All Chapters of Mated To The Cursed Alpha : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

TOBIAS'S POVI had seen bad scenes in twenty years of service to the crown. This was one of the worst.Not because of the scale — I had seen battlefields. Because of the specificity. Someone had chosen this girl, this cell, this timing. Everything about it was deliberate.I crouched beside the door and looked at the bars. The lock had not been forced. There was no sign of damage to the mechanism — no bending, no scratching from improvised tools. Someone had walked up to this door with a key that fit and turned it. The girl had provided it, willingly or otherwise, and now she was dead on the floor and Isla was gone.I stood up and looked at the guards doing the initial sweep."Anyone see anything before the alarm?" I asked."Nothing, sir. The lower corridor was clear on the last check twenty minutes ago."Twenty minutes. Clean entry, clean exit, one casualty. This was not a desperate prisoner taking an opportunity. This had been planned.Rowan came through the entrance with three guard

MIRA'S POVElara moved faster than I expected her to as she put herself between me and the figure with both arms out.She was blocking and said something sharp that I didn't fully hear because the figure was already moving with a blade that came sideways.The steel caught Elara's shoulder as it was not a killing blow but an obstacle removal.Elara made a sound that I felt in my chest then she went down hard against the bedframe.I called her name but there was no time as the figure was still moving and I was the target.I felt my wolf rise with it being not clean and not controlled but just raw and immediate and desperate then I moved.We collided and the impact sent both of us into the writing table.It went over with a crash that I hoped was loud enough for someone in the corridor to hear through a closed door over their own dying as the figure was stronger than me.They were significantly stronger and I felt it in the first second of contact with the difference in mass and training

TOBIAS'S POVI had been at this table for two hours before Rowan arrived.The evidence from Vessa's chambers was extensive — more than I had expected when the search team first brought back the box. I had gone through everything twice before I was ready to present it, because I wanted to be certain I understood what I was looking at before I put it in front of Rowan. Getting this wrong was not an option.By the time he came through the door, I had it all laid out in order.He stood at the edge of the table and looked at it. His jaw was set and his arms were folded and he didn't touch anything yet, just looked at the spread of letters and documents the way you look at something you already know is going to be bad before you start reading."Walk me through it," he said.I started from the left. "Correspondence between Vessa and at least six court members. Some of it goes back over a year." I moved along the table. "These are strategy documents — specific plans to undermine your author

ROWAN'S POVI had been trying to find the right moment to say it for two days.While she was unconscious, I had rehearsed it more times than I could count — sitting in that chair with her hand in mine and the healing chamber quiet around me, going over the words until they felt like something I could actually say out loud without the usual mechanisms of control getting in the way. I had had a lot of time to think. Too much, maybe.But now she was awake and looking at me and the rehearsed version was gone, so I said the real version instead."When you were seizing," I said. "When Corvin was working and your body was fighting the treatment and I didn't know which way it was going to go." I looked at our hands. "All of it — the distance, the careful check-ins, the guilt I'd been carrying around like it was something noble — it felt like the stupidity it was. For the first time since I brought you here, I couldn't dress it up into anything reasonable."Mira watched me and didn't speak."I

ROWAN'S POVThe day after Isla's questioning, I put every piece of information she had given us to work.The passages were the first priority. I took the maps Tobias had pulled from Hadrian's hidden files and walked every route myself with the head of my guard unit, identifying which sections could be collapsed without structural risk to the castle above and which needed to be sealed and stationed instead. By the end of the first day, the north entry point was rubble and both east access routes had four guards each at every junction, with orders that did not allow exceptions.I recalled warriors from three border assignments. Not all of them — pulling the borders completely bare would be its own invitation — but enough to bring the castle's defensive force up to something I was confident in. I repositioned the archers. I revised the watch rotation so the gaps Hadrian had documented no longer existed.Tobias managed the scouts. He sent teams out in four directions with instructions to