Hunted By Alphas, Claimed By The Alpha King のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

She calls the front desk at noon the next day.I am in the kitchen and Thalrion is in his office and the building phone rings and I pick it up because everyone else is occupied and nobody is on the front desk right now and old habits mean I answer things that ring."Mr. Bloodryn's residence," I say.A pause.Long enough to have texture.And then a voice. Low and warm and carrying the specific ease of someone who has never walked into a room and been uncertain of their welcome."Well," she says. "That's new."I say nothing."Is Thal available?" she asks. Thal. Easy and worn smooth, the sound of someone who has said it in the dark."He's unavailable," I say. My voice is completely steady. I am choosing to be proud of that.Another pause. "Tell him Zara called," she says. "Tell him I'm in the city." A beat. "Tell him I'd love to see him. He knows where to find me."She hangs up.I put the phone down.I stand in the kitchen and look at the city through the window and I take stock of what I

She comes to the building the next morning.I find out because Soren tells me with an expression that is carefully not asking me how I feel about it. "She's downstairs," he says. "She told the front desk she's not leaving until he comes down.""And is he going down?" I ask."He's thinking about it," Soren says, which means yes.I look at the window."Okay," I say.Soren looks at me. "That's it? Okay?""What else should I say?" I ask.He looks at me for a moment. "Nothing," he says. "Just checking."He goes.I sit in the window seat and I think about okay and what it actually is, which is not nothing, which is a warm complicated mess that is doing things in my chest that I am not interested in examining in front of Soren, and I look at the city and I breathe and I think.Thalrion goes down twenty minutes later.I know because I feel the direction of him through the bond change, downward and away, and I sit with that for a moment. The bond between a King and the person he filed for over

The sweep takes three hours.I spend them in the back of a vehicle with Thalrion and two security team members and a tablet showing the feeds from all three properties and I watch Caius's team move through them with the same quiet efficiency the security team brings to everything and I think about what it means to live inside a situation like this, where efficiency is the difference between a message and a body.Thalrion is on his phone for most of it.I look at the feeds and I think."The properties are clean," I say at the two hour mark.He looks up from his phone."He didn't plant anything at the properties," I say. "The car park was a message, not a first step in a sequence. If he was going to sequence it he would have had something at one of the properties ready to go immediately after. He didn't." I look at the tablet. "Which means the message is the move. He wanted you moving and reconfiguring and expending resources."Thalrion looks at me."You've been thinking about this," he

She arrives the next morning.Bryn's team drove through the night and she walks into the apartment at 8am looking like someone who has been awake since yesterday afternoon and has spent the intervening hours constructing an extremely detailed list of questions.She is smaller than I remembered.Not literally, she is exactly the same height she has always been, but there is something about seeing the people you love in your head versus seeing them in person, the way the real version is simultaneously more and less than the version you carry. She has my mother's eyes, dark and direct, and her own particular way of standing which is with her chin slightly forward like she is prepared to walk into whatever is in front of her.She sees me and her face does the warming up thing.I cross the room and she grabs the back of my jacket with both hands and I hold on and she says into my shoulder, "You are in so much trouble.""I know," I say."So much trouble, Vaelis," she says."I know," I reply.

I did not expect Noctyros to sit still since the courtroom, none of us expects that from him. We all know he will make a move... a physical move. What we do not know is the kind of moves he's deciding to make. This time...He takes Soren.Not permanently. Not kidnapping, nothing that direct. He gets to Soren through a woman, which in retrospect should not surprise any of us because Noctyros uses the things people don't think to guard against, and by the time we understand what has happened, Soren has been gone for four hours.It starts at nine in the evening.Soren tells Thalrion he's going out to meet a contact, which is normal, Soren has contacts across this city that are operational necessities and Thalrion trusts him with them, and he leaves and at one in the morning, Thalrion wakes up from a sound sleep because his phone is going and the number on the screen is not Soren's.I wake up when he does.Bond response. He is out of bed and fully operational before I have finished sit