Todos os capítulos de The Royal Alphas’ Captive Maid: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

POV: MelinaThe note had four words on it.Report to my office.No please. No time suggestion. No signature...just the Howlington seal pressed into the bottom corner like that was explanation enough. Like anyone in this building would need clarification about whose office they were being summoned to.Melina stared at it for a full minute.Then she put it down, finished making the bed she'd been making, and told herself it was fine.It wasn't fine.She'd managed two days in this place without a direct encounter with him. Two days of closed doors and distant glimpses and the specific, uncomfortable awareness of someone just out of sight. Like knowing there was something large and patient in the water without being able to see it. Archer had taken her apart with a smirk and a doorway. Aiden had stood behind her and said things next to her ear that she was still replaying against her will at two in the morning.She didn't know what Alaric would do.That was the problem.Archer was fire. A

She needed air.That was the only thought in her head when she slipped out of the staff corridor at six forty-five in the morning, before her shift started, before the estate fully woke up. She needed air and open sky and something that wasn't stone walls and corridors that smelled like them.The garden was empty at this hour.That was why she picked it.She found a bench near the rose beds on the east side....far enough from the main building that she couldn't see any windows, close enough that she wasn't technically outside the staff-permitted grounds. She sat down. Put her hands in her lap. And steard at the roses.She'd been here three days.Three days and she had already been watched through a dining hall by three men who looked like a punishment designed specifically for her. She'd stood in a doorway and watched things she couldn't unsee. She'd had a man stand behind her close enough to feel his warmth and say things next to her ear. She'd sat across a desk from silver eyes that

She fell asleep at eleven.She knew because she'd been staring at the ceiling for two hours before that. Listening to the estate go quiet. Trying to empty her head of everything that had been filling it since the dining hall.It wasn't working.But eventually exhaustion won.Her eyes closed.And the dream came.It started the way it actually happened.The corridor. The door not properly closed. The sounds coming through the gap.Archer in the chair.The woman on his lap.Melina in the doorway watching.But then the woman turned her head and Melina saw her own face looking back at her and before she could process that....before she could do anything with that information.....she wasn't in the doorway anymore.She was in the chair.Archer's hands were on her waist. His chest was warm and solid against her back. And she could feel him underneath her....hard and thick and right there....and her body clenched around nothing before she could stop it."There you are," he said against her ear

She woke up at six.Not because of the alarm. Her body just stopped sleeping, the way it did when something was wrong. Eyes open. Ceiling. Six oh three.She lay there.Everything hurt.Not badly. Not like injury. More like the specific ache of muscles that had been working all night. Her thighs. Her lower back. The space between her shoulder blades. Her whole body heavy and wrung out in a way that made no sense for a person who had been lying in a bed.She stared at the ceiling.And the dream came back immediately.All of it. In order. Every detail.She closed her eyes.That didn't help because it was worse with her eyes closed so she opened them again and went back to staring at the ceiling and took a very slow breath.It was a dream.Her body felt like this because of a dream.Her body needed to get its story straight.She sat up slowly. Her head swam for a second. She pressed both feet flat on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the room to stop tilting.It even

POV: MelinaShe dropped a pillowcase.Just let it fall right out of her hands onto the floor and stood there looking at it for a moment before she bent down and picked it up.Focus.She shook it out. Smoothed it over the pillow. Moved to the next one.Her hands were fine. Her hands were completely fine. The problem was everything below her hands...the persistent low ache in her thighs, the tenderness she kept noticing every time she shifted her weight, the way her lower back pulled when she bent over. All of it. Still there. Still present. Still refusing to let her forget.It was a dream.She knew it was a dream.Her body apparently hadn't gotten that memo.She finished the bed. Moved to the bathroom. Wiped down the sink, the counter, the mirror. Her reflection looked back at her the same way it had this morning....blank, unremarkable, fine and she looked away first.She moved her cart to the next room.By the third room she'd knocked over her spray bottle, forgotten what she'd alread