All Chapters of Claimed by the Triplet Alphas: Breeder for the Lycan King: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

He finished wrapping the cloth around my shoulder carefully, tying it with a precision that was almost obsessive, like he needed the knot to be exactly right. Then he sat back and looked at the work instead of at me."Don't read into it," he said.But I was already reading it.Because I had known Liam for six years. I had watched him be cold and cutting and deliberately cruel. I had watched him turn away from me in corridors and pretend I wasn't in rooms. I had watched him stand beside Moss while she poured wine on me and said absolutely nothing.But I had also once, a long time ago, when we were younger and the curse was newer and none of us fully understood what was happening, found him sitting outside my door in the middle of the night. He had told me it was because the darkness was bad. That he needed to be near me to breathe. He had not spoken to me normally for three days afterward, like the vulnerability of it had frightened him into cruelty.Liam was the most dangerous kind of

KiaI found the small library on the second floor by accident.I hadn't been given a tour of the mountain estate, obviously. My introduction to it had been a locked room and a tray of food I didn't touch. But Dorla had quietly confirmed that morning, while collecting the breakfast dishes, that I was permitted to move through the residential wing during daylight hours provided I didn't approach the outer doors.I needed permission before doing anything like I was a pet with slightly extended boundaries.I took what I could get.The library was narrow, tucked between two larger rooms, lined floor to ceiling with old books that smelled of cedar and decades of disuse. A single window at the far end let in a strip of cold mountain light. There were two chairs, a low table, and the specific kind of silence that only old rooms accumulate.I had been sitting there for almost an hour, not really reading, just existing in a space that didn't feel hostile, when the door swung open.Kratavak lean

KiaThe eastern wing smelled different. Older like the rest of the mountain estate had been maintained and kept functional, but this part had been left to accumulate time the way rooms do when nobody wants to think about what's inside them.I found it by following the drought.Dorla had brought my lunch and stayed slightly longer than necessary, which I had started to understand was her way of checking on me without saying so directly. When she left, she forgot to fully close my door, and the draught came through the gap like an invitation.I followed it down the main corridor, then left at the carved stone archway, then through a narrower hallway I hadn't been in before. The carpet here was a different pattern, darker and older. The light fixtures on the walls were not erotic. They were the kind built for candles for date nights.I stopped in front of a door at the end of the passage.It was heavier than the others, a lock that looked like it hadn't been opened recently but had been

KiaThey came at nine.Not together because that would have been easier to read. Ryder first, then Kratavak behind him, and Liam last, which told me everything about where the argument between him and Ryder had landed. Liam's expression was the careful blankness of someone who had lost a negotiation and hadn't finished processing it."Three days," I said immediately. "Ryder, you said three days.""I said I'd consider it," Ryder replied."That's not what you said.""Kia." His voice carried the low warning edge I had come to recognise as the version of his tone that meant do not push this particular point tonight."You're moving the timeline," I said. "Why?"Ryder looked at Kratavak briefly. Something passed between them that I couldn't interpret."The curse has been accelerating," Ryder said. "The transition at the border this morning lasted eleven minutes before any of us could pull back. Last week it was four. The week before that, two." He looked at me steadily. "We are running out

KiaDorla left a gap in the door again.I was starting to think it wasn't accidental.It was two days after the ritual night, and I had spent most of those two days sleeping in a way that felt less like rest and more like my body conducting urgent repairs without consulting me. The warmth in my chest had steadied into something permanent and low, like an ember that had decided it was staying regardless of what I thought about it.I was sitting up in bed, reading one of the elder folders I had smuggled from the locked room inside a folded blanket, when I heard the tap.Not on the main door. The window.I looked up.A face appeared in the gap at the bottom of the high window, which shouldn't have been possible given how far off the ground it was. But Pam had always been creative about vertical problems."I'm going to need you to not ask how I got up here," she said through the glass.I crossed the room and pushed the window open as far as it would go, which wasn't far. "Pam.""In the fl