MasukShare
Chapter six
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-03-05 07:32:30Hilda covered my fading bruises, styled my auburn hair into loose waves, and pushed me into heels I could barely stand in.
When I looked in the mirror, I didn't recognize the woman looking back. Beautiful. Confident. Unbroken. I smiled at her, and for once she smiled back like she meant it. The club was everything Hilda promised. Loud, crowded, overwhelming in the best possible way. We drank. We danced. We laughed. For a few hours I forgot the broken bond, the murder no one would let me deny, the auction and the dungeon and Corvain's nightmare eyes. I forgot everything but the music and the lights and the pure animal joy of being free. I was weaving back toward our table when I felt it. A presence. Powerful. Watching. I turned. A man stood a few feet away, and my breath caught in my throat. Silver-white hair that caught the club lights. Sharp, elegant features. Eyes like molten gold. He looked young, early thirties at most, but he carried himself with the weight of someone who commanded rooms without trying. "May I?" His voice was deep and smooth, aged whiskey poured slow. I glanced at Hilda. She gave me a wildly unsubtle thumbs-up. I came here to reclaim my life, didn't I? "Please." I nodded to the empty chair. He sat with fluid grace. "I'm Jake." "Liya." I gave him half my name on purpose. "Liya." He said it like he was tasting it. "What brings you here tonight?" "Needed to forget reality for a while." I sipped my drink, feeling bold. "You?" "Same, actually." His smile was easy. "Though reality's looking a lot more interesting all of a sudden." We talked. He was funny, quick, easy in a way I wasn't used to. He asked about me without prying, and I gave him answers that weren't quite lies. The knot in my chest slowly loosened. Then the pain came. Sharp. Sudden. It lanced through me and I gasped, my hand flying to my chest. "Liya? What's wrong?" The broken bond throbbed in time with my heartbeat. Somewhere out there, Dayn had moved on to someone else, and even shattered, even rejected, the bond made me feel the echo of it. He gets to move on. And I get to bleed for it. I looked up at Jake through the haze, and something reckless rose in me. "Do you want to get out of here?" His eyes widened slightly. "Liya, you've been drinking. Are you sure?" "I'm sure." I stood, unsteady, and held out my hand. "Unless you're not interested." He took it, his grip warm and certain. "I'm very interested. I just want you sure it's what you want." Another pulse of pain rolled through the dead bond. Fuck the bond. Fuck Dayn. "I'm sure." We barely made it out the door before we were kissing, and the moment his mouth found mine, something in me went still. Not pain. Not revenge. Something that felt, impossibly, like coming home. He pulled back, breathing hard. "Do you want to go somewhere better? My hotel's not far—" "There," I said against his mouth. Later. Now I just needed to feel wanted by someone who was choosing me back. "Come on." He kept asking if I was sure. That was the thing I'd remember afterward. Every step of the way, this stranger kept making certain the choice was mine. For the first time in longer than I could remember, it was. I texted Hilda one line — ‘leaving, I'm okay, see you tomorrow’ — and let him lead me to his car. I woke at dawn with a pounding head, in a room I didn't recognize, next to a man I'd met hours ago. Sober now, reality crashed down. ‘What did I do?’ I'd gone home with a stranger whose last name I didn't know. I hadn't thought about a single consequence. Stupid. So stupid.’ I was barely starting to piece my life back together. I slid out of bed as quietly as I could, gathered my scattered clothes, dressed in under a minute, and slipped out the door.
