All Chapters of Mated To Three Alphas: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

~Annalyn POV~I didn't sleep.I lay on the bed fully dressed, staring at the ceiling, turning Selene's words over and over until they stopped feeling like a warning and started feeling like a compass. Which one of your mates is not what he says he is.By the time the house had gone quiet enough that I could move through it without running into anyone, I was already decided.The guard outside Ezra's door was one of the newer ones, young, standing with the careful posture of someone trying to look more certain than he felt. He straightened when he heard me coming down the corridor."I need ten minutes," I said."Lucas said no one goes in without—""I'm not no one." I didn't raise my voice. I didn't need to. Lucas's mark apparently worked whether I intended it or not, because the guard stepped aside with a look of faint surprise at his own feet, the same way Lucas and Calix had moved when Dalisay told me to send them out of the room.I opened the door and closed it behind me.Ezra was si

Annalyn POVWe reached the mansion in under two minutes and every guard we passed was on the ground.Not dead. I checked the first one automatically, dropping to a crouch as we came through the side entrance, pressing two fingers to his throat. Pulse steady, breathing normal, unconscious the way people go unconscious when something has simply removed them from the situation rather than harmed them.Lucas was already moving past me toward the inner corridor.The cellar door was gone. Not opened, not broken off its hinges in the usual sense. The wood had blown outward, fragments scattered across the kitchen floor in a radius that suggested the force had come from below.Matteo was at the top of the stairs. He looked at me when I appeared and something in his expression shifted from panic into a more focused kind of alarm."Isabella," he said.I went down the stairs first.The cellar was changed. The tablet in the foundation wall was gone, not cracked further or removed carefully, simply

Lucas POVI was seventeen when I made the oath and I thought I was doing the right thing.That was the part I kept returning to as I sat in the archive room in the early hours of the morning with the family records spread across the table in front of me. Not the oath itself, not the silver bowl, not the five stone-faced elders watching me press my palm down and bleed into the thing. The fact that I had walked into that assembly room believing I was being responsible. That I was the kind of person who prepared for difficult outcomes so that others wouldn't have to.I had been seventeen and afraid and completely certain I was right.The assembly had summoned me without explanation, which was standard practice for the Elder council at the time. You didn't ask why you were called. You went, and you listened, and you demonstrated that the Del Pieros heir was worth the name. My father had told me that before I walked in. He'd straightened my collar at the door, told me to stand up straight,

Annalyn POVLucas came back at dawn with the photograph.I heard the boat before I saw him, the engine cutting across the early morning quiet, and I was already in the kitchen when he walked through the side door. He didn't greet me. He sat across the breakfast table, reached into the folder he was carrying, and placed a photograph between us without preamble.Matteo appeared in the doorway behind me. He stayed there without coming in.I looked at the photograph.Two men standing together, the posture of a formal occasion, hands clasped in a handshake. One of them was unmistakably a younger version of the man whose study we'd torn apart the previous night. The other had his face partially angled away from the camera. His left hand was visible at his side, and even in the faded print I could count the fingers.Two were absent.Around his neck, caught by the camera at the collar gap, hung a pendant.I recognized the design before my mind had fully processed what I was looking at. Cresce

Isabella POVThe first thing I registered was the ceiling.White plaster, a hairline crack running toward the corner, a light fixture that had probably cost more than everything in my childhood bedroom combined. I lay on my back and looked at it and did a quiet inventory of my own body the way you do when you're not entirely sure what state you've woken up in.Arms present. Legs functional. A deep ache running through my chest like something had been removed and the space hadn't fully closed over yet. My head felt scraped clean, not painful exactly, more like the aftermath of a very high fever when the heat has broken and what's left is just hollow and tender.The blanket smelled like cedar.The window showed a sky going orange at the far end of the afternoon. I had been here, unconscious and absent from myself, for close to two full days.I lay still for a while longer before I tried sitting up.My last memory before the cellar came in fragments. Ezra's voice, which I now understood