All Chapters of Bound To The Cruel Alphas (SPICY): Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

ZANA’S POVI sat with that for a moment.Then I closed the book and handed it back to Rhea.I reached down, pulled my sock back up, put my boot on, and laced it. I did all of this slowly and without looking up, because I needed something to do with my hands while I thought of what she just said.Last surviving heir.Last surviving heir?!What was this? A movie? A YA fantasy?"There's an explanation for this," I said. "One that doesn't involve any of that." I nodded at the book. "There's a logical explanation that I just don't have yet."Rhea sat down across from me. She held the book in her lap and she looked at me with"I've been looking for one," she said. "For a week, since the classroom. Since the windows." She paused. "I haven't found it.""Keep looking," I said."Zana-""Keep looking," I said again.Rhea was quiet for a moment. Outside the broken glass panes, the noon light was grey. Somewhere in the overgrown green of the greenhouse, something dripped."The mark on your wrist a

ZANA’S POVI closed my eyes and tried to focus on my power.I thought about the wind in the forest, the way it moved between trees, how you could feel the direction of it change before you could see the leaves move. I thought about tracking in the cold months as a rogue. I thought about standing in a field at fifteen and feeling the magic inside me move for the first time, and how scared I was because I didn’t even know what this thing inside me was.I reached for it.Not the way the textbook described, not the three-stage formal alignment that Marlowe had just taught us.. I reached the way I always reached -straight in, like reaching for something familiar in the dark, knowing exactly where it was without having to look.The magic answered.It moved inside me the way it always moved - not like something external I was directing but like something that was part of me, that had been waiting with quiet patience for me to need it. I felt it gather. I felt it recognize what I wanted. I

ZANA’S POVHe didn’t say anything.I looked at him, asking again “Where did you get this?”He was already stepping back. Clearly, he didn’t want to say anything.I said nothing. I didn't know what to say. I wasn't sure there was anything adequate to say. I was just surprised, wondering how he got this necklace.I wrapped the ring back in the cloth and put it in my jacket pocket, against my ribs.I left the observatory.-The walk back to my dormitory was long and entirely silent. The academy at night had a different character than it did during the day.The corridors were emptied out. The sounds had changed. The same spaces felt larger. I moved through it without seeing it. My mind was doing something I didn't have a word for - not thinking, exactly, but turning.It felt like my mind was turning inside me, like it was picking up what I'd been told and looking at it from each side and then putting it down and picking it up again.Romell Lunae.I hadn't known that name before tonight. I

Lucas’s POVBrandon’s text came at seven in the morning. It’s done.Just two words. I read them once. Then I turned my phone face-down on Brandon’s kitchen table and sat there with my coffee for a few quiet minutes. David Harlow and Marcus Brennan were in federal custody. The operation that had been running for more than ten years was over before breakfast on a Tuesday.I thought about Ashley waking up to that news. I pictured her standing at her window, watching as the thing she had been fighting for so long finally ended. I hoped she was okay. I knew she probably wasn’t okay in a simple, clean way. She is too honest for that. She does not pretend relief when she has not fully felt it yet. She would understand the cost of everything that happened. She would feel all of it.I picked up my gear bag and went to the arena.Northern Heights were the defending Invitational champions. They were exactly what the scouting report said they were, and maybe even better. They forechecked hard. Th

PERCY'S POVI’d always known things I wasn't supposed to know.It started when I was young - seven, maybe eight - when I realized that the information I was absorbing about the people around me was different from what my brothers absorbed.Ken observed people to assess them. Darren observed people to find their weak points. I observed people and simply knew things about them that I had no logical reason to know.I knew the shape of what they were feeling, the gap between what they said and what was actually happening inside them.My father noticed it early but he didn’t encourage it. He preferred his sons to be certain things, and a son who felt too much and noticed too much was not the thing he was building. I learned to keep it quiet. Knowledge you haven't deployed yet is the only safe kind, especially in a family where your dad was a dangerous controlling Alpha.By the time I was twelve I had perfected the appearance of simply being the quiet one. I was the brother who processed ra