Semua Bab THE ALPHA KING'S MAID: Bab 31 - Bab 40

ALARICI had Gustavo pinned against the wall with my hand wrapped around his throat. His feet dangled fifteen centimeters off the floor and his face was shifting from red to purple with a progression I found satisfying.“I’ll ask you one last time,” I said, and my voice came out distorted because the Lycán was fighting to emerge and my eyes had already abandoned amber. “Who carved that altar in your territory?”“I… don’t… know…” he croaked, clawing at my wrist with nails that didn’t have the strength to even tickle me. “I swear… my King… I didn’t know…”“You’re lying. That altar is days old. Not weeks, not months. Days. Someone in your pack is summoning demons under your nose and you’re telling me you have no idea who—”The stab pierced my chest like an ice spear.I released Gustavo. The alpha collapsed to the floor coughing, but I didn’t register it. I didn’t register anything except the pain drilling through my sternum and spreading across my ribs like an internal fracture.It wasn’

**ALARIC**I wasn’t leaving that damned pack without answers.Gustavo was sitting in a chair in his own study, his wrists tied with silver rope and his dignity shattered on the floor. The man who, twenty-four hours earlier, had welcomed us with sweaty smiles and a gold-soaked mansion now looked like an empty sack someone had stripped of all its stuffing.Damián stood by the door. Silas was going through the bookshelves with that distracted academic air he used when he was actually cataloguing every detail of a room. And I sat in front of Gustavo, elbows resting on my knees, my patience exhausted three interrogations ago.“Gustavo,” I said, and my voice sounded exactly like what it was — the last warning before things got ugly. “You’ve spent two hours telling me you don’t know anything. That the vampires arrived on their own. That the attacks took you by surprise. That the inscriptions on the altar we found in the forest are a mystery to you.”“It’s the truth, my King, I swear by the M

****LYRA**Three demons. Bleeding flank. A defenseless omega clinging to my back like a terrified sack of potatoes.The Moon Goddess had a shitty sense of humor.The first one attacked from the right. The big one — charcoal skin threaded with veins of lava. It moved faster than something that size should be able to, and its claw came down like an axe toward my head.I dodged. Barely. I felt the heat of the strike skim my fur, and the ground where I had stood a second earlier exploded in a spray of dirt and roots.Emili clung to my back with a strength that surprised me. For an omega without a wolf, the damn girl had claws when it suited her.The second demon — the small, fast one — appeared at my left flank. Right where the wound was. Of course. Smart little bastards. I met it with a swipe that forced it back, but its translucent claws caught my shoulder, and the pain was like plunging my arm into acid.“Lyra!” Emili shouted against my ear.I couldn’t answer her. Not with words. In L

**EMILI**We weren’t finished.I knew it from the way Alaric lifted me off the ruined desk: unhurried, not rough, but with that firmness that said *“this isn’t over — it just changed settings.”* He carried me as if I weighed nothing, my back against his chest, his arms wrapped around my waist, and walked toward the bathroom adjoining his office without saying a word.I had ink on my face. On my hands. On my stomach. A map of the Northern territory stuck to my left thigh peeled off halfway there, leaving behind a blue stain shaped like a mountain range. I looked like abstract art with legs.“I’m a mess,” I murmured.“Not yet,” he replied against my ear, and the promise in that sentence ran down my spine.The office bathroom was smaller than the one in the main bedroom, but it had a wide dark-stone shower and a wooden bench Alaric used after his transformations. He turned on the hot water, and steam began filling the tight space, wrapping around us like a curtain that shut out the world

**EMILI**Three days after the ambush on the road, the Lycán mansion had returned to something resembling normality. Or what passed for normal in a place where the King destroyed desks during marital arguments and the administrator demanded a salary raise every time she opened a door without knocking.Alaric reinforced the patrols. Damián coordinated double shifts for the guardians. Klaus supervised the repairs on the armored trucks, which had been left looking like crushed sardine cans. Amelia replaced the office desk with one made of solid oak and reinforced legs, and when they installed it she looked at me with an expression that said, *let’s see if this one lasts more than a week.*I went back to my routine with Amelia during the day and my sessions with Silas whenever I could, though now with more caution. After what happened in the hallway — after Alaric saw us whispering — every meeting with the guardian felt like defusing a bomb. One wrong step and everything would blow sky-hi