Home / Werewolf / Claimed by the Triplet Alphas: Breeder for the Lycan King / Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

All Chapters of Claimed by the Triplet Alphas: Breeder for the Lycan King: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

208 Chapters

Chapter Forty One

Kia I heard about the war room meeting from Liam, who came to my room at noon with a tight expression and the careful delivery of someone who had processed the information and was presenting the edited version. "Xander challenged the territorial grant," he said. "He cited the Northern Charter. He's claiming the mark and the decree violate Charter protections on non-wolf dependents." I sat with this for a moment. "He researched the founding charter." "Apparently," Liam said. "Before the meeting," I said. "He came prepared." "Yes," Liam said. I looked at my hands. "How did Ryder take it?" "Badly," Liam said. "And then carefully. He's not stupid. He knows what a High Council intervention would mean for the territory." He paused. "He's going to engage with the framework." "But," I said, because there

Chapter Forty Two

XanderHe found her in the east garden.It was the only outdoor space she was permitted without an escort, a narrow stone terrace that caught the late afternoon sun and overlooked the mountain valley below. She was standing at the stone railing when he came through the door, her hands wrapped around a cup of something warm, her hair loose in the mountain wind.She heard him coming. He knew she did because her shoulders shifted slightly, a small adjustment that wasn't quite bracing and wasn't quite welcoming but was something precisely between the two.He closed the door behind him."You were at the vent," he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact he was placing on the table between them."Yes," she said, without turning around."Then you heard most of it.""Enough," she said.He crossed the terrace and stood beside her at the railing, close enough that the warmth of him reached her in the cold mountain air. Below them, the valley was beginning to fill with the blue shadow of late aftern

Chapter Forty Three

KiaI didn't sleep.I lay in the dark and pressed my hands against my stomach and turned the terrace over and over in my mind, every word of it, every silence, the weight of his arms and the way he had said hello to two people who couldn't hear him yet.I'm on your side.I wanted to believe it with an intensity that frightened me.That was the problem. The wanting itself was the warning sign. Because I had wanted to believe Vluran, who had looked at me across a crowded room like I mattered right up until the moment he announced I didn't. I had wanted to believe that the Volkovs bringing me into their home meant something, that the transaction had some human warmth in it somewhere.Wanting hadn't protected me from any of it.I was still awake at six when the knock came.Not Liam's nor Kratavak's. Not any rhythm I had catalogued from the estate's regular residents.I pulled on a robe and opened the door.Xander stood in the corridor in dark clothes, no guards, his expression carrying th

Chapter Forty Four

RyderHe spent the rest of the morning watching. This was something he was practised at, the particular skill of comprehensive attention that looked like nothing from the outside, that functioned as ordinary Alpha presence while cataloguing everything within range with the precision of someone who had learned early that information was the only reliable form of power.He watched Kia at the breakfast table, the careful way she sat, the specific thing she was doing with her hands, the way her eyes moved to Xander exactly twice and away both times with the deliberateness of someone managing an involuntary response.He watched Xander not watching her, which was its own kind of watching.He watched Liam's careful attention to his breakfast plate, which meant Liam knew something.He watched Kratavak, who was the most honest of the three of them in the sense that he had stopped pretending entirely, who looked at Kia with an open protectiveness that had appeared in the last week from nowhere

Chapter Forty Five

KiaThe voices from the council room lasted forty minutes.I know because I sat on the edge of my bed and counted the minutes the way I had learned to count difficult things, one at a time, without looking at the total.Liam had gone to stand outside the council room, not inside, just outside, in the specific position of a man who had decided that proximity to a situation was better than distance from it even when he had no power to change the outcome.When the voices stopped, the silence was a different shape.The kind of silence that meant something had been decided.He came back to my room at half past two.He looked tired in the bone-deep way that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the specific exhaustion of watching events move faster than you can manage them. He closed the door and leaned against it and looked at me with the expression he had been developing over the last weeks, the open one, the one without the six years of performance over it."It's done,"

