บททั้งหมดของ BOUND BY REVENGE: The Alpha King's broken bride : บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

POV: Lucian (First Person)She started talking and I did not move.I had asked her to tell me everything and i had meant it. But sitting across from her now, watching her decide where the beginning actually was, I understood that I had asked for something that was going to cost her considerably more than I had fully appreciated when I said it.She did not perform it. That was the first thing. She did not arrange her pain for my benefit or frame it in a way designed to make me feel the correct amount of guilt. She just told me, in the same flat direct voice she used for everything.The nightmares started before she arrived here, she said. She had been having them for years but they had gotten worse over time. She said it was a stone room she always saw and it smelled of something medicinal. She used to see a girl on a surface but could never get the full detail of her face. She had never been able to hold the details past waking, they dissolved every time, but the feeling stayed. The f

POV: Thorne (Limited Third Person)The insignia was small.That was what made it effective. It was small enough to overlook in a dense financial record.Thorne had been looking at it for three hours.He had found it first in the financial transfer document. Then he went back through the archive patiently, pulling every High Council discretionary record he could access, cross referencing dates, looking for the thread.He found it twice more.The first was a record from eleven years ago. A discretionary operation in the western territory, no public documentation, the kind of action that got taken and never written up for general council review. The silver thread mark was in the authorization corner. The operation itself was listed as a border security measure. Thorne had cross referenced the border incidents from that period. Nothing matched. Whatever the operation actually was, border security was not it.The second was from fifteen years ago. A funding allocation to a private pack ove

POV: Nyx (First Person)The fifth session started the same way the others had.Elara across from me on the floor of the small east room, her hands open on her knees, her breathing slow and deliberate. There were no candles this time. Just the afternoon light coming through the narrow window and the silence she created when she was working, a silence that felt different from ordinary quiet, thicker, like the air itself was paying attention."Let her come at her own pace," Elara said. "Don't reach. Just wait."I had gotten better at waiting.I sat with my eyes closed and I let Mara do what she had been doing more and more since Elara started these sessions. Pressing forward in increments. Testing the edge of whatever the serum had built between us, not breaking through, just leaning, the way you leaned against a door you were not yet strong enough to open.But today was different.I knew it the moment it happened. Not a stirring or the familiar lean. It was a push. Real, sudden and full

POV: Lucian (First Person)She knocked this time.I noticed it. She had not knocked the last time she came to this study with something important. In fact she had never knocked. Thinking about that now she is very bold. "Come in," I said.She came in and sat down across from me without preamble, the way she did everything, and she looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who has rehearsed a beginning and has decided to abandon it in favor of just starting."I need to tell you something," she said. "About the session with Elara yesterday."I set down what I was holding. "Go ahead."She told me all of it. She told me about Mara pushing through for the first time, not a stirring but a full break, real and complete, and the memory she has seen after Mara pushed and she was in it. She was in a clearing, frozen ground and everywhere had smelt of blood. She told me about the woman who had come to save her and her voice was warm and careful.I did not move and she kept going.

POV: Nyx (First Person)I walked into his study with my chin up and my decision already made.He moved over and sat behind his desk looking at me directly with calm attention. Waiting for me to say what I had come here for. I gathered up boldness and said "Elara and I will be going north. To my hometown."I felt his eyes scan me slowly. "And why is that?""We need more information on my bloodline to help Mara recover properly. Elara has hit a wall she cannot get around from here."He leaned forward slightly. "The archive should-""It does not have what we are looking for." I did not let him finish. "Someone made sure of that a long time ago. There is almost nothing left. Whatever documentation existed about the Noven bloodline has specifically and deliberately been removed. The only place it might still exist is where my family lived."He looked at me with the careful specific attention he gave everything that mattered. Then: "And if I say no?"I held his gaze. "I did not come here