All Chapters of BOUGHT BY THE BEAST: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

I didn't go to Seraphine that evening.I wanted to. Every instinct in me screamed to walk to the north wing and tell her what I had set in motion with Lyra. But Morgessa's wards were listening, and tonight of all nights, I couldn't afford to give her anything to be curious about.Instead, I went back to the suite.Caspian was there.He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. He looked like a man trying to hold his skull together from the outside. The jacket he had worn to his afternoon meetings was thrown across the foot of the bed, his shirt half-unbuttoned, his shoes still on. He hadn't even made it to the closet before whatever was pressing down on him had driven him to sit and stop moving.He didn't look up when I came in.I closed the door quietly and stood there, watching him. The bond pulsed weakly between us, that thin thread of connection straining under the weight of everything Morgessa had piled on top of it. Through the static, I

I didn't hear it happen, I felt it.The ward network that threaded through the mountain carried vibrations the way water carries ripples. As I descended into the passage, the stone beneath my fingertips trembled with a sudden, sharp pulse of energy that had nothing to do with ancient magic or stolen heartbeats.It was anger. It was collective, explosive, human anger, channeled through walls and floors and the invisible threads that connected every room in the mansion to every other.Lyra had made her move.I kept walking, one hand on the wall, the other pressed against my stomach where a knot of fear had taken up permanent residence. The darkness was absolute again, the false wall having sealed itself behind me the moment I stepped through.There was no going back, only down.The passage spiraled deeper. I counted my steps the way I had previously, using the numbers as an anchor against the darkness pressing in around me.Fifty steps, a hundred, two hundred...The cold intensified with

By the time Caspian finally came to bed, my hand had started throbbing again.It was not the ordinary kind of pain that comes with a deep cut, this had a pulse to it. Slow at first, heavy too, like something under the bandage was knocking from the inside, trying to get out.I lay with my back to him and kept my breathing even, pretending to sleep because I was too tired to talk and too raw to let him hear what was happening in my head.Behind me, the mattress dipped under his weight, but he didn't touch me.He just lay there in the dark, close enough that I could feel his heat through the cold sheet between us while I counted his breaths.At some point after midnight, the throbbing crawled up my wrist, and by two in the morning, the heat had reached my shoulder. By the time the scream tore out of me, the pain was everywhere.I jackknifed upright in the bed, crushing my bandaged hand to my chest as fire ripped through my body so fast my vision went white. It felt like my veins had split

I didn't sleep for what was left of the night.I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub, Caspian's hand still wrapped around mine. He had slid down the doorframe at some point, his body giving out before his grip did, and now he was half-sitting against the wall with his legs stretched across the tile and his head tipped back and his eyes closed.The fog had taken him again. I could feel it through the bond, thick and heavy and suffocating, pressing him down into that unnatural sleep that stole hours from his life and fed them to the thing beneath the mountain. But his hand stayed locked around mine, even in sleep, his fingers curled tight like he was holding onto a rope over a cliff edge.I watched the sky lighten through the small bathroom window and tried to think.Morgessa was coming back. She had said as much. A full assessment of the ward damage, an examination of the suite, an examination of us. She would walk through this room with her magic humming and her gree

The outer wall door groaned when I pushed it open, the sound carrying across the frost-covered ground like a warning shot.Cold air slammed into me so hard my lungs seized. November in the mountains was not the kind of cold that nipped at your edges. It was the kind that reached inside your chest and squeezed until your body forgot how to shiver because shivering required energy it couldn't spare.I didn't stop to adjust.The tree line was a hundred yards ahead, a dark wall of pine and oak standing against the pale morning sky. Between me and those trees was nothing but open ground, frost-white and exposed, and if anyone was watching the perimeter from the mansion behind me, they would see a woman running across it like her life depended on the cover of the forest.Because it did.I ran.My boots slipped twice on the frozen grass but I kept my balance and kept moving, the pack Theron had given me bouncing against my spine with my small pack inside, my injured hand throbbing with every