All Chapters of The Alpha King’s obsession.: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Silverpine — Lord Silas CorvainThe cell was empty.Corvain stood in the doorway with his coat still buttoned against the dungeon chill and looked at the abandoned ropes on the floor, the cot dragged beneath the window, the gap in the bars with its edges scraped bright and smeared brown where she’d bled forcing herself through.Behind him, the guards had gone the color of old tallow. Somewhere up the spiral stairs, he could hear Alpha Dayn shouting at someone, the words lost, the fury clear.Corvain crouched. He picked up a frayed loop of rope, turned it in his gloved fingers, examined the fibers where she’d sawed through it against raw stone. Twenty minutes of work, he judged. Perhaps thirty. With bound hands, in the cold, after a beating and a rejection and an auction.He smiled.“Sir,” the auction house steward said nervously, “the pack extends its deepest apologies. Naturally your payment will be returned in full&

Alpha King Jake POVThe footage was seventeen seconds long, and I had watched it forty times.The club’s door camera, angled down and badly lit. The dark-haired friend exits first, laughing at something over her shoulder. And then she steps into frame — auburn hair silvered by the streetlight, my jacket that she never knew was mine draped over nothing, her face turned three-quarters away.At second eleven, she glances back at the door. At the camera. At me, it felt like, every time.“That’s our best frame.” Callan laid the printed still on my desk beside the artist’s sketch. The sketch was good. It was also wrong in some way I couldn’t name — too symmetrical, too calm. It had her features and none of her weather. “The friend’s harder. But we pulled the club’s tab receipts. The friend paid with a healer’s guild account.”I looked up. “A guild account.”“Registered to the border districts. There are eleven guild healers in the towns along the Silverpine lake line.” He set a short list b

By dawn the episode had passed, and I lay on the clinic bed wrung out and hollow while Hilda sat beside me with three open books and the face of a woman who’d been reading all night and hated everything she’d learned.“Tell me plainly,” I said.“Plainly.” She rubbed her eyes. “A mating bond isn’t a thread, whatever the poets say. It’s a graft. Living tissue, spirit-deep. When a bond completes, the graft takes, and the two systems grow together.” She turned one of the books toward me — an old anatomical plate, two wolf-spirits drawn intertwined. “When a bond is rejected, the graft is cut. Usually the dead tissue just… withers. Aches for a season. Fades.”“Usually.”“Usually the rejection is mutual, or at least witnessed and released. Yours wasn’t.” Her jaw tightened. “He rejected you and then denied you everything that lets a severed bond die clean — no release rite, no closure, and then trauma on trauma on trauma. Beatings. The auction. Starvation. The bond couldn’t wither, so it turn

The silence from the front room lasted half a heartbeat and a hundred years. “So I have,” Hilda said, and I heard her pick up a cup and take an unhurried sip. “The second one’s for you, if you’ll stop looming and drink it. Night-shift habit, I brew two so I don’t have to get up twice. Ask anyone in the guild what our hours do to us.” A beat. Then, mercy of mercies, a short laugh from one of the other guards, and the courteous voice softening into something human. “My wife’s a night nurse. She salts her coffee and swears she doesn’t.” Boots moving, away. “Thank you for your time, healer. Remember: Callan’s line.” The door closed. I counted to two hundred before Hilda opened the back room, and by then I was already pulling my bag from under the cot. “Don’t,” she said. “Two cups, Hilda. He counted the cups.” My hands were shaking as I stuffed clothes into the bag, her clothes, everything I owned was hers, everything I owned in the world fit in one bag and belonged to someone els

Vance povThe hounds took the scent on the far shore of the lake, two hours after moonrise, and Vance let himself smile for the first time in nine days.He was a lean, patient man who had hunted for Lord Corvain for eleven years, and he had learned the trade’s one great truth: everyone leaves a trail. The dead girl, because they were all dead girls eventually, his lordship’s purchases, had done better than most. The water crossing had cost the dogs a week. The border patrols, thick as flies in the King’s territory, had cost him three careful detours and one bribed farmer.But scent settles in soil like memory. And the trail out of the lake reeds ran north, weak but readable: fear-sweat, old blood.And something else.The lead hound, Sorrow, had been acting strange for a mile, whining, over-eager, checking back. At the trail’s next marker, a fence post where the girl had rested her hand, Vance knelt and took the scent himself, the old way, palm to the wood and a slow pull of night air