Lahat ng Kabanata ng Claimed by the Triplet Alphas: Breeder for the Lycan King: Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

KiaShe had been standing in the market for too long.She knew she had been standing too long because the bread vendor, Dova, had glanced at her twice with the specific expression of a woman calculating whether to intervene. The second glance had the decision in it.But Dova was on the far side of a market crowd and the world had gone slightly tilted approximately four minutes ago and Kia was currently conducting a private negotiation with her own body about remaining vertical.Not here, she told herself. Not in the middle of the market.Her body expressed polite disagreement.The exhaustion had been building for three days. Not the manageable tiredness of early pregnancy, the kind she had become practiced at working around. This was the other kind, the kind that arrived when you had been running on insufficient sleep and insufficient food and significant sustained anxiety for three weeks and your body had been patient about it and was now presenting its invoice.She shifted her baske

KiaIt started the way it always started now.Not with sound or sight or any of the senses she had spent twenty-two years relying on. It started somewhere below those, in the part of her that had been waking up incrementally since she left the estate, the wolf-sense that didn't have a name yet because she was still learning its vocabulary.Directional. Specific. Coming from the northeast corner of the market district with the consistency of a signal rather than a feeling, steady and patient and entirely unbothered by the fact that she had been trying to ignore it for three days.She was at the tea house counter when it intensified.Not dramatically. Just a degree, the way a sound gets slightly louder when you turn toward it rather than away, and she had her hands in the washing basin and a customer asking about the evening blend and she answered the question correctly and dried her hands and felt the warmth orient in her chest like a compass finding north.He's close, the wolf said, f

KiaCael brought dinner on a Thursday not to the tea house but to her room above it, which she had mentioned in passing three days ago in the context of the building's insufficient heating, and which he had apparently noted with the quiet efficiency that characterised most of his actions.He knocked at seven with a covered pot and the specific expression of someone who had decided this was a practical gesture rather than a personal one and was prepared to defend that characterisation."You're not eating enough in the evenings," he said."You sound like Sable," she said."Sable is correct about most things," he said. "Can I come in?"She stood back from the door.He came in and set the pot on the small table and uncovered it with the matter-of-fact air of a man who cooked the way he healed, purposefully and without ceremony. It was a grain stew, heavy and warm, the kind of thing that sat in the body and convinced it that everything was going to be manageable.He sat across from her and

LiamHe found out from Voss.Voss, too careful to direct but had a habit of leaving documents in the council room after meetings, not forgotten, precisely positioned, the specific practice of a man who wanted certain information to travel and had chosen his courier carefully.Liam found the document on the council room table at seven in the morning, two days after it had apparently been placed there.He read it standing up, which he regretted by the third page.He sat down and read it again.Then he folded it and put it inside his jacket and walked to Anastasia's private sitting room and knocked."Come in," she said.She was at her writing desk, dressed already, hair already arranged, the way she was always already composed when the rest of the house was still waking. She looked up at him with the expression she used for visitors she had been expecting."Liam, sit down," she said."I'll stand," he replied.She set her pen down. "You've seen the protocol document.""Yes," he said."I a

KiaIt started as pressure, a deep pain she had been warned about, the kind that announced itself clearly and left no room for misinterpretation. This was subtler, a deep, gathering pressure in her lower back that had been present since morning in a mild way and had been escalating so gradually that she had managed to convince herself for several hours that it was the cold, or the specific discomfort of a body at six months that had been doing too much.She was behind the tea house counter at half past two when she understood it was none of those things."Fen," she said, and her voice came out different from how she intended it, stripped of its usual management.Fen looked up from the inventory.She looked at Kia's face and put the inventory down."What's happening," Fen asked. The practical tone of a woman who had run a business for twenty years and could read the difference between minor problems and the other kind."I need to get to Sable," Kia said. "Right now.""Can you walk?" Fe