All Chapters of To Rule the Tsar Alpha's Heart: Chapter 71 - Chapter 78

I woke to the quiet surroundings. It was in a medical wing’s smell of clorox or the Cave’s quiet hospital bed but the polished silence of a house I used to visit when I was a kid, an assassin-in-training. The sheets were too smooth and the scented candle on the nightstand burning a smell that tried too hard to be comfortable. For a moment I didn’t move, testing my body the way I’d been self-taught since I had wounds. I blink, breathe slowly and flex the small muscles first, count what hurts.Except… the pain wasn’t there.It should’ve been. Hessa craved me with her anger with her claws; I know that now in a way I wish I didn’t. She wanted me dead.Last night the wounds screamed every time I breathed. Now the burn was… dulled, distant, a bruise remembered instead of a blade still inside me. I pressed my palm to my bandages and felt only a tug and a faint throb. What happened?Suddenly, the door clicked softly. Maria slipped in on cat feet, her tray balanced on her hand. She was older

Dennise point of ViewThe study smelled like polished wood and old books. Valentina sat in a spill of light at the great desk, hair an arrangement that made paintings jealous, the line of her mouth more delicate than anyone else. “…Make it ready,” she said, each word deliberate. Then, with a small flick of her wrist, she ended the call.Valentina sat behind her grand mahogany desk, her posture perfect, her blonde hair falling loose around her shoulders instead of pinned in one of her elaborate crowns. A faint glow from her laptop screen painted her features as she spoke into the camera.Her gaze lifted to me as she slipped her eyeglasses off. Without them, without the mask of red lipstick and sharp lines of makeup, she looked… young. Younger than me, perhaps. Smooth skin, eyes like glass polished with centuries of patience, lips full and bare. If she had walked down a crowded street like this, men would have fought to kneel at her feet.Yeah maybe, if she was human. But she’s not. Th

My knees feel suddenly out of strength the moment the doors slide open. The clinic smells of metal, but there’s another undercurrent to it, warm, wild, animal and copper. My throat tightens so hard I have to force air down into my lungs.Three figures lie under glass lamps, arranged in an operating bed. The first one makes my breath stop.He’s half-turned toward me, chained to a frame that gleams with silver. One side of him is still a boy, narrow shoulders, ribs visible under thin skin, hair matted with sweat. The other side is… everything I recognize from nightmares: fur bristling along a shoulder, a jaw that would snap and tear if the chain allowed it, an ear tipped in the wrong way. Tubes tunnel into his veins, wires attached into his temples. Machines beep with every breath he takes. He is mid-shift and suffering like a living thing buried under ice. Tears track clean paths down his cheeks. He looks straight at me.No one should ever look at you like that: full of pain, full of

The corridors turned colder as we went deeper. Not the kind of cold that lives in air ducts, but the old cold kind of feelings that secrets buried where sunlight can’t make witnesses of anyone have been revealed one by one. As Valentina and I went through some skeptic corridor, the tiles started to lose their shine, the kind of nobody really come here so it was not.made specially like those first floor we have beenThe glass widened, mold made its way there. The doors felt ancient and heavy but Valentina effortlessly it with ease. Every checkpoint required Valentina’s hand, her iris and her voice. The lab tech with the tablet followed at a respectful distance, a shadow with a spreadsheet.“This wing is not on the maps,” Valentina said, conversational, as if discussing weather. “Even our own don’t all know it exists. I prefer collections to be… curated.”“Collections,” I echoed, because sometimes to keep a lie alive you have to feed it back the words it loves.We stepped through a f