All Chapters of The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

He turned to face me. "I couldn't stop him. I tried. I offered him everything I had, and it wasn't enough to compete with what Zoran was already offering. So I did the only thing I could think of. I made sure I was inside whatever happened next instead of outside it." "By selling yourself to Vex," I said. "By making myself necessary to Vex," he corrected, and there was iron under the words now, the first hard edge I'd ever heard from him in five years of knowing him. "There's a difference between a spy and a man buying time. I took his money because it meant he trusted me enough to tell me things. I secured that land not because I wanted the Vale exploited, but because I needed a reason to be watching it closely enough to know the moment anything changed." "And when I arrived," I said, "eleven years after you started this, you didn't think that was relevant information to share with me? Not once? Not during any single hour of training, of grief, of everything you told me about m

The war room smelled like burnt tallow and cold coffee by the time everyone had gathered, candles guttering low from a night nobody had slept through. Kael had the eleven property markers rearranged across the map already, red thread stretched between three of them in a pattern that made my stomach turn the moment I saw it. "Explain the thread," I said, dropping into the nearest chair. "Movement patterns," Kael said. "Sable tracked supply wagons over the last four days using the route Aldric flagged near the Vale. Three separate deliveries, all converging on the property closest to the site itself. Heavier cargo than trade goods usually run. Weapons crates, if the weight estimates hold." "Jeppe Hansen's work," Aldric said quietly from the corner, where he'd stationed himself since arriving, close enough to contribute, far enough to give me space I still hadn't decided how to fill. "He runs logistics for anything Vex considers essential. If he's moving weapons into the Vale directl

"I know," Aldric said. "And I know I don't have the right to ask for trust I never earned with you directly. But I need you to listen to me anyway, because there are men half a mile from this farmhouse right now staging weapons, and your family is standing directly in the middle of something I helped build years before I understood what it would cost." Albert's face went through several things at once, disbelief, then dawning horror as he registered the specific weight of what Aldric had just said. "What men," he said, sharp now. "What are you talking about?" I stepped forward before Aldric could answer, and Albert's eyes cut to me, taking in everything at once, my bearing, the way Caius and Kael flanked me without needing instruction. "My name is Sera," I said. "Five years ago I broke a curse that had been eating a man alive for three years, and in doing so I released something that's been sealed underground half a mile from your farmhouse for three hundred years. A man named Vex

Møller's bravado cracked. I watched it happen, watched the specific moment a man who'd been trained to withstand pressure finally hit the point where pressure won. "Northeast," he said, breathing hard. "Half mile from the stone formation. He's got the weapons cache there, the whole staging point. I swear that's everything, I don't know more than that." Caius looked at me. I nodded, once, and he brought the hilt of his blade down against Møller's temple, hard enough to drop him unconscious without killing him. Kael returned from the ridge a moment later, dragging one wounded man by the collar, Rowan and Sable close behind him, both breathing hard but upright. "Two down on the ridge," Kael reported. "This one's alive, the other one won't be talking to anyone again." "We have a location," I said. "Northeast, half mile from the stone formation. Jeppe's staging point, and apparently the whole weapons cache is there with him." "Twenty men," Caius added grimly, and watched Rowa

I rode hard back toward the Kristensen farmhouse, the current in my blood pulsing wrong the entire way, a rhythm I'd never felt before and didn't have a name for yet, only the certainty that something had shifted underground while I'd been busy loading wagons and calming frightened children. Caius was waiting at the tree line when I broke through, Kael beside him with a spyglass trained on the northeast ridge, both of them turning at the sound of my horse. "It's changed," I said, swinging down before the animal had even fully stopped. "The site. Whatever Jeppe's doing out there, it's not staging for later. He's pushing it now." Caius's face went hard in the specific way it did when a plan he'd trusted started collapsing in real time. "How do you know." "I can feel it," I said, and pressed a hand flat against my own chest like that could explain the sensation crawling under my ribs, something between a heartbeat and a scream, distant but growing. "It felt like a slow current be