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Home / Werewolf / MARRIED TO AN ALPHA, CLAIMED BY THE LYCAN KING / Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

All Chapters of MARRIED TO AN ALPHA, CLAIMED BY THE LYCAN KING : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

98 Chapters

༄Chapter 21

I did not turn around.The woman's voice was behind me and Ethan's eyes were in front of me and I kept my gaze exactly where it was because the look he was giving me left absolutely no room for anything except doing what he had just told me to do. It wasn't a request dressed up as an instruction. It was just an instruction, sitting in his amber eyes with the full weight of everything he was behind it, and every part of me that had a survival instinct understood that there was no version of this moment where I said no.I reached for the hem of my gown.My hands were not steady and there was nothing I could do about that. I pulled the gown up slowly and lifted it over my head and the air of the room touched my skin and I was standing in just my bra and my lace panties in front of the Lycan King and I kept my chin up because dropping it wasn't going to help anything."What the fuck, Ethan?"The woman's voice split through the room from behind me sharp and loud and I kept my eyes on Ethan

༄Chapter 22

Ethan's POVI watched her hands shake against the fabric of her gown and said nothing.She was trying to put herself back together with the urgency of someone who had come undone in front of a person they weren't supposed to come undone in front of, and the effort she was putting into looking composed while her fingers trembled against the hem was something I filed away without letting anything show on my face about it.I kept my expression exactly where it always was.Still and unreadable. The same face I wore in war rooms and throne rooms and every room where the wrong flicker of expression gave people information they could use against you. I had been wearing it so long it no longer required effort.Serena had been dealt with.That was the primary outcome of the last few minutes and it had been cleaner than I had expected when I heard her voice at that door. She had cheated. That was the fact and the fact was all there was, I had no interest in her explanation or her regret or the

༄Chapter 23

Bella's POVHe fell asleep before the transfusion even finished.I was watching it happen in real time and still couldn't fully make sense of it. One moment Ethan was sitting in that chair with his arm extended and his face doing its usual thing of giving nothing away, and then somewhere in the middle of the transfusion his eyes just closed. His breathing shifted and deepened and his whole body released from whatever constant effort holding himself at that particular level of control required, and he was just…gone. Asleep in the chair with his head tipped slightly back and his face finally, completely unguarded in a way I had never seen it when he was conscious.I stared at him.The physician finished everything quietly, disconnecting the line from my arm with practiced efficiency, and I sat on the edge of the bed and pressed my free hand flat against the mattress and took stock of how my body felt. Dizzy was the most accurate word for it. Not dramatically, not in a way that made the

༄Chapter 24

Bella's POVThe packhouse told me everything before anyone opened their mouth.The servants were moving differently. Quieter than usual, smaller somehow, the way people make themselves small when something heavy is sitting in a room and they need to not be in the path of it. Nobody met my eyes when the carriage pulled through the gate. Everyone found somewhere else to be. I had been in this packhouse long enough to read that particular energy and what it meant was that Andrew was home and in a mood and everyone within his range was managing their distance carefully.I sat with that information for a second before the carriage fully stopped.Lucas brought it to a halt and I pushed the door open and climbed down and when my feet hit the ground I turned and looked at him directly where he sat at the front."Thank you, Lucas," I said.I looked him in the eyes when I said it, held his gaze long enough for him to understand that I meant it and that the weight behind it was real, that I reme

༄Chapter 25

Bella's POV "I don't understand what you're saying, Andrew." I kept my voice completely steady and looked at him with the blankest expression I could manufacture. "What do you mean?" My brain was running fast behind that blank face, turning over every possible angle, every direction this could go, every version of what he might know versus what he thought he knew, and none of the calculations were producing anything I could comfortably stand on. Andrew looked at me for one long moment. "My guards lost track of your carriage, you scheming bitch!" His voice cracked through the sitting room and I flinched, not dramatically, just a small involuntary movement in my shoulders that I couldn't stop before it happened, and Hailey looked up at him with those wide eyes and said nothing and I stood there and let the echo of it settle in the room. "Where did you go?" he demanded. Somewhere underneath the fear and the racing calculations and the flinch I hadn't been able to stop, something wa

