All Chapters of Chosen By The Alpha, Bound By Desire: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

42 Chapters

Say It to My Face

Sloane's POVFive years of hatred for Oscar had built up inside me quietly, like the kind you have for weather patterns—large and constant and impossible to change, only to live. But hearing a different man call my father's name with the added insult of being bought into silence caused a chilling sensation in my chest that five years of hating him at a distance had never done."Say it again," I demanded. "All of it, not just the parts you think I want."Lucien stood with his back to me at the window of his study, jacket gone, sleeves rolled. His shoulders still bore the weight of the chamber. "Oscar paid Theodore. That's the fact.""That's half of it.""It's the half you get tonight.""Why?" I moved closer, close enough that he had to look at me rather than ignore me. "You said his name as if it wasn't anything, like it wasn't my father you were talking about. If Carl is in that house, if he has been living under a roof provided by this mystery, I deserve to know what this mystery is.

The Lie About the Surgery

Sloane's POVI had built five years of my life around one sentence. He is too young to have the surgery. I heard it from Oscar's lips in a hospital corridor when Carl was little enough to ask me why his lips turned blue sometimes, and I carried that sentence like scripture ever since, using it to excuse every year that passed without a fix, every year Carl got sicker instead of better. I'd repeated it to doctors who raised their eyebrows. I had said it to myself on many nights when I was lying awake wondering what else I could be doing.The sentence was always untrue.I was in the laundry room at Oscar's house, the only room in that house no one ever went to, and Celia was pulling a folded page out of her cardigan pocket, her hands shaking."He was cleared," she whispered. "Carl was cleared for surgery at the age of seven. Your father refused twice, in writing."I took the page. I couldn't hold it level with my hands."How do you know this?""For six years, I have been his nurse." Her

The Bride Who Came Back

Sloane's POVBella had practiced this. I could see it in her eyes, in her body, in the way she crossed her legs when I walked in, in the way she paused before she spoke, in the way she went soft and wounded on cue like she'd practiced it in a mirror.I didn't prepare anything. I had only rehearsed my anger at Oscar, but now the wrong sister was in the wrong chair and all the words I'd loaded on the drive over were washed away."How do you know?" Bella asked. "Were you going to think I wouldn't come back for what's mine?""What's yours?" My voice sounded flat. I felt a lot more than flat."My husband, my house, my title." She tilted her head, blonde hair falling over her shoulder, which used to make men forget their names. "You took everything, Sloane. You wore my ring, you slept in my bed, and you stood at that altar in my place. And the whole town calls you the sister who cried at Mom's funeral. Do you know what they'd call you if they knew the truth?""That you ran," I said. "That y

The Beta's Offer

Sloane's POVI couldn't bring this to Lucien. Not because he wouldn't help, but because if he helped, I knew I would have to go to Oscar's house after he told me not to, and I didn't have the strength tonight to fight that battle on top of the battle I already fought and lost. So I went to the archives and found the one man in Blackstone who had never once sent me anywhere, at the same wooden table where we used to sit side by side writing out patrol reports, back when I knew the least about my father—that he was cold.When I walked in, Ryan looked up, and his expression changed, like he was waiting for someone, and he was listening."You seem like you've had a night," he said.I told him all of it. The custody document, Oscar's refusal, the alliance clause, and Bella sitting in that chair as if she'd never left, as if five years hadn't happened to any of us but me. Unlike Lucien, Ryan listened without deciding halfway through what he wanted to hear next or whether I needed to hear it

The Wolf Who Couldn't Win

Ryan's POVWe used to run from training sessions, neither of us wanting to finish, and I climbed out a second-floor window with Lucien, the two of us laughing too loud to be quiet, fifteen years ago. He landed first. Some instinct in him, even then, made the ground meet him gentler than the rest of us; he always landed first. I told myself that day it didn't matter who hit the ground first, and I've told myself that for fifteen years since, one step behind him, close enough to matter, but never close enough to be him.I wanted one thing today that was Lucien's, and it wasn't Sloane, whatever anyone thought, whatever they would think if they ever caught me looking at her a beat too long. I wanted to be the man who did what he couldn't do quick enough. I wanted to walk into Moonlight's elder court and hand a broken family something Lucien's careful, calculated patience would never have delivered in time.The petition was clean. I had built it well: guardianship transfer, medical authori