Bab terbaru
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty eight
“You think you have won, haven’t you?” she said, to my back, and there was something in her voice, some last coiled thing, that made me stop. “You think it ends with my son in the wild and me in a small room. Foolish girl. You don’t even know what you’re holding.” She laughed, low and awful. “Your sister knew. Kiara always knew. Why do you think she did it? Why do you think the Chain wanted your family gone and you sold and never dead? There are people who have been waiting a very long time for what runs in your blood to be born, and you’ve gone and born it, and now you’ve hidden it in a nursery and told yourself it’s safe, foolish girl.” Her eyes glittered. “Ask your King what the White Moon is. Ask him why the last one vanished. Ask him whose sister she was.” The floor seemed to tilt all of a sudden. “What did you say,” I whispered. But the Dowager Luna only smiled, the same bright terrible smile she’d worn over a girl beaten on a b
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty seven
The Dowager Luna’s performance saved her from exile and cost her everything else, which was a justice I had not planned and found I could live with.The Council believed her, more or less. They could not prove she had written the grain-contract letter in her own hand, because she was far too careful for that, and a mother’s grief is a difficult thing to convict. So they did not exile her. They did something the old woman found infinitely worse, though it took her some weeks to understand it.They stripped her of the Blackwood name, since there was no longer a Blackwood pack for her to be Dowager of, and they left her exactly what she had left me. Nothing. No title, no lands, no allies, no son, no protection. An old woman with a ruined name in a crown-administered territory, surrounded by the very servants she had once ruled, who remembered every cruelty and were no longer afraid of her.I went to see her once, before I left Silverpine for the last time. I told myself it
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty six
“Dayn Blackwood,” the Council speaker said, “you are stripped of your title, your pack, and your standing. Silverpine passes to crown administration pending its people’s protection. You are exiled beyond the borders of the seven packs, to live or die by the wild as a lone wolf, which mercy is more than you extended to those you sold. The Council has spoken.”Exiled. To the wilds, to die as a lone wolf. The exact sentence he had offered me in his office, the one I had climbed out a window to escape, handed back to him now by the Council he had thought he stood above.He asked to speak before they took him. It was his right, the last one he had.They brought him before the crown, and I could have refused to hear him, and no one would have blamed me. But I had come too far in learning to be the kind of person who does not run on boots and hands, and so I nodded, and let the man who had thrown me away have his moment.“I’m sorry,” Dayn said.The hall went very quiet.
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty five
The crown inquiry closed its case against Silverpine on a grey afternoon in the great hall, and I was there for it, which mattered to me more than I had let myself admit.I sat at the crown’s side, not the accused’s, in the deep blue that had become mine, and I watched the evidence go before the full Alpha Council one piece at a time, and every piece was one I had helped pull into the light. The auction ledger in the Silverpine steward’s own hand. The freight manifests placing a Chain courier at my family’s gate the night of the fire. The nursery assassin’s chain of payment, running back through a chartered labour company to a letter about grain contracts sealed in the Dowager Luna’s morning room. Ken’s cracked confession, taken before he was poisoned inside the crown’s own walls. And the library records, the vervain research pulled month after month from a terminal under my dead sister’s login.The hall was silent for most of it. Alphas who had come prepared to see a family
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty four
He opened his mouth. I will remember what happened next for the rest of my life, because I watched it, from three feet away, and there was nothing I could do.He opened his mouth to answer me, and his face changed, and his hand went to his throat, and the wolf beside him, the guard who had brought him in, stepped back a single pace with a stillness that was its own confession. Ken folded to the library floor with foam at his lips and his eyes rolling white, and by the time I got to my knees beside him the seizure had him entirely, and the crown’s healer could do nothing, and neither could I.Vervain. The same poison that had killed my family. Given to Ken, somewhere between his cell and this room, by a hand that had reached him even here, even now, even inside a crown inquiry, exactly as a woman in grey had reached my son through a wall.He was dying. He knew it. He looked up at me through the poison with the last of himself, and he used it, the way Corvain had used his
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty three
The library records broke the frame open in a single afternoon, and they broke it open in a way that stopped my heart.I had heard Ken on the phone the night my family burned. It’s done. Made it look like an accident. I had built three seasons of survival on the certainty that Ken had lit the match. And Ken had. The inquiry proved it twice over, once in the freight manifests that put a Chain courier at our gate the night of the fire, and once in Ken’s own account, which cracked within an hour of a royal interrogator who could not be bribed and did not care whose Alpha he’d served.But Ken had not planned it. Ken was a hand, not a head, and heads leave their fingerprints in the details hands never think to hide.The vervain. The poison in the gas line, the same poison the frame had claimed I’d been researching. The inquiry traced the research, as I’d asked them to, back through the pack library’s terminals to the exact machine and the exact login that had pulled every tex
Anda juga akan menyukai
My Alpha's Mark
JP Sina668.3K DibacaP.S. You're My Mate
Kylie. G941.8K DibacaDangerous Desires
Karima Sa'ad Usman596.5K DibacaPregnant, I left him To His First Love
Collins Patrick 547.9K DibacaTHE LUNA'S RITUAL
Gracie-moxiestar22 DibacaDivorced Alpha, His Luna Is Hard to Reclaim
Chelsea TW198 DibacaTHE LUNA WHO WASN'T SUPPOSED TO EXIST
Jessica M71 Dibaca90 Days To Win Back My Ex-Luna Back
Aya Starr24 Dibaca
