Todos los capítulos de The Alpha King’s obsession.: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

Alpha King Jake POVThe call came at 1:40 in the morning, and I was already awake.I had been awake for four hours, sitting in the dark of my study with a map I no longer needed to look at, because at some point around ten o’clock my wolf had risen to his feet inside me and simply stayed there — head up, ears forward, staring north-west like a hound at a door.Something was wrong. I had no evidence. I had ordered the horses saddled anyway, and let the household think what it liked.Callan came through the door without knocking, which he had done twice in twenty years.“Found,” he said. “Alive. Barely.”I was moving before he finished. “Where?”“Lake road, nine miles east of the guild town. Captain Bren’s detail.” He kept pace with me down the corridor, feeding me the report in pieces as it came in. “She was in the hands of a tracker when they took her. Southern man, professional, four hounds. He’s in irons.”“Her condition.”“Medic says hypothermic, malnourished, cut feet. And—” Calla

The world did a slow, terrible turn.“No,” I said.“Liya—”“No.” I got a hand between us and pushed. It moved him not at all, but he let go instantly, both hands lifting away from me, and I dragged myself upright against the far door with my heart trying to break my ribs. “You don’t get to say it like that. Like it’s a fact you own.”“It is a fact.”“It’s a person. It’s mine.” The words tore out of me raw. “You have an entire kingdom. You have armies and palaces and every wolf alive kneels when you walk into a room, and you have had this baby for nine days and it took you nine days to find me. So don’t sit there and tell me what I’m carrying, Your Majesty, because I already know, and I’ve known while I was running through the woods barefoot with dogs behind me.”Silence in the car. Outside, someone laughed at something, ordinary and far away.He didn’t shout. Somehow that was worse. He sat with his hands open on his knees and took it, all of it, and when he spoke his voice was level.

HildaThey brought her into the field tent at half past three in the morning, and Hilda shoved a captain of the royal guard bodily out of her way to get to her.“Merliya—” She caught herself. “Liya.”The girl’s eyes found her and filled instantly. “Your door,” she said. “Hilda, your door, they broke your—”“It’s a door. I’ll get a better one, and the crown will pay for it, won’t they, Captain?” She was already working, pulse, pupils, the wrappings on those poor feet, and her hands knew what they were doing even while her chest ached. “You absolute idiot. You ran nine miles in the dark barefoot.”“You told me to run.”“I told you to go north, not to break the world record.” Hilda pressed her palm flat to the girl’s sternum, and stopped.The frost was still there. She could feel it, the dead, wrong cold of a necrotic bond, exactly as it had been. But it had retreated. Two nights ago it had been climbing down toward the womb like ivy on a wall, and now it had pulled back to the size of a

They tried to tell me the King was in council.I said I’d wait. I waited two hours in a corridor with a marble bust of somebody’s grandfather, in borrowed clothes, with my hair wet from the first hot bath of my life, and when the doors finally opened and a stream of very important men came out, they all looked at me, and I looked back at every one of them until they looked away.I’m going to remember your faces, I thought, from habit. Then, startled: No. These ones haven’t done anything to me. Not yet.He came out last. “You should be asleep.”“I need to say something, and I need to say it before I sleep in your house.”He glanced at the emptying corridor, then stood aside from the council room door. “In here. Nobody comes in.”The room was all dark wood and old maps. I stayed standing. So did he, I noticed that, and I noticed that he’d noticed I would.“Say it,” he said.I had rehearsed it in the bath and lost every word. So I said it plainly.“I know what I am here. I’m the woman ca

The woman in silver crossed the lawn like she owned the frost on it.She was older than me by perhaps ten years, though it was hard to be sure, because she was the kind of beautiful that doesn’t age so much as settle. Pale hair coiled at her neck. A grey wool dress cut with the sort of restraint that costs more than colour ever could. She smiled as she came, and the smile was warm, and I did not believe a second of it, because I had spent three weeks learning to read faces the way other people read weather.“You must be the King’s guest,” she said, and took my cold hand in both of her warm ones before I could decide whether to give it. “I’m Seren. Lady Seren, if we’re being formal, but I hope we won’t be. I heard he brought someone home in the small hours, and I simply couldn’t wait for a proper introduction, which is terribly rude of me, so you’ll have to forgive it.”“Liya,” I said.“Liya.” She held the name for a moment, tasting it, the way Jake had in the club, except that where h