All Chapters of Claimed by the Triplet Alphas: Breeder for the Lycan King: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

KiaThe morning came the way all difficult things did in this house.Without warning and without mercy. I had slept for three or four hours, the kind of sleep that doesn't rest so much as the body insisting on its minimum requirements. When I woke, the candle had burned down to a stub of wax and the mountain light outside the high windows was the pale, colourless grey of very early morning.One day, he had said.I lay there for a moment, my hand pressed flat against my stomach, feeling the warmth in my chest that had been there for weeks, and I thought about what it meant that it felt stronger this morning than it had last night.Then I got up and splashed cold water on my face and told myself to think practically.The paper was still in the elder folder. Pam's contact.I needed to move in three hours.I dressed and folded the paper into the inside pocket of my jacket and sat at the window to wait for the house to wake up enough that movement through the corridors wouldn't be noticed.

KiaI didn't make it to the lower gate.Thirty-eight minutes became thirty because Anastasia moved the decree reading earlier without announcement, and thirty became twenty because Elder Voss spoke faster than expected, and twenty became nothing because when I slipped out of the assembly room and turned toward the service corridor, Ryder was already there.In his hand was the paper bag from Dorla.The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the mountain air."Where did you get that," I said."Your room," he said. His voice was completely flat. "I had it searched while you were in the reading.""You had no right!""She found it in the basin waste," he said. "She didn't know what it was. I did."He was looking at me with an expression I had never seen from him before, not the cruel blankness, not the cursed fury, not the complicated almost-tenderness of the last few weeks. This was something new. Something that had gone very still in the way of things that are about to become

LiamRyder was in the war room.He always went to the war room when he needed to think, or when he needed to not think, when he needed the stone walls and the low light and the specific atmosphere of a room that had been built for hard decisions.Liam pushed the door open without knocking.Ryder was standing by the fireplace. He had a glass in his hand that he hadn't drunk from. He looked up when Liam came in, and his expression did the thing it always did when he was braced for a confrontation, shuttering, preparing, building the architecture of control into place."Don't," Liam said."Liam,""Don't build the face," Liam said. "Don't do the Alpha composure. Not with me please maybe another day."Ryder set the glass down. "You've been to see her.""Yes," Liam said. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, and the click of it was very deliberate. "She's in pain, Ryder. The mark is burning and she's pale and she's.""She's carrying someone else's children," Ryder said, and his

KiaThe mark was three days old and it had already rewritten the architecture of the estate.Without announcements or confrontations. Just in the way every wolf who passed me in the corridors now read my neck before my face, the way the guards stationed outside my door had doubled without explanation, the way Anastasia looked at me over the breakfast table with the specific satisfaction of someone whose plan had arrived at its intended destination.I was marked and made a property. I had no other option than stayI sat at the window in the grey morning light and pressed both hands flat against my stomach and tried to feel steady.The twins, that wordless instinct still insisting on plural, on two, were making themselves known in ways that were becoming increasingly difficult to manage alone. The nausea had developed preferences. Mornings were the worst, a thirty-minute window after waking where my body conducted what felt like a comprehensive review of everything it objected to. Certa

KratavakHe didn't sleep well that night.He lay on the ceiling dark and turned over what she had told him and what she hadn't told him and the specific shape of the silence between the two, and by three in the morning he had assembled the most likely answer and it sat in his chest like a coal.Someone outside the pack. Someone with rank. Someone whose identity she was protecting with the specific care of a person who understood that revealing it would change everything.He thought about the Lycan King's eyes on Kia across the dinner table. The particular quality of that attention, the one that had the performance of indifference over something that was the opposite of indifference.He thought about the morning Xander had arrived and the way Kia's posture had changed, just slightly, just enough for someone who had been watching her for six years to catch.He thought about the bond language he knew from the texts, the way a Lycan King's mate bond operated differently from standard wolf