All Chapters of The Alpha's Secret Heir: The Ward's Revenge: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Cora’s POVThe air in the conference room was stifling, smelling of expensive cedarwood and the heavy, electric pressure of Silas’s presence. I sat at the end of the long mahogany table, my fingers tracing the edge of my laptop. The Liquid Silver was a sheet of ice behind my ribs, keeping my human heart in a slow, rhythmic cage. For a human, the silver was a dead weight; it made my breath shallow and my skin unnaturally cool, a necessary sacrifice to ensure I didn’t leak a single pheromone of fear or recognition into the room.Across from me, Silas tossed my “Open Play” proposal onto the table with a flick of his wrist. The paper skittered across the polished wood, stopping just inches from my hand.“Inefficient,” he said. The word was a cold blade. “You’ve dedicated forty percent of the floor plan to ‘unstructured exploration.’ My foundation doesn’t fund aimless wandering, Sarah. We’ll convert the south wing into a tiered testing center. Efficiency is the priority. We need to know

Cora’s POVThe drive back to my small apartment was a blur of gray asphalt and the metallic taste of copper sitting heavy on my tongue. My hands were shaking so violently I had to grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turned a ghostly white. It wasn’t just the adrenaline from facing Cassian; it was the Liquid Silver.​I had doubled the dose this morning to survive the day with Silas, and now my body was paying the “human” tax. For a shifter, silver was a deterrent; for a human, it was a heavy metal neurotoxin. It was designed to flatten my biological signature—to make me “scentless”—but it was also starting to flatten my nervous system.​When I finally pulled into my gravel driveway, I didn’t get out. I leaned my head against the cold glass of the window and waited for the world to stop spinning. My vision was swimming with tiny, silver sparks, a side effect I knew all too well.​“Just a few more weeks,” I whispered to my reflection in the rearview mirror. My skin looked transluce

Cora’s POVThe air in the administrative trailer was thick enough to chew. Between the high-noon sun beating down on the metal roof and the heat generated by ten bodies crammed into the conference space, the atmosphere had become a humid, suffocating weight. I stood in my usual corner, clutching my clipboard like a shield, but the plastic felt slick against my palms.I had crossed a line this morning. The "Biological War" I was waging against my own body was reaching its peak. My blood felt heavy, as if the Liquid Silver had turned into literal lead, dragging at my veins. Every time my heart beat, it wasn't a thud; it was a high-pitched, metallic vibration that rang in my ears like a tuning fork.Across the table, Silas was mid-sentence, his voice a rich baritone that seemed to hum through the floorboards. He was explaining the structural integrity of the South Wing to a group of skeptical board members, his movements precise and commanding. He hadn't looked at me once in the last

Cora’s POVThe apartment was supposed to be my sanctuary, but today it felt like a cage of my own making.​I leaned against the kitchen counter, my breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches that whistled in my lungs. The yellow envelope from the pediatrician’s office sat like a lead weight near the kitchen sink. I had spent the last two hours in a state of high-alert panic that made the room feel as though it were shrinking. Leo had woken up with a low-grade fever and a raspy, wet cough—a mild flu that had sent my protective instincts into an overdrive I couldn’t afford.​The trip to the pharmacy had been a desperate necessity for the fever reducers, but the stop at the clinic had been for the results of his recent blood work. The values were all perfect, the doctor had assured me with a kind, oblivious smile, but the physical evidence of his existence—the records, the receipts, the very fact that his name was typed on a document in this town—was a paper tr

Silas’s POVThe yellow plastic wheel felt like a hot coal in my pocket as I sat in the darkness of my car. I didn't start the engine. I just watched the cottage, my silver eyes fixed on the flickering light behind her curtains.Babysitting.The lie was pathetic. It was a thin, desperate shield. You don't walk into a pediatrician’s office with a heart full of panic for a neighbor’s child. You don't hold pediatric records to your chest like a holy relic if they don’t belong to your own blood.I gripped the steering wheel until the leather groaned. Every instinct I had—the predator and the man—had screamed at me to kick down those hallway doors. I wanted to tear the secret out of the shadows. I wanted to know if I was haunting a stranger or if Cora had truly built a whole new life on the ashes of our love.But then I had seen the blood.The sight of her injury had been a bucket of ice water over my rage. Seeing her hurt—seeing that small, jagged piece of g