All Chapters of Reborn To Seduce My Bully's Alpha Father : Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

164 Chapters

Caden finds her first

Chapter 131Matthias's voice on the radio sent everyone into motion.Find Cassius.Dante was already moving. Kane's men peeled off toward the west wing in a coordinated sweep. My father squeezed my hand once and let go."Go," he said. "I'm safe here. Go."I went.The corridor outside the medical wing split three ways.I took the central route, the one that connected most directly to the west entrance where Matthias had engaged the fourth team. Behind me I heard Dante's voice on the radio, directing, coordinating, the estate's defensive architecture holding even as it bent under the weight of four simultaneous incursions.I was halfway down the corridor when someone grabbed my arm.I spun, every instinct from weeks of Dante's training firing at once.Caden.He let go immediately. Both hands up. The same gesture from the staircase, except this time his face had a different quality to it. Urgency that had moved past warning into something closer to fear."Not that way," he said."Matthia

Cadan's gun

Chapter 132Cassius wasn't where Caden said he'd be.We reached the garden corridor junction and it was empty. No silver-haired man. No movement. Just the cold night air coming through a broken pane of glass and the sound of fighting somewhere closer to the west entrance than expected."He doubled back," Caden said.Dante's voice on the radio, urgent now. West corridor. Matthias has him. One operative, disarmed, pinned. Get here.We ran.The west corridor was chaos contained.Matthias had one of Cassius's operatives against the wall, weapon already on the floor, the man's arm twisted up behind him at an angle that meant he wasn't going anywhere. Two of Kane's men were further down, dealing with the aftermath of the fourth team. Dante was moving toward Matthias, radio still in hand.No Cassius.I scanned the corridor and understood at the same moment Caden did.Cassius wasn't here.He'd never been heading for me at all. He'd sent the report of his movement toward the garden corridor or

The shot

Chapter 133The sound was wrong.That was the first thing, not the volume, though it was loud, the corridor turning the gunshot into something that filled every corner of the space at once. It was the wrongness of it. A sound that didn't belong in this building. In this life. In any version of either life I had lived.Matthias staggered back.His hand went to his chest.For one impossible second nothing else happened. He just stood there with his hand pressed to the front of his shirt, looking down at it like he didn't understand what he was looking at, and the silence in the corridor stretched into something that felt like it would never end.Then his legs went.He went down."NO"I don't know if the sound came from me or from Caden. Maybe both of us at once. The corridor erupted into motion, Dante surging forward, Kane's men turning, the operative against the wall forgotten entirely, but all of it was too far. Dante was fifteen feet away. Kane's men further. Caden was closest of all

The Wolf

Chapter 134The gunshot was still echoing when something inside me broke.Not broke like shattered. Broke like a dam. Like something that had been held back, carefully, deliberately, for weeks, for months, for two lifetimes, simply stopped being held.I didn't decide to move toward Matthias first.I didn't decide anything.One moment I was a person, kneeling, reaching.The next moment I wasn't.I have no memory of the shift itself. No sensation of transition, no awareness of my body changing. There was simply a gap, the world tilting, my vision sharpening into something that saw differently, smelled differently, every scent in the corridor suddenly a separate distinct thread: blood, gunpowder, fear, and underneath all of it, Caden.Caden, who still had the gun in his hand.Caden, whose scent carried the specific chemical wrongness of someone whose wolf had taken over completely, whose mind had gone somewhere none of us could reach.Caden, who had just shot Matthias.I don't remember c

The healing

Chapter 135 The corridor looked like something out of a nightmare. Blood on the floor, Matthias's blood, dark and spreading, more of it than I let myself fully look at. Dante on his knees beside him, both hands pressed to the wound, his composure cracking at the edges in a way I had never seen from him. Kane's men holding position at both ends of the corridor, weapons up, faces tight. And Matthias. His eyes were open. Barely. Finding mine as I crawled back to him, leaving Caden behind in his wreckage of grief and freedom. "Aria," he said. Just my name. Barely audible. "I'm here," I said. "I'm here, I'm not leaving." Dante looked at me. "The bleeding slowed when you touched him before. I don't know what you did but it slowed." His voice was tight, controlled by sheer force. "It's not enough. The silver's still in there. I can feel it, there's something wrong under my hands, something that doesn't." "I know," I said. "Move your hands." He moved them. I put my palms against the

