Alle Kapitel von The Deaf Alpha’s Unexpected Mate : Kapitel 61 – Kapitel 70

ALLYI hit the floor hard, one of the men's boots pressing between my shoulder blades, pinning me flat against the cold wood like I was something dangerous rather than a girl who hadn't committed a single crime in her entire life. Across the room, Ma Agatha had sunk into a chair, her whole body wracked with coughing so violent I could hear the wet, rattling struggle in every breath she tried to draw, her hands pressed hard against her chest as she could physically hold her own lungs together through sheer will alone."Let me go to her." I twisted hard against the boot pinning me, desperate, my cheek scraping against the floorboards. "She needs help!""Stay still!" The man above me barked, his weight pressing harder, and pain flared sharply through my shoulder."She's sick!" I screamed it this time, my voice cracking with raw panic, watching Ma Agatha's face go a pale, frightening shade of grey between coughs. "Please, she needs help!"My plea landed on nothing. Calista stood near the

KAELI didn't remember crossing the chamber floor. I remembered the doors flying open under my palms, the torches shuddering in the wind they let in, and the Speaker's voice trailing behind me, calling my name in a tone built to sound like concern.I didn't turn around.Outside, the sky had gone the color of a bruise healing. The Betas fell into step around me without being told, Mohan at my left, Seraphine at my right, my own breath steaming white in the cold. I was halfway down the stone steps when my phone buzzed once against my ribs.Unknown number. A message, this time, no voice.How does it feel to lose?Draven.I stopped on the step so abruptly Cassian nearly collided with my back. For one long second the whole world narrowed to the pale glow of that screen, to the four words he'd chosen, to the smug little question mark at the end of them. I thought of Isolde's driver with his throat opened. I thought of a woman in a sapphire gown dragged into the dark. I thought of a c

KAELI counted her breaths the whole way home.One. The car struck a rut on the harbor road and her head rolled against my arm. Two. I slid my palm beneath her skull and held her still. Three. Her lips had gone the color of ash, and a thin thread of green had crept from the corner of her mouth where the poison was working its way out of her. Four. I pressed two fingers to the hollow of her throat, just below the wound, and felt a pulse so slow that I stopped breathing myself until the next one came.The world outside the windows slid past in silence. Mohan sat across from me with his hands knotted in his lap, not signing, his eyes fixed on her face. Cassian drove like a man trying to outrun the sun. The engine's vibration traveled up through the seat and into my spine, the only sound I had left, and it felt like a drum beating for a funeral I refused to attend."Faster," I said, and couldn't tell whether I had shouted it or whispered it.Mohan shook his head, slowly. Nothing he could

Kael"I couldn't say." He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at her, and there was something almost sorrowful in his face. "Whatever sleeps in her blood is old, and old things don't wake gently. Keep the windows latched. Keep iron out of the room. Watch her night and day. And when she opens her eyes, don't leave her alone, and don't be afraid of what you see.""Why would I be afraid of her?"He lifted his satchel and met my eyes squarely. "I didn't say you would. I said don't."He left a pouch of dried leaves with instructions I memorised without hearing, bowed once to the girl on the bed, and walked out as quietly as he'd come, his scent of peat and mint hanging in the air behind him like a blessing or a warning.I had just settled back beside her, counting her breaths again, when the door opened without a knock.Mohan stood in the gap, and I knew from the set of his shoulders that something was wrong before his hands lifted. He held a box against his chest, a square thing wrapped i

SERAPHINESound first. It poured into me from every direction at once, a tide, a flood. The wind in the eaves. The tick of the clock. Two Omegas breathing outside my door, one slow and steady, the other quick and nervous, their heartbeats thudding against each other like mismatched drums. Pipes knocking in the walls. A kettle shrieking in a kitchen two floors below. A mouse chewing at the plaster behind the headboard. A thousand tiny sounds, each one as sharp and distinct as a shout.Then smell. Lavender, from my own hair. Candle wax. Dried leaves, and the bitter green stink of something packed against my throat. Horse and leather from the stables. Gun oil on a guard's belt. The soap on the housekeeper's apron, three rooms away. And beneath all of it, drifting up through the floorboards from somewhere below, a thin, sweetish, rotten thread that turned my stomach inside out.Iron. Salt. Something dead, and cold, and beginning to warm.I ran for the bathroom. I didn't know I could run l