment my palms found the firm, immovable fabric of his coat, the moment I looked up and found myself staring directly into eyes the color of crushed starlight—green veined with something deeper, colder, impossibly blue.Atlas.He looked down, startled, but not unkindly so—his brows drawn in the soft beginnings of concern rather than the sharp edges of suspicion. His hand caught my elbow, not as an instinct but as an inevitability. As though his reflexes had already known I’d be there before I did. The jolt of contact was subtle, just a gloved palm steadying my balance, but it may as well have been lightning wrapped in silk.He was warm—unreasonably warm for someone always cloaked in shadows—and impossibly still. His head tilted just slightly, and his eyes, blue veined with gree
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 49: Where Rumors Take Root
The greenhouse let us go gently—its warmth retreating with the reluctant sigh of moisture against glass, the fragrance of crushed mint and sweet rot dissolving behind us like the last breath of a dream we weren’t entirely ready to wake from. The corridors of Ashwood, by contrast, received us with their usual austerity. Polished stone beneath our boots. Cold air thick with hierarchy. The subtle pressure of unseen eyes. It was like stepping from some forgotten pocket of sanctuary into a world sharpened at every edge.Callum and I didn’t speak at first. Not out of tension, but reverence. The plan between us—newborn, delicate, still flickering with the tremble of risk—deserved quiet. It was a secret not yet ready to be spoken aloud too many times, lest it lose its shape or turn against us.The Legacy Common Hall rose into view like a cathedral carved from ambition and fire. Gold-fluted pillars framed the entrance. A chandelier the size of a carriage loomed overhead, its crystal drops catc
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 48: Baiting the Butterfly
The quiet in the greenhouse had taken on a different texture.Not peaceful. Not even still. It was the kind of quiet that came just before a decision—the breath before the blade dropped, the hush before a fire caught. Callum had stopped pacing, and I had stopped pretending not to be pacing. We both stood now, suspended in the soft damp air, surrounded by greenery that paid us no mind. The plants here didn’t care about legacy or pride or betrayal. They just kept growing. I envied them for that.He leaned back against one of the wooden trellis columns, arms crossed, gaze flicking from the misted windowpanes to the orchid leaves curling gently near his shoulder. His eyes were distant, still caught in the web of options we hadn’t quite untangled yet.“So,” he said eventually, voice low, like he didn’t want the orchids to overhear, “we need a reason she’d come to you. But it can’t look like it came from you.”I nodded, slowly. “It has to feel like her idea. Like something she’s choosing. O
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 47: Between the Ferns and Favors
A few days had passed since the night of the Pre-Ball, though the word passed felt too passive, too gentle, for what those hours had actually done to me. They hadn’t slipped by like soft pages turning in a forgotten book—they had dragged, hour by hour, inch by inch, and I had felt each one dig into my chest with the precision of quiet judgment. Ashwood went on, as it always did—bells ringing with cruel punctuality, hallways echoing with gossip, legacy students gliding through the corridors like they owned the dust and air alike—but I moved through it all like a ghost poorly pretending to still belong among the living.And Ingrid—Ingrid was silent.Not the kind of silence that meant she was too busy or tired, not even the ice-cold detachment she wore when she was trying to punish someone without saying it aloud. No, this was a subtler, sharper kind of silence—the sort that came wrapped in polite smiles and excuses about schedules, the sort that never confronted, never accused, but alwa
THE AUREUM TRIAL: BLOOD OATH Chapter 46: Between Her Questions and My Lies
The carriage creaked and lurched forward, its wheels grinding over gravel that still shimmered faintly in the wake of the Pre-Ball’s glow—but it wasn’t the sound outside that filled the space. No, the silence inside was far louder. It pressed in from every side, taut and unforgiving, like the tension between two bowstrings drawn too tight—aimed not directly at each other, but near enough that each breath felt like the shift before impact.I kept my hands folded neatly in my lap, the gloves still cold and damp from a grip I hadn’t loosened since we’d left the Blackwood estate. Half sweat, half nerves, entirely useless now. I angled my face just slightly toward the window, feigning interest in the nothing that flickered past—trees reduced to pale ghosts streaking across shadow. I couldn’t see a thing, but that wasn’t the point. It gave me something else to look at. Something other than Ingrid.I felt her gaze burning into the side of my head with the precision of a scalpel—calculated, u
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