Lahat ng Kabanata ng To Rule the Tsar Alpha's Heart: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

Valentina’s POVI have spent four centuries pruning the world into a garden that would feed me. Empires fell with the courtesy of a bow; kings died thinking their final orders were their own. And yet, for all that choreography, one thing eluded me: loyal blood.Blood that did not require thralls and bargains and the tedious maintenance of vanity. Blood that answered when called because it remembered the name of the caller and that name was mine.I almost gave up the hunt a century ago, when the last Drăculești registry burned under a minister’s “modernization.” Almost. But “almost” is the difference between mortals and us. I read the ash. I asked the smoke. I followed rumor into ledger, ledger into baptismal lie, lie into a little girl at Cross academy with quiet hands and eyes that never argued with authority.Dennise Lambert.My blood woke what her blood had always promised. Stage by elegant stage, she has set aside those clumsy human noises, hunger that begs, grief that sours, love

Dennise’s Point of viewAt first there was only the sound, a soft, endless hum that lived between silence and heartbeat. I did not know where I was.I did not know who I was.Then came the smell. Iron, rain, lilac. A sweetness that belonged to neither heaven nor rot.I tried to move, but my body did not belong to me yet. It was as if I were carved from marble heavy, perfect, and immovable. My mind floated somewhere above me, like a cloud trying to remember where the ground used to be.I didn’t dream this time. Not forests, not mirrors, not faces. Just a crimson haze and the whisper of a voice I didn’t recognize anymore, calm, cold, promising:“Sleep, my creation. When you wake, the world will bow.”And so I slept.When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was light.Not the weak yellow of candles, nor the warm spill of dawn but the kind of light that could have burned angels out of the sky. Yet it didn’t hurt. It kissed my skin like a welcome.I sat up slowly, the sheets sliding d

Dennise's Point of ViewDennise’s Point of View“Please don’t, I’m begging you.” A mother of three kittens, were begging at me as I raided the last panther house located at the far end of the forest. It was made of scraps like this family was kicked out from the rest of the tribe. I looked down at the three kids, maybe ranging from 6 to 9. They were scared and malnourished, the kind like they only eat once a day or not at all. “You can kill me but please not my children,” she begged. “Please spare them. They’re still young and I wanted them to feel the luxury of life I didn’t have.”I should have killed them but something in me, a small amount of strange feeling suddenly hit my heart. Pain, mercy. I don't think something in me broke a bit. “Go before I change my mind,” I said and watched her scramble, running away with her children. I watched them completely disappear before I burned their house and left before my team became suspicious. I used to tell myself that killing felt wro

Hessa's POVAce had been watching me for days.Not the way he used to, glancing, then looking away as if my face had set something gentle loose inside him. This was different. This was the stare of a king counting knives in his own dining hall. I felt it every time I crossed the mezzanine, every time I lifted a cup, every time I breathed too evenly in a room that smelled like his patience,thin, ironed flat.So I made myself small.I learned the routes the cameras loved least. I stopped cutting corners and took the long rails. I asked Stan for guard rotations with a smile I didn’t feel, hid my wolf’s restless tail under dresses, and let the staff see me fold Ace’s shirts in the laundry so they could tell each other a story I needed them to believe. Poor Hessa, trying. Poor Hessa, patient. Poor Hessa, good.But there is a thing that happens when a wolf pretends to be a lamb: her ears sharpen.It was midday when I heard her name. I wasn’t even trying to listen, not at first. I was passin

Dennise’s Point of viewThere’s something bothering me about those panthers I let live. They should have died, I know but something in me pushed hard, maybe mercy or pity. I don’t know. Kill, that was the plan, the pattern, the hymn I’d been taught to hum while my hands did holy work. Seven nights, a tribe erased, a map made clean. I had killed their scouts, their sentries, their mothers who fought with teeth dulled by hunger. I had kissed the air with my blade and the air had learned to bleed.And then I found the last den.It wasn’t even a den, just a belly of roots under a fallen kapok tree, sweet with soil and milk. Onr adult panther slept in shifts, ribs rising like black bellows. Between them, three kits, clumsy with newness, tried to fight a beetle and lost.I stood in the doorway of dirt and leaf, and something inside me hesitated.Not my hands. Those stayed steady. Not my eyes; they had learned not to flinch. It was a deeper thing, a piece I thought Valentina’s blood had fil