Todos los capítulos de THE ALPHA’S QUIET TEMPTATION : Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

LUCAS’S POVI came awake the way I always came awake, fast and complete, no gradual surfacing.The carriage. The palace walls through the window, closer now than when I had last registered them. The weight against my side, her head against my shoulder, and then the abrupt absence of that weight as she jerked upright beside me with a gasp that had nothing of ordinary waking in it.I had fallen asleep.I turned the fact over for a moment with the detached observation of someone noting something unexpected. I did not fall asleep in carriages. I did not fall asleep in moving vehicles of any kind as a general rule, the combination of exposed position and unfamiliar motion producing a vigilance that overrode fatigue reliably. I had done it anyway, and I had done it with my arm around someone, which was a different category of information that I set aside for later examination.She was shivering.Not the small, post-sleep disorientation of someone adjusting to waking. The shivering had a dif

LIORA’S POVI woke up thinking about him.Not the dream. The dream had receded into the specific murk where bad dreams go when you have slept past them, still present in the body if not in the mind, a residual unease I could feel but not locate. What was present and clear and immediately available when I opened my eyes was Lucas.The carriage. His arm around me. The bath of afternoon light through the window and the specific quality of a silence that had not needed to be filled.I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and gave myself the length of one full minute to simply be in it, the memory of it, without managing or redirecting or reminding myself of the seventeen reasons it was not something I could afford to be in.The minute ended.I got up.Myra arrived shortly after with the energy of someone who had been awake for some time and had been waiting for the reasonable hour at which she could transfer that energy to me. She came through the tent flap, which was no longer a tent

LIORA’S POVI had walked this road enough times that my feet remembered it before my mind did.The particular slope of the lane past the lower market, the way the cobblestones changed texture at the junction where the old road met the newer one, the smell of the bakehouse that operated out of the ground floor of the corner building and never quite closed regardless of the hour. I had walked this route in the dark, in the early morning before the city properly woke, in the rain with inadequate shoes.I had never walked it free before.The thought arrived quietly and I let it pass without examining it too closely because examining it would take me somewhere that was not useful right now.I pulled the folded paper from inside my dress as we walked and spread it against my palm. The pencil was short, worn to a stub from previous use, but it worked well enough for what I needed. I drew from memory, which was reliable for this specific geography. The rear wall of the estate with its three s

LIORA’S POVThe arrow came from nowhere.One moment he was opening his mouth and I was on my knees in front of him with everything I had concentrated into the next few seconds and then the sound arrived, a short, brutal whisper of displaced air, and he stopped.The second arrow came before the first had finished its work.The third followed immediately after.He folded. Not dramatically, not the way deaths happened in stories with their careful choreography of significance. He simply stopped being upright and the crates behind him received him as he went down, and I was already moving toward him, my knees leaving the ground, my hands reaching.“No,” I said. The word came out wrong, flat and insufficient. “No, no…”Commotion arrived from every direction at once. Shouting, the sound of boots on stone, the particular percussion of armed men moving with purpose. The garden door burst open and palace guards came through it in a stream and behind them, moving with the urgent authority of so

ELORA’S POVThe news reached me before breakfast.One of the lower maids brought it in with the morning water, the way news always traveled in palaces, attached to ordinary things, delivered with the careful neutrality of someone who understood that information was currency and were not entirely sure of the exchange rate in this particular room.Liora had been caught outside the palace in disguise. There had been an incident at Lord Cassius’s estate. A boy had died. She had been brought back and disciplined and the king had intervened and her handmaid had been taken to the physician.I sat with the water cooling in the basin and waited to feel what I had expected to feel.The satisfaction did not arrive.I waited longer.My headmaid, Cress, watched me from the corner of the room with the expression she wore when she was reading me and finding results she had not anticipated.“My lady,” she said finally. “This is good news.”“Yes,” I said.“She’s been weakened. The king’s intervention