All Chapters of MARRIED TO AN ALPHA, CLAIMED BY THE LYCAN KING : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Bella's POVI had made one decision when I woke up that morning and I was holding onto it with both hands.Stay in the room. Avoid Andrew. Let the day pass without incident. After last night I needed one day where nothing happened. One day where I didn't have to perform composure for anyone or manage Andrew's mood or navigate Hailey's presence or calculate my next move.My head still pounded from yesterday's mess and my chest felt tight every time his face flashed in my mind. I wanted nothing to do with him today. Nothing.That was the plan.Julie was styling my hair when she said it."Luna." Her voice had the particular quality it got when she was working up to something she wasn't sure how I was going to receive. "Do you know what today is?"I looked at her through the mirror, my eyes slightly tired. "Is there something important happening today?"She met my eyes in the reflection and let out a small sigh that she tried to make inaudible and didn't quite manage. "You really did lose

Bella's POVThe fourteen days passed faster than I expected.Andrew had gotten busy with pack duties, patrols, whatever it was Alphas did when they needed to look like they were leading something and somewhere in the middle of all of that he had stopped looking at me. Not the deliberate not-looking that he did when he was making a point, but genuinely stopped registering my presence in a room the way you stop registering furniture you've decided is no longer interesting. He poured everything into Hailey. His attention, his time, his careful hands and soft voice, all of it directed at her in a way that was clearly designed to make me feel the absence of it.I felt nothing.That was the part that still surprised me when I examined it honestly. No jealousy, no longing, no hollow ache where something had been removed. Just a clean empty space where Andrew used to occupy my thoughts and the quiet satisfaction of a woman who had realized she was free of something without having the legal p

Ethan's POVShe walked through that door and I had approximately three seconds of peace before her scent reached me.Her warm Honey scent filling the room the way it always did when she was in it, and Slade went from dormant to fully present in the space of one breath, rising up inside me with the particular intensity of something that had been waiting and was done being patient about it. I kept my face where it always was and watched her curtsy and noted that she had gotten more composed since the last time she had stood in this room, less visibly overwhelmed, and I noted that too without letting anything show about it.My necklace was on her neck.I saw it the moment she straightened from the curtsy, the silver chain with the rubies sitting against her collarbone exactly where I had imagined it would sit when I took it out of that drawer and put it in the box. I had known it would look right on her. I had known that since the moment I bought it years ago and had not examined why I k

Bella's POVI lay in my bed that night and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out what I was actually feeling.Not the surface version of it. Not the easy answer that presented itself first—anger, obviously, the sharp hot anger that came from having your expectations dropped from a height. I knew that was there. But underneath it something else was sitting that I couldn't immediately name, something quieter and heavier, and I lay there in the dark and tried to find it.It wasn't Hailey's words. I had catalogued every single one of them in the garden and put them in their correct place…deliberate, aimed, the words of a woman who felt threatened and had decided offense was the best defense. They had landed, yes. Some of them had found the specific spots they were designed to find. But they weren't what was keeping me awake.It wasn't Andrew either. Andrew had shown me who he was so many times by now that nothing he did in that garden had surprised me. His silence while Hailey spo

Bella's POVThree hours.I sat in that waiting hall for three full hours with my hands in my lap and my back straight and my mind running in every direction it could find and none of the directions were comfortable. The waiting hall was nice enough, quietly furnished, warm, the kind of room designed to make people feel settled while they waited for things they had no control over and I hated every inch of it.What had happened to my father?That was the question that sat heaviest. Not the cold look from Ethan, not the formal title, not being redirected out of the room like a visiting stranger—all of that was sitting in its own separate pile that I was going to get to—but my father first. Alexander of Blackthron on his knees on the floor of that room, worry sitting openly on his face in a way I had never seen from him before, here without stopping to see me first, here without sending word, here for something that apparently three hours later I was still not being told about.Andrew ha