All Chapters of The Alpha King’s obsession.: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

I didn’t sleep that night, and by dawn I’d made a decision that felt like standing on the window ledge again.I couldn’t tell him who I was. Not yet. I’d seen how the treaty worked, how even a king had to bend to a pack’s lawful accusation of murder, and I knew that the day my name came out was the day I stopped being a guest and started being a legal problem with a signature required. I wasn’t ready to hand him that. I wasn’t ready to hand anyone that.But I couldn’t stand in that room, in front of all those faces with nothing under their names, and give him nothing.So I found a third path, which was the coward’s path and the only one I could walk.I knew a thing about the auctions that no one on his wall knew, because I’d been on the block. The auctioneer had used a phrase, a specific one, the same rhythm every time the bidding stalled, and I’d heard it in the underground hall at Silverpine and I’d have bet my life it wasn’t invented there. Going once to a good house. Going twice t

They rode in at noon on the third day, and I watched from a high window with the curtain held to one side, exactly as I’d told myself not to.I knew him at once, across the whole width of the great courtyard, before I could see his face. The set of the shoulders. The way the other riders angled themselves toward him without seeming to. Dayn Blackwood swung down from his horse in the courtyard where I’d stood bowed-to eleven days before, and even from four floors up I felt my whole body pull tight, an animal remembering the hand that struck it.He looked wrong. That was the thing I hadn’t expected. In my memory he was carved from certainty, the Alpha who owned every floor I’d knelt on. The man in the courtyard moved like something had come loose in him. He held himself upright by will, not ease. And there was a woman beside him in pale gold that I didn’t recognize, riding too close, laying a proprietary hand on his arm as they dismounted, and I understood without being told that this w

Alpha DaynHe held himself together in front of the King, and he did not remember afterward how.Alive. The word went through him and kept going, down past the practiced composure, down to the silent place where his wolf had lived before the ballroom, and for one instant the silence there was not silence at all but something straining against a wall. She was alive. She was in the King’s territory. The crown had intercepted the tracker, which meant the crown had her, or had had her, which meant every word she carried about the auction and the beatings and the torn dress was now within reach of the one man in the world whose law he could not buy or outrun.“A fugitive, Majesty,” he heard himself say. “Convicted by the pack’s own council. If she’s in your lands, I’d ask that she be returned to face her sentence.”“Convicted.” The King’s gold eyes did not blink. “By the pack’s council. That would be the same council you preside over.”“The evidence was overwhelming.”“I’m sure it was.” So

Alpha King Jake POVI knew something was wrong before I knew what, the way you know a house is empty from the sound of your own footsteps in it.She hadn’t come to the study that night, which happened sometimes now that the pregnancy tired her early, so I’d let her sleep and told myself I’d see her at breakfast. But I woke in the grey before dawn with my wolf already on his feet, staring, and the pull in my chest that always told me where she was in the house had gone slack and directionless, pointing at nothing, pointing everywhere, and I was out of my rooms and down the corridor before I’d finished dressing.Her door was unlocked. I’d had a man build her a second bolt because she liked to feel the house sealed around her, and the second bolt was drawn back, and the room beyond it was cold and still and empty, the bed unslept in, the curtains open on a garden going white with frost.There were two things on the pillow.I crossed to them the way you cross to a thing you already unders

The carriage rolled north through the rest of the night and all the next day, and Vance did not once let the hood off the lamp, so that Hilda and I sat in a swaying dark and held each other’s bound hands and did not speak, because there was nothing to say that our captor should hear.They took us to a house I had never seen and would never forget, a low grey manor set back in wooded hills with a wall around it and men on the wall, the kind of house that looks from the road like an old family seat and is, on the inside, something else entirely. They put Hilda in one room and me in another, and mine was not a cell. That frightened me more than a cell would have. It was a good room, warm, with a fire and a bed and food laid out, the room you give a guest, or a thing you have paid a great deal for and do not wish to damage.I was there perhaps an hour before the door opened without a knock and Lord Silas Corvain came in.I knew him from the auction, from the front r