Lahat ng Kabanata ng Fated to My Brother in-law, The Lycan King: Kabanata 321 - Kabanata 330

LUCIAN I had learned many things about Elias over the months I'd been with him.I had learned that he took his tea without sugar most times, learned the way his jaw tightened when he was holding something back, the particular silence that settled over him when he was thinking too hard about something he refused to say out loud.What I had not learned, what I was apparently only now discovering, was that Elias was capable of being an absolute, insufferable coward.I stood outside my new tent and stared at it like it had personally wronged me. Because in a way, it had. It was smaller than the one I had shared with Elias. It smelled like cedar and dry earth. It sat on the far edge of camp, a deliberate distance from the central part where Elias slept, worked, and apparently now hid.Someone had already moved my things. My pack, my spare cloak, my boots, and clothes. All of it had been transported here with the kind of efficiency that told me this had been planned. This had not been a s

ELIAS After he woke up, Elias had gone for a stroll, thinking about the seer and if there was a loophole in her words.Afterward, he'd passed by Lucian's tent. It was empty, and when he asked around, he was told Lucian was doing a voluntary routine check. But that was hours ago now, and Lucian's tent was still empty. He told himself it was nothing and brushed it off.By noon, he had found three separate reasons to pass by the Lucian's tent.The first time he told himself he was collecting a document he needed from his desk, which was true, and which also happened to take him within clear sightline of the tent partition and the space behind it. The second time he had no excuse prepared, which bothered him, so he manufactured one on the way, he needed to check the supply room, which was no where near the tents at all but required passing by it if he took the long route, which he took.The third time, he stopped pretending he was doing anything other than what he was doing and simpl

*****Rowan stood at the edge of the broken ridge, staring down at what remained of his army.What remained was generous wording.The wind carried the stench of wounds and blood up toward him, curling through the torn fabric of his cloak. Below, scattered across the terrain, his me moved aimlessly only with survival instinct. Clusters of soldiers regrouped and broke apart again within minutes, unable to maintain formation for long under pressure.Less than two hundred.That number repeated in his mind like a gong going off repeatedly in an echoing place or a vacuum He had less than two hundred men when he had thousands.His jaw tightened.This was not how it was supposed to go.He had expected Elias and his fight, not this, not a denom moving through his men and dropping them in matters of seconds. At the beginning, before he started all these, he knew and expected the resistance from the Lycans but he'd also expected them to break under his pressure, not still be cohesive no mat

SERAPHINA Her anger did not dissipate, nor was she able to contain it into something more manageable. Every step Seraphina took through the forest made her chest heave with anger more, branches caught at her clothes, thorns scraping against her skin, roots rising like traps beneath her, and the night air biting against her skin like it was trying to slow her down.She walked faster than before, her mind reeling with different thoughts.Her father was dead, and the pack had turned on her.They had dared to look her in the face and say she was the reason.Her jaw tightened.Her hands clenched at her sides, nails digging into her palms hard enough to draw blood she didn’t even feel.They were wrong. They had to be wrong. Her father didn't even love her.Rage settled deep down in her bones. Why were they blaming her instead. Her father’s face kept appearing in her mind.Not as he had been at the end, broken, strained, distant but before.Strong, powerful, and unshakable.A leader.Her

LUCIAN The Dark Elf Kingdom was and would always be a mystery. There was no great gate, no wall you could see from a distance and prepare yourself for. One moment there was forest, ancient, lightless, the kind of forest that felt like it had been there before the world decided what it wanted to be, and then there were riders on either side of them, dark-cloaked, and silent. Lucian understood without being told that they had already been inside the kingdom for some time. The border wasn't a line. It was a feeling, a sickening feeling at the bottom of your stomach.The slow realization that the shadows between the trees had been watching you for longer than you knew.They didn't speak to them. That was the thing Lucian noticed and kept noticing, the absolute, deliberate silence of the elves who had taken them. No commands, no explanations, no cruelty in the performative way that men sometimes used cruelty, loud and proud, to make themselves feel big aside from when it happened at tha