Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Alpha King's Breeder: Kabanata 751 - Kabanata 760

MariannaSoren meets my eyes through what I can only describe as a haze. The room looks and feels distorted, but that might be my mind trying to shield me from what I just heard and saw. Blake remains in the center of the room while Maeve backs away, her eyes wet with tears and her gaze darting from me to Soren, who looks livid as he tells his mate, “We’re done here. Come with me.”Maeve jerks into sudden awareness and turns her back on Blake. She leaves the room first, tearing into the hallway, her rapid footsteps the only sound in the vacuum of silence spreading through Blake’s office. But Soren turns to look at Blake over his shoulder with a rough sigh. “We’re going to talk this through. Don’t do anything stupid until we do.”I wait for the door to click shut. Blake doesn’t move from his spot in the center of the office, but… I have to do something. I have to say something. He beats me to it. “How much did you hear?”“It doesn’t matter. I wasn’t supposed to hear any of it, was I?

MariannaI wake up alone in the haze of another bright, sunny day. Summer heat pours over Moonrise as I slide out of bed and pull on a thin, silken robe over the tank top and shorts I fell asleep in late last night, after putting Skye to bed and rejoining Blake. He hadn’t woken up since I forced him to sleep yesterday, sometime in the early afternoon, but he’s gone now.. I blink back fatigue still clogging my eyesight and open our bedroom door, where soft voices drift toward me, carried on a warm breeze scented like maple syrup and freshly brewed coffee. Skye kneels beside the coffee table in the living room, a plate of half-eaten pancakes resting beside her. She looks up at me with a sugary grin before her gaze locks back onto the chessboard on the table. Blake turns his head and follows my progress across the room to where a breakfast spread has been laid out–pancakes, eggs, fruit, and an assortment of juices, but I reach for the carafe of steaming coffee, trying to will my hands

MariannaI get dressed, and then we’re ushered down to the basement of the castle in short order. Soren doesn’t set Skye down until we reach the web of hallways leading to what I thought were storage rooms but end up being an intricate, absolutely unreal, training facility built levels below the main floor of the castle. There, we enter a small arena of sorts, where several guards are already waiting for us, as well as… Sydney. Blake and I haven’t married yet, but Sydney is as close as he can be to a father-in-law at this point in time, and that’s written clearly on his face when Skye runs into his waiting arms, but his eyes remain on mine. Silent. Hollow with both grief and startling understanding. There’s no room for anything else, but I… I feel nothing but anger. Soren’s talking, but I barely register a word he says as I stare back at Sydney, my hands curling into fists at my side. I want to say what’s on my heart–that he should have known that Blake would become this, that he co

LexaSummer sunlight sweeps across the trembling fields of wheat–a wash of pure gold against the emerald face of the mountains just beyond. I lift my face to the sun and breathe in, letting the scent of what will be another prosperous harvest fill my lungs. It smells like… bread. Bread and apples. Bread and roasting meat. Bread and the ever burning fire at the center of the village, where lively chatter rises above the crackling embers, above the stretch of a laundry line being raised, above the sound of shutters opening and mothers calling out for their children to come brush their teeth before running off to play. Goddess, it’s good to be home. “Lexa! LEXA!” Chessie’s voice rips down the road, followed by her pounding booted footsteps as she races in my direction. I turn, catching her in the glare of the early morning sun, her wild blonde hair tousled from sleep–unbrushed–and her dress–the first dress I’ve seen her wear in over six months–wrinkled, like she picked it off the line

LexaTeshka isn’t known for its pristine beaches. The water here is gray and turbulent, the waves crashing against the shore to the songs of seagulls and the roar of the water lapping up the cliff faces. I watch the sunset over the horizon–watch it slip beneath the gray water, turning the sky a vibrant crimson that fades into streaks of violet, and as I look into the stars that slowly come into full view, I send another colorful curse down the empty mind-link to my idiot cousin Blake, who is the reason I’m stuck on the Goddess forsaken beach. It took four days to travel here in our wolf forms. We stopped to camp every night, not a single fire lit, eating no more than a few oatcakes and washing them down with whatever water we could get our hands on. My girls made haste because that was my command. I’m not here to fuck around–not with so much at stake. But the shoreline in Teshka, which spans nearly twenty miles before becoming so steep it’s completely impassable, is just impossible