Lahat ng Kabanata ng Claimed by the Triplet Alphas: Breeder for the Lycan King: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

KiaSable did not sleep that night.Kia knew this because she didn't sleep either, and every time she rose from the shallow, tiredly dozing that was the closest she could manage, she heard Sable moving in the outer room with the quality quality of someone who was not resting but was not working either,just present. awake and thinking.The twins were asleep,They slept with the total, committed unconsciousness of people who had done something important and were recovering from it, their breathing matched from the first hour, their small bodies generating a warmth that was not equal to their size in a way that had nothing to do with blankets.The frost had melted from the windows by midnight.The candles had returned to gold.But Sable had said nothing about either of these things since they happened, which was its own kind of statement.At three in the morning, Kia gave up on sleep entirely and sat up carefully and looked at her children in the small crib Sable had placed beside the tab

CaelThe coded message came at four in the morning. He had been expecting it. He had sent his own at midnight, the standard check-in format, the information compressed into the cipher that Declan had designed and that Cael had been using for two years. He had sent it and then sat in his room above the apothecary and looked at the wall and thought about the woman he had been reporting on and what she had looked like on the cobblestones and the man who had caught her.He had recognised the man.He had been in Declan's service long enough to know the shape of a Lycan King's bearing, the specific quality of movement, the authority that wasn't performed. And he had watched the man carry her through the street and through the blue cloth door and he had stood on the pavement and felt something shift in the arrangement of things he was doing.The message that came back at four in the morning was not the acknowledgement he had been expecting.The children have arrived. Confirm their status. Co

LiamHe knew the exact time because he had been awake and watching the clock in the way of someone who had been doing the same thing every night for eight weeks, marking the hours not because time was moving slowly but because paying attention to it was the only productive thing available when everything else was out of reach.The surge hit him mid-breath.He sat up in the narrow bed of the Endra-adjacent inn he had been occupying for the last nine days, his hand going to his chest automatically, pressing flat against the sternum where the bond lived in its attenuated form, the thin stretched signal of her alive and far away that he had been carrying like a splinter he couldn't remove and couldn't stop feeling.The bond flooded with a presence that was nothing like the managed, anchored connection of the estate years. It was like something that had been waiting to exist without constraints.His hands went completely still against his chest.Children, he understood, with the total clar

KiaThe third day was the hardest. The first day had been a shock so enormous having happened that the mind hadn't yet caught up with, which functioned as a kind of anaesthesia.The second day had been the physical reconciliation, everything the body had agreed to defer during the first day arriving with consolidated force.The third day was the day she understood what she had taken on. When both children were awake for the fourth time and she had been awake for twenty-two of the preceding twenty-four hours and the exhaustion she was operating under had moved past the stage of being felt into the stage of being structured, a condition rather than a sensation.She sat on the edge of the examination table that Sable had converted into a bed, the boy in her left arm and the girl in her right, and she looked at the ceiling and breathed."I don't know what I'm doing," she told the ceiling, very quietly so as not to wake Sable in the outer room.The boy made a sound.She looked down at him.

XanderBren found the first one at the city's western entrance. He reported it the way he reported everything, without preamble with complete accuracy, at the precise moment when the information was actionable rather than merely interesting."Four of them," Bren said, appearing at Xander's shoulder in the pre-dawn darkness outside Sable's practice. "Western gate. They came in separately, twenty-minute intervals and are currently converging on the east market district.""How long?" Xander said."Forty minutes before they reach this street," Bren said. "Maybe less if they have the correct address.""Do they?""The observer saw Cael's handler meeting with someone at the border three days ago," Bren said. "So possibly yes."Xander stood in the narrow street with the cold morning air moving around him and thought about the room behind him, about two sleeping children and a woman who had been awake since four and Liam and Kratavak on the floor of the outer room with their boots still on bec