All Chapters of The Alpha's Enemy's Daughter : Chapter 21 - Chapter 29

29 Chapters

CHAPTER 21

Lucien continued.He spoke without note and hesitation, without once raising his voice. That alone was enough to make her pay attention. She had been in enough rooms with enough powerful men to know that the ones who shouted were usually the ones who were uncertain. The ones who stayed quiet were the ones who already knew something everyone else was still working out."Whoever did this," Lucien said, moving his gaze slowly across the hall, "was not careless. They did not act on impulse. They understood this pack well enough to know which deaths would cause the most disruption and which direction suspicion would naturally fall." He paused. "That kind of understanding is not something a stranger walks in with. It is something that grows over time….Over the years. From the inside."The hall was very quiet.Alira looked around slowly, keeping her expression neutral. Most faces carried the expected mixture of unease and attention. But there were others, three that she counted, who had gone

CHAPTER 22

She found his office on her own.Nobody directed her there. Nobody offered to walk her. She had spent enough weeks in this keep to know its corridors by now, which ones curved, which ones narrowed, which doors belonged to which rooms. She had learned it the way she learned most things, quietly, without announcing that she was learning.She knocked once and did not wait for an answer.Lucien was at his desk, reading something. He did not look up immediately, which she suspected was deliberate. A small power, cheap but effective. She stood in the middle of the room and waited, because she had not come here to be rattled by a man taking his time with a document.He set the paper down and looked at her."You are going to want to close that door," she said.He said nothing. She closed it herself."I want to know who it is," she said. "The person you are protecting. The person who has been using me as a shield while they move freely through this pack."Lucien leaned back in his chair and lo

CHAPTER 23

The training ground was loud that evening.Lucien had been at it since before the sun was fully up, working through combinations with Draven that had long since passed the point of being drills. Draven was one of the few wolves in Ashveil who could still push him properly, who knew when to press and when to pull back and who did not make the mistake of going easy because of who he was sparring with.Lucien valued that more than most things.He landed a clean strike to Draven's shoulder, and Draven rolled with it and came back low and fast, which was the right response, and for a moment they were simply two men working through something physical with everything else stripped away. No pack.No investigation. Just the ground under his feet and the work in front of him.Soren was on the far side of the ground with three younger wolves, running them through footwork drills with the focused impatience of a man who had little tolerance for sloppiness. Lucien could hear him from across the

CHAPTER 24

"You are a long way from wherever you came from," Lucien said."Not so far," the rogue said. His accent was northern. "Close enough to know what you have inside those walls. Close enough to know it does not belong to you."Lucien looked at him steadily. "Last chance to walk away from this.""Last chance," Lucien said, "to walk away from this."The rogue smiled, and that was his first mistake.His second was throwing the first punch.What happened after that was not a fight in any clean sense of the word. Lucien did not step back. He did not calculate, measure or find a pattern. Something in him that was usually kept behind several layers of composure came forward all at once, and what replaced it was not rage exactly, it was something colder and more total than rage, the part of him that had built this pack out of rubble and buried its dead and sworn, in the specific and unforgiving way that men swore things over graves, that nothing inside these walls would be taken again.He hit the

CHAPTER 25

Alira had not left her room in three days.Wren had come twice. The first time Alira had opened the door and taken the food and said she was fine in a tone that meant the conversation was over. The second time, she had not opened the door at all, just said she was sleeping, and Wren had stood outside for a moment and then left without pushing, because Wren understood, without being told, the difference between someone who needed company and someone who needed walls.Alira needed walls.She sat on the edge of her bed on the third morning and looked at the grey light coming through the narrow window and thought about nothing in particular, which was its own kind of thinking. She had done everything right. She had been careful and precise, and she had handed this pack the truth on a clean plate and it had not mattered. Her father's name had mattered. The fact that she was Roric's daughter in a pack that had bled because of Roric had mattered more than anything she had found or proved or

CHAPTER 26

The infirmary smelled of blood and unwashed field dressings, which told her everything she needed to know before she even looked at the patients.She looked anyway. Moving from bed to bed the way she had been trained to, starting with the worst and working outward. Three deep lacerations, badly dressed in the field, the kind of rushed work that happened when people were trying to keep someone alive long enough to get them somewhere better. One shoulder wound that had gone deep and been bleeding long enough that the wolf's colour was wrong. Two chest cases breathing shallowly in a way she did not like at all.She set her satchel down and looked at Wren."The shoulder first," she said. "Then the chest cases. The lacerations can wait thirty minutes, they are not going anywhere.""The shoulder has been bleeding since before they rode back," Wren said."I can see that," Alira said, already moving. "What did you use to pack it?""Standard field compress," Wren said. "It is not holding.""It

CHAPTER 27

The training ground was quiet at that hour.Most wolves did not come out this early. The sun had barely made up its mind about the morning, and the ground was still wet from the night before. Lucien had been out here for an hour already, working through drills alone, the kind of repetitive, focused work that kept the hands busy and left the mind free to do what it needed to do.Soren arrived the way he always arrived. He dropped into position across from Lucien with the ease of a man who had done this more times than he could count, and they fell into it without a word, the way men did when they had sparred together long enough that the opening was just understood.They had been at it since before Ironmoor fell.Soren knew his footwork. Lucien knew his tells. They had long since stopped being able to genuinely surprise each other, which was the point. There was comfort in that, in fighting someone who knew exactly what you were and met it without ceremony.They worked in silence for a

CHAPTER 28

Alira was sitting on the edge of her bed with a book she had not been reading for the past hour when she heard it. One firm knock on her door. She knew who it was before she reached the door.Lucien stood in the corridor in a clean shirt, no training clothes, no blood, no evidence of whatever the day had cost him except the slight tension still sitting in his jaw."Have you decided," he said, "what you want?"Alira didn’t need to ask what he was talking about because she understood immediately what he was talking about. She had been thinking about it since the night in the infirmary. She had turned over every practical option. Her freedom of movement. Her formal clearance from suspicion. A letter to her father that would never be answered. She had considered all of it and dismissed all of it and came back, every time, to the same simple thing."Yes," she said.He waited."I want to go outside," she said. "A walk around the grounds, outside the keep walls. Fresh air and open sky, and

CHAPTER 29

The guards stopped at the tree line.Lucien said something to them quietly, two words at most, and they fell back without question. Alira watched them go and then looked at Lucien."Where exactly," she said, "are you taking me?""Walk," he said, and moved into the trees.She did not move immediately. She looked at the tree line, then at his back, then at the six wolves now standing at a distance that was no longer close enough to matter."I want to be clear," she called after him, "that if you are planning to kill me in the middle of these woods and feed what is left to whatever lives out here, I think it is a very poor use of my wish agreement."He did not stop walking. "You have terrible survival instincts," he said, from somewhere between the trees."I have excellent survival instincts," she said, walking after him. "They are what is making me ask the question."She caught up to him and fell into step beside him, and the trees closed around them and the torchlight from the keep dis

1 2 3

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP