Todos los capítulos de THE ALPHA’S QUIET TEMPTATION : Capítulo 111 - Capítulo 120

LIORA’S POVHe pulled me up with the easy strength of someone for whom the effort was genuinely minimal, and once I was on my feet he looked at me with the expression that was doing the thing I did not have the energy to address.“Third time,” he said.I looked at the water on the floor. “What?”“Third time I’ve watched you fall. You have a pattern.”“I have a cobblestone that was in the wrong place.”“The cobblestone was where it always is.”I picked up the empty pail and turned toward the water source corridor. “I need to refill this.”His hand came to my arm. Not stopping me exactly. Just there.I stopped anyway.“Let someone else get the water,” he said.“There is no one else.” I said it plainly, without self-pity, because it was simply accurate. “Everyone in this palace either wants me gone or wants me dead or is in a position where helping me creates a problem for them. Myra is the only person I trust and Myra is currently sleeping off a fever because of what happened last night

LUCAS’S POVI looked at Darren. He looked back with a composed expression.“Release her,” I said again.The repetition was deliberate. Not because I thought he had failed to hear it the first time. Because the first time was a request and the second time was something else, and I wanted the distinction to be clear.Darren tilted his head slightly. “I heard you.”“Then answer me.”“I did answer you.”“Answer me again.”He looked at me with like he was examining a situation he find more interesting than threatening. “This is between Liora and myself. It was arranged between us. The terms were agreed. The documentation exists.” He spread his hands in the gesture of someone presenting an open and obvious thing. “I’m not certain what standing you have to insert yourself into a private arrangement between two consenting parties.”“I’m the king.”“You’re my father,” he said. “Which is a different thing, in this room, and you know it.” He held my gaze. “The king doesn’t dissolve private house

LIORA’S POVI held the food in my hands and looked at him and breathed.The anger was clean and present and I was aware, with the part of my mind that had been trained by eleven years of survival in a house that punished visible emotion, that clean anger needed to be managed before it was expressed or it would come out wrong. Too much or too sharp or in a direction that created more problems than it resolved.I set the food on the side table.I closed the door.“I went to the kitchen,” I said. My voice was even. I was making it even. “Myra is unable to get up and I needed to eat. So I went to the kitchen.”Darren looked at me with the expression of someone preparing a response. “You went without escort.”“I don’t need escort to find bread.”“You need escort for everything in this palace. That is not a preference, it is the structure you are operating within.” He held my gaze steadily. “You have maids assigned to this household. Their purpose is exactly this.”“I dismissed the maids.”

LUCAS’S POVI had second thoughts approximately four times during the preparation.The first time was when Byron looked at the spread being arranged and said nothing, which from Byron was louder than most people’s extensive commentary. The second time was when the small fountain arrived, carried by two palace workers who had the expressions of men who had been given an unusual instruction and had decided their continued employment required them not to have opinions about it. The third time was when I looked at the overall arrangement and registered that I had done something I had not done in a very long time.The fourth time was when Byron said, with the careful neutrality of a man choosing his words with surgical precision, “Is this perhaps more than you intended?”I looked at the lanterns arranged along the low stone edge. The food, which had been a simple idea that had expanded under the attention of the kitchen staff into something considerably less simple. The flowers, which had

LIORA’S POVI went to the royal infirmary before breakfast.The corridors were quiet in the early hour, the palace not yet fully operational, and I moved through them with the purposeful pace of someone who knew where they were going and had been thinking about it since before they opened their eyes.The infirmary occupied a wing on the palace’s eastern side, cooler than the main residence and deliberately so, the stone chosen and the windows positioned to maintain a temperature that served recovery. I had learned this from the physician when he explained the move. I had held it as a comfort since.The nurse at the entrance was not a comfort.She was a woman of middle years with the particular bearing of someone who had been doing a job long enough to have strong opinions about how it should be done and a low threshold for those opinions being tested. She looked at me when I came through the entrance with the assessing expression of someone determining which category of visitor I fell