All Chapters of Whispers of Loyalty: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

ALANAThe silence was the loudest thing in the room.It stretched, a suffocating blanket that clung to my skin, louder than the gunfire that had shattered the night only minutes ago. My ears still rang, but the absence of chaos, the stillness after the storm, cut sharper than any sound.Bodies were cooling at our feet. Some were friends, others enemies, though the blood didn’t care which name belonged to which side. It mingled across the marble floors of the Vittore estate, a dark red river carving through the cracks, catching the light from the chandelier above and glinting like rubies spilled by careless hands.The chandelier itself trembled slightly, as though it, too, remembered the concussive force of the last shot. A shard of crystal had fallen from it and lay glittering among the carnage, a piece of beauty discarded in ruin. The smell of gunpowder hung heavy, sharp and metallic, mixing with the copper tang of blood until my stomach churned.I was still clutching the gun, though

ALANAThe silence of the estate was a kind that didn’t comfort. It pressed in too close, swallowing every sound until even the creak of floorboards felt like an intrusion. I sat by the window, the moon spilling silver light across the garden outside, and tried to slow the rhythm of my heart.He’d been gone for hours.I’d woken from another dream with blood, gunfire, Zach’s body collapsing in my arms, and reached out only to find the bed cold. No note. No whisper against my skin telling me where he’d gone. Just emptiness.Now, as I waited, my thoughts spiraled. Every second without him near reopened the wound left by that night. The bullet tearing through me. The one that had nearly ended him.I traced the scar on my side through the thin fabric of my dress, feeling the raised edge beneath my fingertips. People said scars healed with time, but this one didn’t. It was a living reminder of everything we’d lost, everything we still stood to lose.The door finally opened. Zach stepped insi

ALANAThe house was too quiet.Not the kind of quiet that comes with peace, but the suffocating silence that follows chaos, where every breath feels too loud and every thought crashes like glass inside your skull.I sat in the drawing room, the fire still burning low, casting restless shadows across the walls. My sundress was torn at the hem, faint smudges of dried blood on my thigh a reminder that none of this was a nightmare I could wake from. The wound had been stitched, cleaned, bandaged. My father’s men had been furious at how close it had come. But the sting wasn’t what burned me alive inside.It was the knowledge that someone close to us had sold us out.Zach’s words from earlier in the night lingered in my chest. He hadn’t sugarcoated it; he never did. He had stood there, eyes burning with something harder than fury, and promised me we’d find who had betrayed us. Promised me there would be no mercy. And yet, beneath all of it, I had seen the edge in his stare, the way guilt ha

ALANA The sound of blood on stone echoed in my head long after the cellar had emptied. Zach had executed the courier without hesitation, his knife precise, deliberate, almost artistic in its cruelty. I had stood at the doorway, my pulse hammering, and watched him deliver death like it was the only language he knew. I couldn’t stop the image from pressing into me: the way his eyes had burned with control, the way his hands had moved over the knife as though it were an extension of his own body. The rest of the world didn’t exist then. There was only him, the man I loved, and the terror he wielded like a crown. I turned from the cellar’s lingering shadows and tried to breathe. But the air was heavy, filled with the copper tang of blood and the weight of inevitability. I had thought I could sit back, watch, and remain untouched. That was a lie. Zach’s darkness didn’t belong solely to him. It seeped into the spaces between us, a quiet, insidious reminder that anyone who loved him would

ALANAThe morning light spilled across the estate in a way that made everything look too calm, too serene. The kind of calm that lulls you into forgetting what waits beyond the gates. I stood in the east wing, arms crossed, watching the sunlight fracture across the marble floor. Every gleam of light reminded me of the darkness we’d both embraced, the blood spilled, the lines drawn in red.I could still feel the heat of Zach’s body behind me from last night, the way he had claimed me in the war room before the world had even stirred. The intimacy had been brief but scorching, leaving traces on my skin like a brand, reminding me that even amidst death and betrayal, some things remained fiercely alive.But alive wasn’t the same as safe. Not for us, not in this world we’d chosen.Gia appeared behind me, her presence silent as always, carrying the faint aroma of coffee and leather. She didn’t speak right away, just observed. I didn’t need her to. She understood.“You’re already awake,” she