༄Chapter 26

Andrew's POVI knew Bella was lying.I had known she'd lie the moment she walked through that door with her spine straight and her face arranged into that blank composed expression she had been wearing since she woke up from that fall. Something had shifted in Bella since she lost her memory and I hadn't been able to put my finger on the exact shape of it but I felt it every time she looked at me, a steadiness that hadn't been there before, a quality in her eyes that was different from the crying obsessive woman I had been married to for two years.That woman had never been able to hide anything from me.This one was trying.The guards losing track of the carriage was the part that sat with me most. I had put my best men on her this morning, men who knew this territory the way they knew their own hands, and they had lost a single carriage on roads they had traveled their entire lives. That didn't happen by accident. Either Lucas had taken a route that made no sense for where she claim

༄Chapter 27

Bella's POVI sat on the edge of my bed and let my mind spiral for a while because there was no point pretending it wasn't going to.Every possible outcome. Every version of what Andrew could have gotten out of them, every direction that conversation downstairs could have gone, every crack in the story that he might have found and pulled at until it came apart. I ran through all of it, one scenario after another, and when I had exhausted every terrible possibility I sat with what was left and made a decision.I was going to trust my gut.My gut said Julie had held herself together. My gut said Lucas had walked into that room with his head up and his story straight and had not given Andrew a single thing to work with. My gut said that if either of them had broken I would know about it by now in a way that involved Andrew's footsteps on the stairs rather than silence.I held onto that and felt the tightest part of the tension in my chest loosen by a fraction.I got up and started undres

༄Chapter 28

Ethan's POVI woke up feeling different.Not in a way I had a clean word for. Not better exactly, not worse, just different. Like something that had been sitting at a fixed grinding pressure inside my chest for a very long time had shifted fractionally in the night and the absence of that specific pressure was unfamiliar enough that my body didn't know what to do with it yet.I lay still for a moment and took inventory the way I did every morning, locating the curse, assessing its weight, measuring it against the day before the way a man measures water in a container he knows is draining. It was the first thing I did when I woke up and had been for long enough that I no longer thought of it as something I chose to do.The curse was there.But it was quieter.Not gone, not even close to gone, but the grinding constant pressure of it had pulled back by a degree that was significant enough to notice and I lay there in the quiet of my room and noted it without letting my face do anything

༄Chapter 29

Bella's POVThe sitting room had gone very quiet.Not the natural quiet of a room where nothing is happening, this is the loaded quiet of a room where everyone is waiting to see what happens next and nobody wants to be the one who moves first. Cordell was holding the box with the royal crest. Andrew was looking at me. Hailey had stopped what she was doing with Andrew's clothes and was looking at me too. And I was standing there looking at the box and telling my face to do absolutely nothing while my mind ran in fifteen directions simultaneously."Why would the King send you a package, Bella?" Andrew asked.His voice came out even. Controlled. But I had been living in close proximity to Andrew long enough to hear what was sitting underneath the evenness and what was underneath it right now was something I had never personally heard from him before directed at me.Jealousy.Actual jealousy. Thin and sharp and trying very hard to sound like reasonable suspicion."I'm just as shocked as y

༄Chapter 30

Andrew's POVI had been turning it over since morning and I still didn't have an answer that satisfied me.The King sent my wife a package. With the royal crest. Addressed to her specifically, by her full name, with instructions that it be received by her alone. I had been sitting with that fact all day and running it through every framework I had for understanding how things worked in this territory and none of them were producing a conclusion I was comfortable with.The King and Alexander had history. That was established, that was known. Alexander had gone to Ethan directly to arrange the marriage and Ethan had agreed, which meant there was a relationship there that went beyond the standard Alpha to King dynamic. A closeness. The kind that produced favors and consideration and possibly, possibly, the kind of gesture that had arrived in a royal box this morning.That was the version I kept returning to because it was the version that made the most sense and left my position intact.

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