Todos los capítulos de THE ALPHA’S QUIET TEMPTATION : Capítulo 91 - Capítulo 100

LUCUAS’S POVThe last evening of the hunt had a particular quality to it.People moved through it with the loosened energy of those who knew the formal obligations were nearly finished, the careful performances of the past days giving way to something more relaxed and genuine. Fires burned higher than they had on previous nights. The music was louder. Even the arrangement of the gathering felt different, less deliberate, people standing where they wanted rather than where position dictated.I watched it from the elevated seat that Byron had arranged at the edge of the main space, because Byron believed that visibility was a form of participation and had said so twice already this evening.“You could go down,” he said, from beside me. “Circulate. People appreciate it when you circulate.”“People appreciate knowing where I am,” I said. “I’m here. They know where I am.”“That’s not the same thing.”“It’s close enough.”He made the sound he made when he disagreed with me but had assessed

LIORA’S POVI read it three more times.Not because the words changed. They did not change. They sat on the page with the same flat certainty each time, and each time I set the paper down and picked it up again hoping for something different I found only the same sentence waiting for me with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.YOU WILL STILL BE CONVICTED OF MURDER IF YOU CANNOT PROVE YOUR INNOCENCE.I set it down.Darren. My first thought, automatic and immediate. Take it to Darren, show him, let him handle it the way he had said he would handle it. He had promised, back at the beginning of all of this, that he would look into it. That he would help.Then his voice came back.You are an omega. Mind yourself.I stood in the middle of the tent and held the paper and did not move toward the entrance.The celebration noise from across the camp drifted through the canvas, distant and ordinary, people enjoying a last evening without the faintest awareness that I was stand

LUCAS’S POVShe walked away from the range with the particular speed of someone who needed to be somewhere else immediately and had not chosen a destination.I picked up the bow she had set down and held it for a moment.Byron appeared at my shoulder. “The northern lords have been trying to get a word with you since this afternoon. Merin specifically, he’s been…”I set the bow down and followed her.“My lord.” Byron matched my pace. “Merin has connections to three of the eastern territories and the conversation has been outstanding for two days already, if you could give him twenty minutes…”“Handle it.”“I handle everything,” Byron said, with the tone of a man making an observation rather than a complaint. “At some point the king might consider handling something himself.”“Twenty minutes,” I said. “Tell him I’ll find him after dinner.”“And now?”I didn’t answer.She had gone between the tents, I had seen the direction from the range. The gap between the supply line and the sleeping

LIORA’S POVThe corner he chose was at the far edge of the camp, where the last row of tents met the tree line and the sounds of the gathering became something you were aware of rather than something you were inside. The light was lower here, the afternoon moving toward evening, and the general noise of the last night’s preparations carried from the other direction without reaching us.Darren stopped and turned to face me.He looked, for a brief moment, like someone who had been rehearsing something and was now confronting the fact that rehearsed things rarely survive the actual moment. He opened his mouth and what came out was faster than his usual cadence, the words running into each other with an energy that was unfamiliar on him.“What I said earlier was wrong. The way I spoke to you. I don’t have an excuse for it that holds up and I’m not going to offer you one. You were trying to help and I responded with something I shouldn’t have said and I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that and

LIORA’S POVLucas handed me in without comment.His hand was brief at my elbow, the functional assistance of someone helping another person navigate a step, and then he was back in his seat and the carriage door was closed and we were moving and the world outside was trees and morning light and the receding shape of Selene’s carriage going the other direction.I sat with my hands in my lap and looked out the window and said nothing.Lucas opened his book.The carriage interior was considerably more comfortable than Selene’s, which had been comfortable. The seats were deeper, the suspension better, the general quality of everything carrying the understated assurance of someone who had not chosen these things for their own use but for whom they had been chosen by people who understood what was appropriate.I looked at the ceiling. At the window. At my hands.At Lucas, who was reading.He turned a page with the focused absorption of someone actually reading and not performing reading, wh