All Chapters of BOUGHT BY THE BEAST: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

I spent the next three hours waiting for the door to open.I didn't pace. I didn't cry. I sat in the middle of the massive, ridiculous bed, surrounded by the shattered glass from the vanity mirror, and I waited for the man who had bonded with me to come back and explain why he was letting a witch touch him in public. The golden light had faded from my hands, but the hum of the First Moon energy remained. It was a cold, steady vibration that felt completely different from the chaotic explosion in the library. This wasn't a loss of control; it was a settling. A terrifying, ancient calmness that was preparing for a war I hadn’t started but fully intended to finish. At two in the morning, the heavy oak doors finally clicked. Caspian walked in. He looked worse than when I had left him at the gala. His suit jacket was gone, his tie pulled loose, and the exhaustion on his face was so profound it looked like it was carved into his bones. He didn't look toward the bed. He went straight to t

I didn't sleep after he turned away.I lay on my side of the bed with my eyes open, watching the slow crawl of moonlight across the ceiling, feeling the needle in the wall pulse with its quiet, patient rhythm.Caspian's breathing had evened out within minutes of turning his back to me, the kind of sudden, heavy sleep that didn't feel natural. It felt like falling, like something had reached up and pulled him under the moment the fog reclaimed him.My body was still warm from his touch. My skin still carried the ghost of his mouth, his hands, the desperate way he had held me like I was the last solid thing in a world that was dissolving around him.Between my thighs, I could still feel the slick evidence of what we had shared, and the intimacy of that, the rawness of carrying him inside me while he slept with his back turned, was a particular kind of cruelty that I didn't have a name for.He had called me his Queen.Again.He had begged me to come with him.And then forty-three minutes

Seraphine didn’t interrupt me once.I sat in the heavy wooden chair near her hearth, the one that had slowly started to feel like mine, and let everything spill out of me. The way Morgessa had walked into our bedroom like she already owned the floorboards. The way Caspian had watched her hands move, his eyes glassy and starved, staring at her like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. And the cold, dormant pulse I had felt buried inside the new spell in the closet doorframe. It wasn't a shield meant to protect us, it was a snare waiting for a footstep.When I finally ran out of words, Seraphine was standing completely motionless by the tall window. The tea she had poured when I arrived sat untouched on the side table, cold skin forming over the dark surface.She turned slowly, the hem of her grey skirt brushing the floor, and crossed the room to her cluttered workbench. Her hands moved with quiet purpose, pushing aside bundles of dried sage and old leather cases u

I didn't go back to the suite.I couldn't. Not yet.Not with the weight of what I now knew pressing down on my chest like a stone. If I walked into that room and saw Caspian standing by the window with his empty eyes and his polite, hollow voice, I would break.And I couldn't afford to break. Not now.So I walked.The mansion was quiet in the late morning, most of the staff occupied with their duties, most of the nobles locked away in meetings or private schemes.I moved through corridors I was only beginning to recognize, past paintings of Valdyr ancestors whose silver eyes seemed to track me as I passed, past windows that looked out over the valley where forty thousand people lived their lives without knowing their King was being hollowed out from the inside.My hand still tingled where Morgessa had touched me. The marker was gone, I waited it out and Seraphine had said so, but I could still feel the ghost of her fingers on my skin. The casual intimacy of it. The way she had smiled w

I woke to darkness and the absence of warmth.The bed beside me was empty. Not just cold, but untouched, the sheets still smooth on his side, the pillow still plump. He hadn't come to bed at all.I sat up slowly, my body aching from training and tension and the particular exhaustion that comes from carrying too much for too long. The suite was quiet. No sound of breathing. No rustle of movement. Just the faint hum of the ward network in the walls and the distant whisper of wind against the windows.The desk in the corner was empty. The file he had been reading was closed, stacked neatly with three others, his pen placed precisely parallel to the edge.He was gone.I looked at the clock on the nightstand. Four seventeen in the morning. Too early for meetings. Too late for anything legitimate.My wolf stirred, pressing against the inside of my skin with a low, anxious whine. She knew where he was. Some part of me knew too, the part that had been tracking his patterns for weeks, catalogin