The Waking

Chapter 136I woke slowly.Not the sharp jolt of returning from unconsciousness in danger. Something gentler. Like surfacing from very deep sleep, layers of awareness arriving one at a time, the softness of a bed, the weight of blankets, the quiet of a room that had no urgency in it.I opened my eyes.Unfamiliar ceiling. Warm light, the particular gold of late afternoon. Somewhere a clock ticking. The smell of clean linen and, underneath it, something I recognized immediately and completely.Matthias.I turned my head.He was in a chair beside the bed. Not the chair he usually chose, something simpler, pulled close, close enough that if I reached out I could touch him without moving more than my hand. He was watching me.He looked like he hadn't slept in days. There were shadows under his eyes and his shirt was wrinkled in a way I'd never seen on him, like he'd been wearing it for longer than a shirt was meant to be worn. But his chest, his chest, where I'd put my hands, where the sil

Everything

Chapter 137I told him everything.Not carefully. Not rationed. All of it, from the beginning, in the order it had actually happened, not the order I'd discovered things or the order that made strategic sense, but the true order. The real sequence of a life that had ended and started again.I started with the party.Not the second one. The first."In my first life," I said, "Caden cornered me at the same back-to-school party. Asked me to accept the mate bond. I said no, but gently. I thought if I was kind about it he'd accept it." I held Matthias's gaze. "He didn't. Within a week he started the rumors. The harassment. His friends bumping into me in the cafeteria. The fake photos."Matthias listened."Then he went after my parents. Equipment started going missing from my father's department. Fake evidence. Fake theft charges." My voice stayed level but I felt the shape of it in my chest, the weight of a timeline I'd lived once and couldn't unlive. "They were fired. Both of them. The As

What he says

Chapter 138He didn't say anything for a long time after I finished.That was what I'd expected. The silence. What I hadn't expected was the quality of it, not the silence of someone questioning or analysing or running calculations, but the silence of someone who had received something enormous and was simply holding it. Feeling its weight. Letting it be real.Matthias sat beside the bed with his hand over mine and his eyes on my face and he didn't speak for long enough that the evening light through the window shifted from gold to something softer and the clock on the wall ticked through several minutes that felt like much more.I waited.I had learned how to wait for Matthias."The first life," he said finally."Yes.""When Caden destroyed your family." He said it carefully. Like something that needed to be said precisely or not at all. "When you lost your job and your parents lost theirs and the savings ran out and you had nowhere to go.""Yes," I said."When the car went off the r

Caden's Reckoning

Chapter 139The room they put him in wasn't a cell.That was the first thing Caden noticed when the door closed behind him and he was left alone with it. Not a cell. A room. Plain, functional, a bed and a chair and a window that was locked but present. Like someone had made a deliberate choice about what kind of space this was going to be.He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor and didn't move for a long time.The bond was gone.He'd known it intellectually the moment she said the words in the corridor, the formal rejection, the cadence of it, the particular authority in her voice that hadn't been there before. He'd known it was done.Knowing it and feeling it were different things.Feeling it was like trying to find a wall in a room you'd lived in your entire life and reaching out and finding nothing there. Just air. Just space where something solid used to be. He kept reaching for it without meaning to, that familiar pull, that frequency, the thing that had told him f

Victoria trial

Chapter 140The proceedings began on a Tuesday morning.Not in a courtroom. In a formal Council chamber, smaller than the one that had hosted Matthias's hearing, with three adjudicators rather than five and a recorder who sat at the side table and documented everything with the patient thoroughness of someone who understood that the record was the point.Victoria arrived exactly on time.Not early. Not late. Exactly on time, which was so entirely her that something in me ached slightly at the recognisability of it. She was wearing a dark suit that was impeccably fitted and her hair was perfect and she sat in the respondent's chair with her hands folded in her lap and looked at the adjudicators with the composed attention of someone who had decided, somewhere between the formal charges being filed and this morning, exactly how she was going to conduct herself.With dignity.Whatever else she was going to lose today, she wasn't going to lose that.I was in the gallery.Not required to b

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