Semua Bab Bound To The Ruthless Alpha: Bab 111 - Bab 120

The maid’s eyes met mine, and I recognized her. Elira’s shadow. One of her handmaidens, who had trailed her like a wraith, who had witnessed her every bruise, her every scar. She knew the truth of what Roran Vale had done. Had seen Elira’s suffering firsthand.And now she had spat venom at Aria because of it.A muscle ticked in my jaw as I stepped toward her, slow and deliberate. Predatory.“Do you know why you’re standing here?” I asked, my voice low, dangerous. Each word carefully controlled, which somehow made them more threatening than if I’d shouted.She lifted her chin, trembling but trying to stand tall despite the broken bones in her body. Despite the obvious pain. “Because I spoke the truth.”My wolf surged at the insolence, snarling to be let loose, demanding I rip her throat out for the disrespect. But I held him back—barely.“The truth,&rdqu

I stared at her, really looked at her, at the way she sat so openly in this room where she had no right to be, where her presence was a violation of rules older than either of us. At the way her hands remained folded calmly even though I could see the tension in her shoulders, the tightness around her eyes that spoke of fear held carefully in check.Fear surged through me, sharper than before, cutting through the panic with surgical precision. Fear for her. Because if Kael found her here, if he discovered that she had dared to enter his private sanctuary without permission—“You shouldn’t be here,” I said quickly, the words tumbling over one another in my haste to get them out, to make her understand the danger she was in. “Mira, you can’t be here. What if Kael finds out? What if someone tells him? He’ll—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t give voice to the terrible possibilities that flashed through my mind. The punishments he could inflict. The ways he could make her suffer f

Mira’s warning still echoed in my ears, the words reverberating through my skull like the aftermath of a bell struck too hard. The room suddenly felt heavier, the air thicker, as though the shadows themselves were pressing in closer, drawn by the gravity of what she’d said.My gaze drifted away from her concerned face, sweeping across the space I had been too afraid, too overwhelmed to truly study until now. Now that the initial shock had faded, now that I could breathe without feeling like I might shatter, I finally allowed myself to really see where I was.And what I saw made my blood run cold.The chamber wasn’t just Kael’s room.It was hers. Elira’s.Every detail screamed her name, whispered her presence, held her memory like a pressed flower between pages of a book. The bed I lay on wasn’t simply where Kael slept—it was where *they* had slept. Together. Entwined. The sheets, though clearly changed, carried the suffocating weight of memory, as though the fabric itself remembered t

Finally—after what felt like an eternity but was probably only seconds—she looked back at me. Her voice when she spoke was calm but grave, weighted with understanding of exactly what I was asking.“Do you understand what you’re asking, my lady?” she said quietly. “If the Alpha discovers what you’ve done, if he finds out you’ve been communicating with anyone from your former pack without his knowledge or permission—”“I know.” My interruption was sharp, desperate, cutting through her warning before she could finish painting the full picture of consequences I was already painfully aware of. “I know the risk, Mira. I know what he could do to me. To both of us. But I can’t keep drowning in their war—in this conflict between packs, between my father and Kael, between duty and desire—without knowing why I was thrown into it in the first place.”I leaned closer to her, my grip on her wrist tightening until I could feel her pulse beneath my fingers—steady and strong, so much steadier than my

Mira lowered her gaze—not out of guilt, I realized, but out of respect. The kind of deference you show when speaking of the dead, of ghosts that still haunt the living.“It wasn’t Alpha who first trusted me,” she admitted, her voice quiet but steady, each word carefully placed. “It was Lady Elira.”The name cut the air between us like a blade drawn in the dark.My chest tightened, suddenly heavy with the echo of a ghost I’d never met but whose shadow lingered over every hall, every whisper, every stone in this cursed estate. Elira. The name was everywhere and nowhere, spoken in hushed tones or reverential whispers, a saint who’d left behind a religion of mourning.Mira went on, her voice softening with memory, tinged with something that might have been affection or grief—perhaps both. “She often asked me to deliver letters for her—to her relatives, her acquaintances, people she trusted beyond these walls. At first, I always had to seek Alpha’s permission, every single time. He was str