บททั้งหมดของ The House Beneath the Blood Moon: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 79

Samantha POV The Heart stayed quiet after the Council severed the feed. Not calm-quiet. More like… predator-quiet. The kind of silence that happens right before teeth. Lucien was still in front of me, gold burning in his eyes like the bond had turned his rage into a new organ. His hands hovered at my shoulders, not touching, like he was terrified contact might convince him to do something irreversible. I kept my breathing even. Kept my voice steady. Because if I let my body react like a normal human woman who’d just seen her mother alive in a stasis cage, I would crumble. And Mirelle would win by default. “We break the pattern,” I’d said. Now I had to actually mean it. Lucien stared at me like I’d just asked him to unlearn five centuries of strategy. “You are asking for the impossible,” he said. “I’m asking for the unthinkable,” I corrected. “The impossible is what the Council sells to make us behave.” His jaw flexed. “They have her.” “I know.” The words tasted like iro

Samantha POV The first symptom wasn’t nausea. Which annoyed me, because if I was going to have a full-blown existential crisis, I would have liked the courtesy of a recognizable trope. No, the first symptom was silence. Not the Sanctuary’s—mine. The constant background hum in my head, the mental dashboards, the threat matrices, the thousand tiny calculations that had become my new normal since the Core Protocol? They… muted. Not gone. Paused. Like something had pressed hold on reality and was waiting to see what I’d do next. I stood alone in the east corridor, one hand braced against cool stone, the other pressed flat against my abdomen like that might explain something. It didn’t. My body felt… fine. Too fine. No pain. No weakness. No flare of light threatening to burn down a wing of the manor. Just a strange, grounded heaviness. As if gravity had subtly renegotiated our contract. “Okay,” I whispered. “Either I’m about to unlock a new power tier, or my uterus is stag

Samantha POV Cassius did not dramatize the announcement. Which, frankly, made it infinitely more terrifying. No thunder. No ritual circle. No blood-on-stone theatrics that vampires apparently loved when they wanted to feel important. He simply stood in the Heart, adjusted the cuffs of his coat like a man about to deliver lab results, and said: “I will notify the Houses.” Lucien stiffened beside me. Sébastien, who had been lounging far too comfortably against a pillar, straightened immediately. “And?” I asked. “You’re going to tell them what, exactly?” Cassius met my gaze. Calm. Precise. Controlled. “That I have verified the continuity of sovereign architecture,” he said. “That the Sanctuary recognizes you. That the Queen’s mark is intrinsic, not induced.” He paused. “That the reincarnation is authentic.” The Sanctuary hummed once—low, satisfied. I snorted. “Wow. That’s it? No behold? No kneel, you fools?” Cassius’s mouth twitched. “I am a healer, not a cult leader.”

Samantha POVFor three full seconds after the door sealed behind Elias, my brain refused to process anything but the sound of my own blood.Not the Sanctuary’s hum.Not Lucien’s breath.Not Cassius standing there like a cathedral that had just realized it was built on a fault line.Just… blood.My pulse was too loud. Too human. Too fragile.And on the ultrasound screen—still glowing on the table like a cruel little billboard—there it was.A flicker.A heartbeat.Alive.Real.Mine.I stared at it until the edges of my vision softened, like my eyes were trying to blur it out the way the Council blurred their faces when they did something evil.But the Sanctuary didn’t blur it.It held the image steady.Witness.Lucien’s hands hovered near my shoulders, not touching, as if contact might break me—or worse, convince him to do something irreversible. His rage was a furnace through the bond, but underneath it was something I’d never felt from him so raw it almost made me sick.Fear.Not for