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Lahat ng Kabanata ng Two Mates, One Destiny : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

67 Kabanata

Chapter 11

FREYAThe hall didn’t go quiet after I said it. It went loud, all at once, in the particular way a room gets when three hundred people try to whisper their shock at the same time.Lilith folded first. Her hands flew to her face and her shoulders started shaking, and within seconds she was crying the kind of tears that never actually touch the eyes, the kind built for an audience. “How could you say that,” she got out of her chair, voice trembling on cue. “How could you accuse me of something so ugly, tonight of all nights—”“Ugly is what you did in his study three weeks ago,” I said. “I’m just the first person willing to say it out loud.”Her crying stuttered for half a second before it found its rhythm again.Lucian recovered faster than she did. He always did. That was the one thing about him I’d learned too late, that he could take any wound and turn it into a weapon before the blood even hit the floor. “Everyone here has known Freya a long time,” he said, addressing the hall now i

Chapter 12

FREYAThe sound seemed to hang in the air longer than it should have, longer than any single slap had a right to. My cheek burned. I could feel my own pulse in it, fast and hot. The hall stood still. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Three hundred people who’d spent the last ten minutes looking forward for a spectacle had just gotten one, and none of them seemed to know what to do with it now that it had actually happened.I straightened slowly. I didn’t touch my face. I wanted my father to see exactly what he’d done without the comfort of watching me flinch away from it.“Say something,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “Say something to Lucian. Ask Lilith one question. Anything.”He didn’t look at either of them.“You have humiliated this family in front of nine packs,” he said, and his voice carried the way it always did when he wanted a room to remember its place, low and hard and final. “You stood in the middle of your own engagement ceremony and accused your sis

Chapter 13

FREYAThe words landed and everyone in the hall seemed to hold their breath around them, like even the people who’d wanted this outcome hadn’t quite believed they’d get it spoken out loud.“You can’t do that,” I said, but even as it left my mouth I already knew he could. He was Alpha. Titles lived and died at his word, and I had spent my whole life understanding that fact without ever once imagining it would be turned on me.“I can,” he said, “and I have.”Behind me, I heard my mother’s chair scrape back, the sound of it sharp enough to cut through the murmuring crowd. “Marcus, stop this.” Her voice shook, but she pushed through it anyway, and something in me that had gone numb a minute ago cracked open again at the sound of her using his name like that, stripped of every title, like she was speaking to the man she married instead of the Alpha she answered to. “She is your daughter. Whatever else is happening here, she is still your daughter, and you will not do this to her in front o

Chapter 14

FREYAThe world came back to me in pieces, none of them in order.Cold air first, and then the feeling of moving without walking, a rhythm under me that didn’t match my own footsteps. My cheek was pressed against something warm, something that smelled like pine and rain and skin, and for a long, disoriented stretch I let myself believe it was Dante.That scent had haunted me for weeks after the night we met, faint traces of it clinging to memory even after he’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with whatever the bond between us was trying to become. I hadn’t smelled it since. Feeling it now, wrapped around me while my body refused to fully wake, stirred some emotions I would preferred locked forever. “Dante,” I mumbled, or tried to. My mouth wasn’t cooperating. My whole body felt like it belonged to someone else, heavy and slow, refusing every order I gave it.The arms carrying me went very still for a second.“Wrong twin,” a voice said above me, low and amused even through what

Chapter 15

FREYAWhen I woke fully, the first thing I registered was the ceiling. Wood beams, dark and old, crossing overhead in a pattern nothing like the pale stone arches of the Ashford house. It took me a full minute of staring at them to remember why that mattered, and then the whole night came crashing back at once. My father’s hand across my face. The walk out of that hall with nobody following. Damien’s voice telling me there was no back to go to.I sat up too fast and regretted it immediately, my head swimming, my bandaged feet aching under a blanket that wasn’t mine, in a room that wasn’t mine, in a bed I had no memory of being placed in.“Careful.” The voice came from a chair near the window, and I turned to find Alpha Kendrick Hamilton sitting there like he’d been waiting for exactly this moment, one leg crossed over the other, watching me with the same unreadable expression he’d worn the night before. Or whenever it was. I’d lost track of how much time had passed since the marker st