Chapter Forty Six

KiaIt started, as most things with the Volkov brothers did, without announcement.Three days after the formal claim.Breakfast arrived at seven-thirty, which was standard. What was not standard was that it arrived via Kratavak, who set it down with the particular care of someone who had researched its contents, plain crackers first, ginger sliced precisely, the soft-boiled egg timed correctly, a small pot of chamomile at exactly the right temperature.He sat down without being invited, which was also standard."You slept," he said, reading my face in the way he had been developing, the specific vocabulary of my pallor and eye brightness that he had apparently compiled into a reference guide."Better than usual," I said."Good," he said, with the satisfied tone of someone whose intervention had produced a measurable result, even though his intervention had been breakfast rather than the actual reason I'd slept.I ate the crackers. I drank the tea. He watched with his arms crossed and

Chapter Forty Seven

KiaI heard it by accident.This is what I would tell myself afterward, turning it over in the quiet of three in the morning, examining it for the places where I could have chosen differently. I could have walked past the solar room. I could have taken the main corridor instead of the service passage. I could have been anywhere else at half past ten on a Thursday night.But I was in the service passage because Petra had been stationed outside my door since nine and I had used the panel behind the wardrobe that connected to the old staff route, the one that Dorla had shown me in the second week at the estate, the one that nobody had thought to mention to the guard rotation because nobody except Dorla and I knew it existed.The solar room was warm and lit and the door was not closed.Anastasia's voice first."You're being sentimental," she said. "It doesn't suit you.""I'm being practical," Ryder's voice, controlled but fraying at the edges in the way it did when the curse was elevated.

Chapter Forty Eight

KiaI didn't go to Xander's room.I got as far as the corridor outside it, close enough to hear the quiet murmur of Bren's voice through the door conducting some late business, and I stopped.Because I understood, standing there in the dark passage with the stone cold against my feet and everything Anastasia had said still reverberating through my chest like an echo in a very deep place, that I couldn't walk into that room carrying all of this and come out the same person who walked in.And I wasn't sure yet who I wanted to be when this settled.So I went back to my own room instead.I sat on the bed. I didn't light the candle. I just sat in the dark with my hands in my lap and let the information move through me the way you let cold water move through your hands, feeling every temperature of it without trying to stop it.My parents were murdered.The woman who had orchestrated it had then brought me into her house and fed me at her table and directed her sons to use my body and my ab

Chapter Forty Nine

KiaI didn't put a cloth on the railing when I folded the letter into the elder folder with the other things I was keeping, the paper Pam had given me, the ancestry notes, the subsections Liam had marked in the Charter text, and I spent the morning moving through the estate with the careful blankness of someone who was holding a great deal very tightly.Kratavak brought breakfast late. He looked at my face and said nothing for a full two minutes, which from Kratavak was a significant exercise in restraint."What happened," he said finally."I didn't sleep well," I said."That's not what I asked," he said."That's what I'm answering," I said.He looked at me steadily. Then he poured the tea and pushed the crackers toward me and sat back and let it be, which was a version of respect I hadn't expected from him and was grateful for.Liam came at noon with the Charter text and a question about a specific subsection, which was his version of checking on me without asking directly. I answere

Chapter Fifty

KiaThe cloth went on the railing at eleven forty-five.By noon it was gone and I hadn't seen anyone take it.By two o'clock the answer came, same delivery method, same staff member with the same careful blankness. A single line this time.Tonight. Midnight. The lower wood gate. Come alone.I folded it away and spent the afternoon being entirely, carefully ordinary.I ate lunch. I sat with Kratavak in the library for an hour while he explained, with more enthusiasm than I had expected, the specific ways that anchor bloodline texts were inconsistent with each other across different historical periods. I walked the terrace with Petra two steps behind me. I attended dinner at the long table where Xander sat at Anastasia's right and talked about Northern trade frameworks with Elder Voss, and I did not look at him more than twice and both times he looked back with the private warmth that bypassed the King's composure entirely.Both times I made myself look away.He chose what you produce.

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