All Chapters of BOUGHT BY THE BEAST: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The name hits me before Ezra finishes his sentence."Which house?" Caspian asks, already moving, already the King rather than the man who was holding me thirty seconds ago.Ezra pushes the door open without being invited, which tells me everything about how seriously he is taking this, and stands in the doorway with a face that has not slept and does not intend to. "House Maren," he says. "Lord Aldric's people confirmed the departure at the eastern gate checkpoint around the third hour. The gate guards logged it as a pre-approved trade delegation, but when I cross-referenced the exit roster against the approved departures list this morning, no such approval exists."Aldric. Who sat in that Council chamber yesterday and called the genealogical investigation political suicide with the practiced ease of someone who had already decided it was a line he would not cross. Who protested noble house dignity so forcefully that I had noted it and filed it under suspicion but had not yet acted on

I read the name twice because once is not enough to make it real.Ezra Valdyr.Caspian's brother. His second. The man who has stood at his right hand through wars and succession crises and the last weeks of Shadow Court attacks, who was wounded at Blackstone Keep, who has been driving the investigation into noble house infiltration with an urgency I read as loyalty and apparently should have read as something else entirely.I look up at Caspian and watch him read the same name, watch his face do something I have never seen it do before, a fracture so brief and so controlled that I would have missed it entirely if I were not bonded to him, if I could not feel through that connection the specific quality of this pain, which is not surprise exactly but the particular devastation of a suspicion confirmed that he had spent years refusing to fully examine.He knew. Not consciously, not with evidence he could act on, but some part of him had catalogued inconsistencies and filed them in a plac

The document contains maps.Detailed ones, drawn with the kind of precision that requires either exceptional memory or direct access, showing underground facility layouts across three levels with guard rotations marked in a different ink color, supply routes annotated in a third, and structural weak points circled in red with the confidence of someone who has been inside and paid attention to load-bearing walls.I spread it across the flat of a weapon rack and lean over it beside Caspian while Ezra stands back and lets us look, and the scale of what I am seeing settles over me with cold clarity.Blackstone Keep was a research outpost. What Ezra has drawn here is a command center, built into a mountain range I recognize from Thorncross's eastern border maps, accessed through mine shafts that were listed as exhausted and abandoned in the kingdom's official records forty years ago."How long has this facility existed?" I ask without looking up."The current iteration, thirty years," Ezra

Two days dissolve into logistics and the particular grinding focus of people preparing for something that cannot be allowed to go wrong.Seraphine's grey-haired operative, who tells me her name is Voss and offers nothing else, drills the extraction team through the facility layout using chalk marks on the castle's lower courtyard stones until we can move the pattern in our sleep.Caspian runs the assault team through engagement sequences with the focused intensity of a man who has fought in enough enclosed spaces to know exactly how fast everything can collapse when the terrain works against you.Ezra answers questions under guard from dawn to midnight each day, producing details from memory with the thoroughness of someone who understands that usefulness is currently the only currency he has.I sleep in pieces and eat when Caspian puts food in front of me and spend the hours between tactical sessions walking Ezra's maps until I can close my eyes and move the path from supply entrance

The supply entrance is exactly where Ezra's maps said it would be.That is the first good sign, and I take it without letting myself build on it, because the map being accurate at the entrance does not guarantee accuracy three levels down where the variables that matter most are waiting.Voss handles the lock in forty-one seconds, which is nineteen seconds faster than her estimate and earns her a look from Seraphine that I interpret as proud approval.The heavy service door swings inward on well-maintained hinges that make no sound, which tells me this entrance is used regularly enough to be kept in good working order, which confirms the supply rotation timing Ezra documented is current.We move inside.The first level smells of stone and cold air and the particular chemical edge I recognize from Blackstone Keep, the same underlying scent of a place where unnatural things are conducted in controlled conditions, and I feel my power stir reflexively in my chest and press it back down to