Chapter 16

FREYAThe healer came by early afternoon, a quiet older woman named Marta who unwrapped the bandages on my feet with careful, practiced hands and didn’t ask a single question about how they’d gotten that way. Not where I’d come from, not why an Ashford was lying in an unfamiliar bed on Hamilton land, not anything at all beyond the occasional murmured instruction to hold still or point my toes. I found I was grateful for it in a way that surprised me. I’d had enough questions the night before to last a lifetime.She left me with fresh dressings, a pair of soft shoes two sizes too big, and instructions to stay off my feet for another full day. I ignored all three within the hour, because staying in that room any longer felt like it might swallow me whole. The walls had started to feel close around midday, the quiet turning from restful into something more like waiting, and I couldn’t sit inside it and do nothing but replay the sound of my father’s hand connecting with my face over and o

Chapter 17

FREYAI didn’t move fast enough.I was still trying to find some version of a response, something that wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of watching me fold, when she stepped in again, closer this time, close enough that I could smell the sharp bite of whatever oil she used on her training leathers.“Not that I blame him for picking you up,” she said, tilting her head like she was studying a piece of furniture she was deciding whether to keep. “You clean up well enough, I suppose, if you like the sad look. Though I heard you cried through most of your own engagement dinner before you even got banished. Must be exhausting, being that fragile all the time.”A few more laughs from behind her, though thinner now, some of the warriors clearly less comfortable with where this had gone than they’d been a minute ago. I kept my chin up and said nothing, because I’d learned the hard way in the last day that giving people a reaction only fed whatever they were hungry for, and I didn’t have anyt

Chapter 18

FREYAI found him two days later, near the edge of the training yard where the tree line started, far enough from the main house that nobody would overhear if this went the way I expected it to. He was alone, sharpening something at a low bench, and he didn’t look up when I approached, though the set of his shoulders told me he’d heard me coming long before I got close.“We need to talk,” I said.“Do we.”Not a question. I stopped a few feet away, close enough to see the tension along his jaw, and waited for him to actually look at me. He didn’t, not for a long moment, his attention fixed on the blade in his hands like it mattered more than anything I might have to say.“You’ve been avoiding me since the courtyard,” I said. “Since before that, actually. Since the marker stones.”“I’ve had a lot to do.”“You carried me across a border and then vanished for two days.” I heard my own voice climbing and didn’t try to pull it back down. Two days of watching him disappear down hallways the

Chapter 19

FREYAI didn’t leave my room for the rest of that day. I told Marta I was tired when she came to check on my feet, which wasn’t entirely a lie, and I told myself I wasn’t hiding, which was.By evening, hunger finally won out over pride, and I made my way down to the kitchen hoping to avoid running into anyone who might ask how I was doing. I found Damien instead, sitting at the long wooden table with a bowl of something that smelled better than it looked, and he glanced up when I came in with an expression that told me he already knew more than I wanted him to.“You look like someone ran you over,” he said.“Thank you.”“I meant it as a compliment. You’re still standing, which is more than most people manage after a conversation with my brother.” He nudged the empty chair across from him with his foot. “Sit. Eat something. You’ve been avoiding the kitchen since yesterday and I refuse to believe that’s a coincidence.”I sat, mostly because I didn’t have the energy left to argue, and le

Chapter 20

FREYADamien found me on the back porch three days later, a deck of worn cards in one hand and a look on his face that told me he wasn’t taking no for an answer.“You’ve been moping,” he said, dropping into the chair across from me without waiting for an invitation. “It’s starting to bring down the whole property. My father mentioned it at breakfast. Said the house feels like a funeral.”“I haven’t been moping.”“You’ve rearranged the same three books on that shelf in the study twice this week. I checked. Freya, that’s a cry for help.” He started his mouth curved into a worried smile while he shuffled the cards with a practiced ease that suggested he’d spent more of his life doing this than most people spent learning anything useful. “Gin rummy. I’ll even let you win the first round so you don’t feel too bad about how badly I’m about to beat you after that.”“That’s generous of you.”“I’m a generous person. Ask anyone.” He dealt the cards out with quick, easy motions, and despite myse

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