His Price

Sloane's POVAll the doors I had knocked on were locked. The petition for custody was dismissed. The elder court, which I was barred from twice. Ryan sitting across from Lucien's desk and explaining the forged signature in a monotone voice, as if it were nothing more than a fact, and me standing in the doorway and realizing that there was no version of tonight where the truth wasn't my responsibility to hold onto alone.I saw him absorb it, saw the quietness that fell on his face as it always did before he chose to be angry, a stillness I'd learned to dread more than his temper."You went to Oscar's house," Lucien said. "After I said don't.""Lucien—""You found a document of custody consent you never signed and brought it to Ryan, and he filed a petition for you without telling me." His voice remained flat, and somehow that wasn't any better than shouting would have been. "How long was I supposed to find out on my own? Was I supposed to hear it from Oscar, the way Ryan heard your fat

The Voice I Was Never Supposed to Have

Sloane's POVWolfless Omegas are deaf. This was the one thing about myself that I never had to doubt, the one thing under all the other doubts of my life. No change, no howl, no wolf in my skin. A girl born into a world that's made for creatures she'll never be.I heard her when I was standing in the doorway with my bag packed, eleven days from Carl's surgery and one night from Moonlight.Mate.Not a thought. It wasn't my voice sounding exhausted. Something else, something low and certain, coming from somewhere below thought, the way the pull toward Lucien had come years ago, across a college courtyard, before I knew his name.I dropped my bag."Sloane." Lucien came up behind me before I could have even finished turning and put his hands on my shoulders, steadying me before I even realized I needed to be steadied. "What's wrong?""I heard something. A voice. It said, "I stopped, because saying it out loud made it real, and real was terrifyi

The Morning I Let Her Go

Lucien's POVI'd never sent anything I loved into Oscar's house before. The last time someone I loved walked through those gates, they never came back, and I had spent twelve years making sure I never felt that kind of waiting again. I had been building walls and contracts and contingencies against just that. And here I was, signing my name to it with my own hand, because there was no other way to save a child worth fighting for.This morning I was about to feel it anyway.I kissed it, the mark at her throat still raw, gentle at first, then not, my hand finding her hip and pulling her back against me like the night had already given me more than I could ask for.She breathed out, "Again?""Once more, before I have to give you to a house I don't trust." I rolled her under me slowly and thoroughly, and I knew the sound she made when I moved inside her; I'd memorized it hours ago. She came apart once, then again, before I let myself follow, and then I held her a long time, both of us act

Sister, Dearest

Sloane's POVI was forced to be small in this house once more. I had been small here for five long years, taught every trick of taking up as little space, voice, and everything a house like this didn't want a girl like me to have, and my body remembered it the second I stepped inside, shoulders curling in, eyes touching the floor before finding anyone's face."The prodigal Luna," Bella said, loud enough to reach the kitchen. "Come to reconcile with your poor forsaken family.""I'm here for Carl.""You're here because your husband sent you." Her eyes darted to my throat, to the mark there, still healing, and something glided across her face so quickly I couldn't name it, gone before I could decide if it was hatred or hunger. "Wearing his mark like a leash and calling it a gift, like it was ever something worth wearing."I gave her the volume. Loud was my cover tonight, and every time she spoke to me in front of the staff, it landed as another brick in the story Lucien needed this house

What Was Locked Away

Sloane's POVThe first thing I knew was that I wasn't alone in my own head.Lucien was there. Not his voice, not words, just him, a roar of something hot and furious and terrified pressing against the inside of my ribs like a wolf throwing itself at a locked door. It hurt. It was the only thing that told me I was still alive.The second thing I knew was a hand over my mouth.My eyes flew open. Hannah's face was above me, grey in the half light, one finger pressed to her own lips. Footsteps passed in the hall outside, slow, unhurried, heels on wood. They paused at my door.Hannah didn't breathe. Neither did I.The footsteps moved on.Only when they reached the stairs did she take her hand away. "Don't sit up fast," she whispered. "You'll bring it all back up again, and there's nothing left in you to bring."My throat was raw. My mouth tasted like salt and something bitter underneath it, like burned sugar. There

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