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

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

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

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

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

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