All Chapters of The Alpha King’s obsession.: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

I had my back to the wall beside the door with the fire-iron I’d worked loose from the grate held low in both hands, exactly as I’d planned in the long hours of searching, and when my door burst open I nearly took the head off a royal guard in crown colours before he shouted my name, the false one, the only one they had.“Miss Liya! Miss Liya, it’s the crown, we have you—”“Hilda,” I said. “The healer, west side, second floor, they had her in a room with a green door—”He was already relaying it. I let him take the iron out of my hands, and the world tilted with relief and something colder underneath it, because through the broken window I could see down into the torchlit yard, and I could see Corvain.He was not fighting. He was walking, unhurried even now, across the far edge of the chaos toward a stand of trees beyond the fallen wall, with two men flanking him, a prosperous uncle strolling out o

They detained me in a tower room with a view of the whole valley, and it was the gentlest prison anyone has ever built for a woman, and I hated it more than the dungeon at Silverpine because I understood exactly what it cost the man who’d ordered it.There were no bars. There was a lock on the door and a guard outside it, but the room itself was one of the best in the palace, warm and wide, with Hilda given free passage in and out and a cot moved in beside my bed so she never had to leave me, and food that Ossa sent up unasked, sour and sharp the way I liked it. By the letter of the treaty I was a prisoner of the crown pending a murder review. By every other measure I was being wrapped in wool by a man who had detained me in front of the whole Alpha Council and then, the moment the doors closed, made it as much a lie as he could without breaking it open.He came to me on the second night, and it was the first I’d seen him since the yard.He looked as though he hadn’t slept. He stood j

“Seen to it how,” he said.“Grain contracts,” said the Dowager Luna, and smiled, and it was the same smile she had worn watching a girl beaten on a ballroom floor. “Nothing you need trouble your conscience with. You never had much of one, darling. Don’t grow one now, it’s terribly inconvenient timing.”She left him in the yard with the splintered post and the silence in his chest, and Dayn Blackwood stood a long time in the cold, doing arithmetic that would not come out clean, haunted by a hope he had no right to and a horror he could not name, while somewhere north of him a rider carried his mother’s grain contracts toward a girl he had thrown away.The review opened in the great hall eleven days later, and it went well, which is why the Goddess chose that evening to nearly take everything.I was not made to attend. A woman two weeks from her time, detained and heavy, was represented instead, and Hilda brought me word of it in pieces through the day. The ledger had been laid before t

The next thing that happened , A golden thread, and under it, deeper, older, a second thread that shone white, and the two of them together reached into the dead cold place in my chest where the rot had lived and simply burned it out, clean and total, the frost boiling away to nothing under a warmth that had roots all the way down.My wolf came back into her body with a howl I felt in my teeth.And then there was only the birth itself and Hilda’s hands, and Jake’s gripping but somehow reassuring hands crushing mine, and the long red work of it, and at the end of the longest hour of my life, in the silver-lit room, my daughter and my son came into the world one after the other and cried, both of them, loud and furious and alive.Hilda cleaned them and wrapped them and put them in my arms, and I looked down at my children through tears that would not stop, a boy with a shock of dark hair and a girl impossibly small beside him, and Jake pressed his mouth to my temple a

“You’re free.” He took my hand. “You’re not cleared. Not yet. Freed and cleared are different, and I won’t lie to you about the second one, because someone built that frame so well that setting aside the conviction isn’t the same as proving who lit the match. Your name is still Merliya Adair, family killer, in every record that matters. The only way that changes is if we find the truth Ken buried, and Ken is in Silverpine, and Silverpine is now under crown inquiry.” His gold eyes held mine. “I can send investigators. Or I can send the one person alive who knows that house from its marble floors to its servants’ halls, who heard Ken on the phone the night it happened, and who has spent every day since learning to look for the herd everyone stepped over.”I understood what he was offering me. Not protection. Not a settlement. The thing no one had offered me since the fire, which was the chance to walk back in and clear my own name with my own hands.“You’d let me lead it,” I s