All Chapters of My Vow: To Kill The Alpha : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The lake was wide and still and looked nothing like a lake this early in the morning. It looked like the edge of something, grey water stretching out further than it had any business stretching, the tree line dark on the other side, the sky not fully decided about what kind of day it wanted to be yet. Damir stood at the bank and looked at it without really seeing it. His mind was somewhere else entirely. His mate. He had thought about telling his mother that he found his mate. And then he had thought about what happened if Zelda rejected him publicly, if she kept denying the bond, if she refused it, if she walked away and the shame of that sat in his chest in a way he didn't have language for and wasn't ready to examine. So he had said nothing. But the mating ceremony. That was the other thing sitting at the front of his mind like a wall he kept running into. His mother's voice...you will mark her whether you like it or not. He wouldn't. He couldn't. He had found his mate

That was the thing that landed first. Which meant Riven walked everywhere and entered anywhere he liked because his aunt was Luna and his cousin was Alpha and nobody in Vordheim was going to tell him otherwise. "Luna." Riven's voice had lost its usual tone. He looked at Mireya directly. "That is not what we agreed. You said you would let her go." "I said I would consider it." Mireya smiled at him the way you smile at someone you are fond of and are also absolutely not listening to. "Seeing her face now I changed my mind." She looked at me. "Unless you would prefer to go back downstairs." I thought about the rats. I thought about the dungeon smell. And then something else occurred to me. Cleaners. Cleaning staff. The Alpha's room. The thought arrived fully formed and I had to physically stop my expression from doing anything. This woman had just handed me exactly what I needed without knowing it. I dipped into the lowest most sincere bow I had given anyone sinc

Zelda's POV The dungeon smelled exactly the same as the one I was locked in earlier. Which made sense. I was now responsible for the smell. I dragged the mop across the stone floor and tried to breathe through my mouth and think about literally anything else. The water in the bucket had gone grey approximately ten minutes ago and I was choosing not to examine that too closely. Somewhere in the corner something small and fast moved through the shadows and I pointedly did not look at it. I mopped another stretch of floor. You have a forensic criminology degree, I told myself. You tracked your way down here using hand drawn coordinates. You can figure out something. Another stretch of floor. The mop hit a particularly unpleasant patch and I stopped and looked at the ceiling and took a very long slow breath. I had been down here for what felt like two hours but was probably thirty minutes. The cleaning was never ending, these dungeons were vast and old and had clearly not s

I smoothed my dress down once. Composed myself. Shoulders back. Face arranged into something calm. I walked to the door and knocked. Three knocks. "Come in." That voice. I am not being dramatic when I say that voice can turn a woman on. I pushed the door open and stepped inside. He was at his desk. Sitting back in his chair with a piece of paper in his hand and his eyes on it. Or.. not quite on it. I looked closer. The paper was upside down. He wasn't reading anything. He was just holding paper and thinking about something that had nothing to do with paper. Oh dear moon goddess. If he would just look this undone because of me. Just once. Just one time let it be me that put that expression on his face. I composed myself immediately. "You sent for me, Alpha," I said. He looked up. "Yes." "Is there a problem, alpha?" He set the upside down paper on the desk. Looked at me properly for the first time since I walked in. "From today," he said. "You are n

There were other things in the file. Many other things. I read through all of it. Every page. Every report. Every carefully documented detail of a life my parents had lived completely parallel to the one I thought I knew. More packs. More infiltrations. More sold intelligence. Dates spanning years, starting long before I was born and running almost up to the point they had disappeared into the human world and gone quiet. I read until my eyes hurt. And somewhere in the middle of the third page my mother's voice came back to me. *Just because we were your best parents in the world doesn't mean we were good people.* I had been sitting with those words since the night she said them. Turning them over. Wondering what she meant. Telling myself she was delirious. Telling myself grief made people say strange things. She wasn't delirious. She had known exactly what she was saying. And now I understood every single word of it. The UK. I pressed my hand flat on the page.