All Chapters of The Price Of Fate: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

388 Chapters

161 When False Crowns Broke 2

Kieran’s POVOutside the hall, beyond the thick doors, voices rose and rolled faintly through the stone. The pack. Still restless. Still gathered in knots and clusters across Vandwood despite the hour, despite the blood, despite the injured. I lifted my hand slightly toward the sound. “Listen.” Beverly stared at me, breathing hard. I took one step closer. “No. Listen carefully.” She frowned through her tears, confused and angry and humiliated all at once. Outside, the sounds swelled again. Not orderly. Not ritual. Alive. Rough. Unfiltered. Names moving through the night. I held her gaze. “Do you hear them?” Her mouth tightened. I did not wait for an answer. “Do you hear whose names are on their lips?” The hall was still now. The elders listened too. I let the next words come out with all the contempt I had for the old poison that had ruled this place. “My mother’s poison has lost its potency.” Beverly flinched. I went on. “The people can see clearly now who

162 When False Crowns Broke 3

Kieran’s POVThe room shifted at once. Bodies turned. Wounded wolves still looked ready to throw themselves at one another just to bleed out their panic on a target that felt smaller than monsters from beyond the barrier. A woman with a wrapped shoulder pointed toward the man who had spoken. “She saved more of you than Beverly ever would!” Another voice rose. “We do not care what she is if she fights for us!” “She is the rightful one!” Then three more voices joined, then ten, then more. The swell came fast, primal, rough. Not rehearsed. Not clean. Real. “We don’t care!” “We want the rightful ones!” “Ronan and Nyra!” “Rightful place!” The hall shook with it. Support rose over prejudice not because the pack had become noble overnight, but because enough of them had seen truth with their own eyes. Enough had watched the old lie fail and something fiercer rise in its place. The few still muttering against Nyra were suddenly drowned in the weight of the rest. One of Beverly’s fa

163 What the Dead Still Leave Behind

Ronan’s POVI held her because there was nothing else I could do.Nothing clever. Nothing strong enough. Nothing that could reach into her chest and pull this grief out without tearing half her soul with it.So I held her.The cabin was too quiet for the kind of pain filling it. The lamp on the table had burned low, throwing a weak amber wash across the old walls, across the little room, across the paper still shaking in her hand. Outside, the woods carried on the way woods always did, indifferent, dark, breathing around us like the world had not just split open. But inside this place, everything felt altered. Like even the air knew someone had gone where they were not meant to go, and someone had been left behind with the knowing of it.Nyra sat half against me, half folded into herself, and I kept one arm around her shoulders and the other across her waist, not trapping her, not forcing her still, just making sure she did not come apart alone. Her body was warm under my hands, but i

164 What the Dead Still Leave Behind 2

Ronan’s POVI lowered the letter a little and kept reading in my head, piecing together not just what Elaine had written but what it implied. The meadow. The barrier. The voice that had called to Nyra. The strange language. The gold. The way Elaine had reacted that day in the cabin when Nyra collapsed glowing and speaking words neither of us knew. The herbs. The purple liquid. The fear she had tried and failed to hide. And now this letter.Something old and dangerous began to take shape in my mind.I did not like the shape of it.Indeed just like I already knew, Nyra’s father was not a wolf but a dragon of some sort.The thought came quietly, but once it came, I could not push it back.I did not say it.I would not.Because the second such a thing became spoken truth in the wrong room, in the wrong pack, in the wrong ears, Nyra’s life would turn into something even harsher than what she had already endured. Vandwood could dress itself in regret now. It could stand around her sickbed a

165 What the Dead Still Leave Behind 3

Ronan’s POVI closed my eyes for one hard second and imagined Brooksbridge again. The terraces. The stone halls. The training grounds. My mother’s face if I brought Nyra home. The council. The challenge ahead. The mark on her throat. My name tied openly to hers. Her walking where she pleased. Her sleeping without expecting cruelty to find her. Her laughing. Her healing. Her being looked at and seen first as mine and second as herself, yes, but seen with respect either way.And beneath all that, quieter and far more dangerous, there was another wanting.I wanted her happy.Not merely alive.Not merely hidden behind my protection.Happy.That was the part that made the rest of this feel less like a man’s possession and more like something solemn enough to kneel for. I wanted the tension to leave her shoulders. I wanted the fear to leave her eyes. I wanted the war in her body to end. I wanted to hear her laugh the way I had heard it in those rare moments when she forgot to brace herself

