All Chapters of A Dorm With My Alpha Mate : Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

Kai's POVWe gathered in a hollow between two fallen oaks, barely enough room for the six of us to crouch without our shoulders touching. Malrick. Sylvie. Finn. Aria. Me. And Fen, who stood at the edge of the hollow watching the tree line while Sylvie cleared a patch of dirt with the side of her boot and crouched over it with a stick."Here." She drew the ridge line;a long curve and marked the slope beneath it with a series of small marks, tight and numerous. "Approximately ninety fighters arranged along the eastern face. They're set for a flanking strike. Any force moving along the road below walks into them from the right side at the precise moment Alastair's gate engages from the front." She sat back on her heels. "Between the two, we'd have nowhere to go."Silence.I looked at the marks in the dirt. Ninety. The number sat in my chest with a particular weight. We had marched forty-three fighters into a corridor between a wall and a hammer and called it a plan.Ragnar pushed against

Sylvie's POVThe stronghold sat at the valley's far end like something that had decided it wasn't going anywhere, and looking at it, I believed it.Stone walls, wider than I'd estimated from Vance's descriptions, the kind of construction that didn't happen in a season or even a decade. Two rows of sentries moved along the ramparts with the disciplined rhythm of men who had been trained to this specific rotation and knew it by muscle memory, the torches spaced close enough that almost no dark gap existed between them. The main gate was iron, reinforced with crossbars visible even from this distance, flanked by guard posts housing four men each and a portcullis that looked like it hadn't been raised in a while and wouldn't struggle being lowered fast.Vance had said forty guards. I counted fifty-three in my first pass, and the outer perimeter wasn't even fully visible yet.I pulled back from the treeline and crouched beside Fen and Liv, keeping my voice below the wind. "He undersold it.

Kai's POVRagnar was ahead of my thinking, which was how I knew the moment had arrived, a heat that pushed upward through my chest, sharp and clean, the particular alertness that hit when everything an instinct had been reading coalesced into something specific and immediate.I raised my hand and the column stopped without a sound.The valley ahead of us was laid out exactly as Sylvie's reconnaissance had predicted, and in it, Alastair's ridge fighters moved across the floor in disarray but still committed to the pursuit, still driving east, their attention entirely forward and their southern flank offered to us with the openness of people who had stopped thinking about their flanks because they were too occupied thinking about the prey ahead of them. They were strung across the terrain in a long, loose thread, and a thread could be cut.Koren drew a short breath beside me, and I understood it. There was a version of this moment that existed in a plan, clean and logical, and then ther

Aria's POVThe camp was never fully quiet the night before a battle.Even when the fires burned low and the voices died down, there was always something. The shuffle of a restless wolf who couldn't sleep, the low murmur of someone speaking to their deity or their dead, the sound of a blade being sharpened that had already been sharpened three times that evening. I had learned to stop trying to block it out. The noise was honest. It was what living things sounded like when they were afraid and choosing to stay anyway.I was sitting outside the medical tent with my back against a supply crate, cleaning a gash along my forearm I'd gotten during the last scouting push and hadn't had the time to properly dress. It wasn't deep, it would close on its own before dawn but my hands needed something to do. So I unwound the dirty bandage and started again from the beginning. Clean cloth. Salve from Luma's kit. Tight wrapping. The familiar routine of it settled something in my chest that nothing e

Malrick's POVThe main gate loomed forty yards ahead, torchlight painting the stone in flickering orange. Just after it, Alastair's fortress slept—or thought it slept. In truth, it was about to wake up screaming.I crouched behind a fallen pillar, one of several scattered across the approach. Rylan pressed close on my left, Kira on my right behind us, twenty fighters waited in the dark they weren't enough to take the gate by force but we could trick this defenders. Funny, how I ended up here. A year ago I would have been on the other side of these walls, serving a different master, fighting for different reasons. Circumstance had a cruel sense of humor."Signal?" Rylan breathed."Wait for it."We waited.The night pressed down, cold and patient. Somewhere inside those walls, Sylvie's team was moving through the drainage tunnel, working toward the side entrance. My job was to make sure every available defender was looking the other way when they came out.I checked the sky. The moons