All Chapters of The Alpha Triplets’ Rejected Omega: Violet Blood Reign: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Ava's POVThe library assignment was fine.I told myself this while walking down the corridor with my cleaning supplies, the bucket handle cutting into my palm and the mop balanced over my shoulder. Fine. Normal. Maids cleaned libraries. That was a thing that happened. There was nothing unusual about it.Leta had handed me the assignment at breakfast without meeting my eyes, which I noted and filed away next to all the other things I was filing away lately. I had a very full mental drawer at this point.The library doors were heavy. I pushed one open with my shoulder and stepped inside.Cax was sitting at the large desk in the center of the room.I stopped moving.He was surrounded by papers. Actual towers of them, stacked at angles that suggested they had been accumulating for some time without intervention. His jacket was gone, his sleeves were pushed up, and he had the look of a man who had been staring at documents for so long that the words had stopped meaning anything. His hair

Dr. Elara's POVThe café was called The Amber Cup.Unremarkable name. Unremarkable location, wedged between a tailor's shop and a dry goods store on the main road that ran parallel to the palace's outer wall. Small tables, mismatched chairs, the kind of place that attracted people who wanted to sit for a long time without being noticed or hurried along.I had chosen it for exactly that reason.I sat at the window table with my tea and my coat folded over the chair beside me and looked like every other tired traveler who had arrived in this city today. That was the point. Elara Voss, the Sylvan Sector's leading research authority, did not exist here. Here I was a woman named Sable Crane, researcher, passing through on academic business, nothing unusual, nothing worth remembering.I had worn this skin so many times it fit like my own."The room is clean," said Maren, sliding into the seat across from me and setting her bag on the floor. She was my assistant, had been for six years, and

Cax's POVI heard Ryker come back from her corridor at half past nine.His footsteps were different when something had unsettled him. Slower. More deliberate, like he was making himself walk at a normal pace. I had known him for thirty years and I knew every version of his footsteps, which was either a sign of deep brotherhood or a deeply strange life, probably both.I didn't ask him about it. He would talk when he was ready or he wouldn't talk at all, and either way pushing Ryker before he was ready produced nothing useful.I had my own problem to deal with.I went to the archives the next morning to pull the original Iron-Claw trade charters from the last century, which I needed for the Northern Territories renegotiation because Soren had very pointedly suggested I review them before my next meeting. He hadn't said why. He didn't need to. I had agreed to a twenty year fixed rate shipping deal because a maid walked past a window, and Soren was the kind of advisor who expressed disapp

Ava's POVNobody moved first.We just stood there in the service hallway, six feet apart, both of us apparently having forgotten basic biological functions like breathing and blinking. The bond was doing something I had no language for. Not the hum I had gotten used to, not the pull, not the ache. Something bigger. Something that felt like a door I hadn't known existed had just blown open inside my chest.I breathed first. Deliberately. In through the nose, out slow."Zephyr," I said. Not a question. I knew which one he was now, I wasn't entirely sure how, just that I did."Yes." His voice was different from Ryker's. Same depth, different texture. Like the same instrument played by someone with a different hand."You followed me for forty minutes.""Yes.""That's strange behavior.""I know."He wasn't apologizing for it. Wasn't constructing an excuse or a smooth explanation the way Max would have, the way most people did when they got caught doing something they shouldn't. He just sto

Ava's POVThe palace changed overnight.I noticed it the second I stepped out of my room the next morning. The corridor smelled different, fresh polish and something floral underneath it, sharp and deliberate. Two maids I had never seen before were working the far end of the hall, moving fast, and a third was on a ladder doing something to the light fixtures that the light fixtures had clearly never experienced before.Leta was waiting for me at the supply closet with an expression that meant she had information and had been waiting to deliver it since before I was awake."Delegation," she said, the moment I reached her."What?""Important visitors. Arriving in two days." She handed me a cloth and grabbed her own bucket. "The whole palace goes into preparation mode when this happens. Every surface gets cleaned twice, flowers come in by the cartload, and the kitchen starts cooking things that take three days to prepare."I looked down the corridor at the sudden activity. "How important