166 What Grief Refused to Take

Ronan’s POVWe stayed in the cabin a little longer after that.Not because either of us had more to say. There was nothing left in the room that words could fix. The letter had already done its damage. The locket had already shifted something. The grief was still there, thick as smoke, caught in every breath Nyra took. But now there was something else moving beneath it, something I did not entirely trust yet because I knew how dangerous purpose could become in a wounded heart.Nyra wiped at her face and turned back toward the small room as if she had remembered something all at once. I watched her move, slower than before, careful without seeming to notice she was being careful. Her body still carried the damage from the fight. Her side was not fully healed. Her shoulder still pulled strangely when she reached too far. Her ribs made her pause every now and then, just for a breath. But she kept going anyway.I followed her out of Elaine’s room and into the main part of the cabin.The p

167 What Grief Refused to Take 2

Ronan’s POVI drove in silence for a while.Then the thought I had been carrying since reading Elaine’s words settled into something I could no longer keep to myself. I glanced at Nyra once. She was still reading.“Nyra.”She lifted her head at once.Her eyes looked tired and too bright.I kept my voice calm.“Please do not let anyone see it. No one must know who or what your father is.”She did not ask why. She did not make me explain the politics or the fear or the cruelty such knowledge could call down on her. Maybe she already knew. Maybe she saw it on my face. Maybe she was simply too tired for questions. Whatever the reason, she only held my gaze for a second, then nodded once.Quietly, she folded the letter and tucked it away.That small obedience hit me harder than it should have.I looked back to the road and gripped the wheel tighter.The safest thing would probably have been to burn it. That truth sat ugly in me at once. Destroy the evidence. Destroy the words. Destroy the

168 What Grief Refused to Take 3

Ronan’s POVWhen the shower was done, I dried her slowly and dressed her in one of my softer shirts. It hung loose on her. The sight of her in it should have felt domestic enough to soothe something in me. Instead it only made me want harder, deeper, with more care than hunger.I led her to the bed and helped her sit.She did not speak.I did not ask her to.I went to the drawer where I kept the first aid kit and brought it back. Then I knelt in front of her and gently lifted the hem of the shirt enough to reach the wound along her side.It looked better than it had.That struck me at once.Not healed. Not fully. The battle had done too much for that. But better.When I first met her, when I had rushed her bleeding and broken to the hospital, her body had seemed frighteningly fragile in my hands. Too cold. Too slow to respond. Too human in all the ways the pack used to torment her for. I had remembered the fear of that night more than once since then. The sharp helplessness of not kno

169 The Pack That Wanted Saving Too Late

Ronan’s POVI eased myself out of bed slowly, carefully, one measured movement at a time. Nyra had finally sunk into a deeper sleep sometime after dawn started bleeding into the edges of the curtains. Even then it had not looked peaceful. Just heavier. Drugged by pain medicine, worn down by grief, and pulled under by a body that had reached its limit. She lay curled partly toward the side I had been on, one hand near the pillow, the other resting over the blanket as if even in sleep she had not quite stopped guarding herself.I stood beside the bed for a second after getting up. The room was quiet except for her breathing. That mattered more than anything downstairs. I looked at her properly in the morning light. The shadows under her eyes were darker now. The tear-dried tightness around them had not fully eased. A strand of hair had fallen across her cheek sometime in the night. I brushed it back carefully, the back of my fingers barely touching her skin.She did not stir.Good.She

170 The Pack That Wanted Saving Too Late 2

Ronan’s POVThe sound cut through the room harder than shouting would have. Jorren’s face tightened. Robert looked away for a beat. Kieran stayed still. My mother’s mouth curved faintly over the rim of her cup.I leaned forward, forearms on my knees.“Should I?” I asked mildly.Jorren held my gaze.“Yes.”“Were you not there,” I said, still in that same low controlled voice, “when those same pack members rejected me and chose Kieran?”The question landed exactly where I wanted it to. Jorren’s face changed first. Embarrassment, quick and ugly. One of the other elders shifted in his seat. Robert’s mouth flattened.I did not let the silence help them.“Were you not sitting there,” I continued, “while they decided blood they found convenient mattered more than the result they were given? While they swallowed Ingrid’s poison, Ethan’s pressure, and their own fear and made it clear exactly what they thought of me?”No answer.Of course.I leaned back again and let the next part come colder.

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