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

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

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

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

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

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.