All Chapters of His Straight Pet: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Jude’s POV“You’re wasting yourself.”The voice slid up my spine before I could name it. Calm. Satisfied. His, all the way down to the way it rattled the inside of my teeth.I didn’t answer. I brought the blade down. Wood split, straw went flying. Knuckles tore open on splinters. Blood slicked the hilt and I smiled, because pain still meant I was breathing.“You call that fighting?” the voice asked, amused. “Swing like a man who thinks mercy will bow the world.”I swung again. “Shut up.” My words came out a blade.You don’t know what mercy is, he said. You never have.The mirrors along the far wall trembled in the strike’s aftershock. One caught the corner of my eye and suddenly I was staring at him.“Patience,” Calix said, from where he sat behind glass and dust. He looked younger than he’d been at his fall and older than any man should be—always that impossible age, always the same smile. “Strike true. Dr

Jude’s POVRaymond was waiting.He always was. Sitting upright in the high-backed chair, pale light cutting bars across his face from the latticed window. His eyes snapped up the moment I entered, searching, sharp, already reading the tremor in my stance before I could hide it.“You’re late,” he said. His voice was too steady. Too careful.“I was occupied.” My throat rasped; every word tasted like smoke. I could feel my veins burning, shadows dragging at my ribs, my body screaming for what only he could give.Raymond stood as I approached, his jaw tight. “Occupied bleeding yourself to death in the halls again? Or occupied deciding how much longer I’m allowed to breathe fresh air?”I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The sound of his pulse was too loud. His throat too close. The ache in me swelled until words were useless things.He saw it—the way my eyes burned, the way my hands curled into claws. He swallowed once, then squared his shoulders. “If you’re going to do it, then stop circling me l

“You nearly killed him, Dante — and don’t you dare grin like that.”Selene’s voice cracked like a whip across the chamber. The words hung, sharp as glass, echoing off the obsidian pillars that ringed the council hall.Dante didn’t flinch. He leaned lazily in his chair, draped in crimson silks, one leg hooked over the other. A cruel smile curled at his lips as if her fury was a fine vintage he intended to savor.“Nearly,” he repeated, tasting the word. “But not quite. Pity, isn’t it? All that smoke, all that spectacle — and still the boy walks.”Akira’s laugh was soft, knife-thin. “Walks, yes. But broken. You saw how his shadows convulsed. That wasn’t strategy. That was infection.”“Don’t speak in riddles,” Selene snapped, eyes flashing. Her bracelets chimed as she gripped the table. “We all felt it. The flare wasn’t his. It was older. Darker.”“Calix.” The name dropped like a stone into still water. This time it was one of the elders, Lord Marcellus, voice raw with age and unease. His

“It should have been mine.”The words slipped before Selene could stop them. Low, guttural, too sharp for the mask she’d worn all night. The forest caught them, swallowed them, but her throat still ached from speaking them aloud. She froze, clutching her cloak tight against her shoulders as though that could press the outburst back into her ribs.A vampire lord did not let her voice break. A vampire lord did not show teeth unless she meant to kill.She smoothed her lips into stillness. Mask in place.But her fangs throbbed anyway.The path back to the keep wound like a serpent. Moonlight glinted off the slick black roots that broke the earth. With every step, Selene could feel the anger pacing behind her mask, scraping its claws against her composure.One thought kept pulsing in her skull like a wound that would not close.It should have been mine.FlashbackA voice, memory-sharp, rose like smoke: her mother’s."You are our dawn, Selene."Selene was only a girl then, seated before a l

Selene’s POVThe word lingered. Betrayal. It was not an accusation yet, but it was a threat.Memories stirred unbidden: my mother’s hand on my shoulder, her whisper in the candlelight. Selene, you must learn to smile while they call you serpent. Let them think you harmless until the strike cannot be stopped.I blinked the memory away, letting the heat of it curl into my smile. “And tell me,” I asked, “do you suspect me of betrayal? Speak it plain, Akira. Or do you only enjoy the theatre of implication?”His lips curved—barely, but it was there. “If I suspected you fully, Selene, we would not be speaking. The knives would already be drawn.”I sat back, exhaling slowly, as if bored. In truth, I was savoring every syllable. He danced so carefully, as though my answer could tilt the board in either direction. And it could.“I stepped out to tend to my faction,” I said again, tone firm, dismissive. “No more. If you think me weaving secret plots, then perhaps your paranoia should turn inwar