Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

I woke up screaming.Not the quiet kind of waking. The full, tearing kind, the kind that rips you out of sleep with your heart slamming so hard you can feel it in your head. I sat straight up in bed at three in the morning with my hands pressed to my neck and for two seconds I did not know where I was.The dream was already dissolving the way they always did - edges first, then the middle but what stayed was my father's face. My father's face? Why? How was that possible?And it was close. Too close. The way it had never been in real life because he couldn't look at me directly.In the dream he had looked at me. Full, direct, nothing averted. And he had been smiling.I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and breathed and told myself it was over but my hands were still shaking so I pressed them flat on the mattress and breathed harder. The connecting door creaked opened.I spun around and saw Caius standing in the doorway in dark clothes, no boots, the curse markings livid in

The heavy oak door of the war room didn't just close; it buckled against the stone frame, snuffed a nearby wall torch, and left the scent of charred wick hanging in the sudden gloom.Kael was usually the anchor — the one man at Ironveil who moved as if the world weren't ending. Seeing him like this, chest heaving, palms slammed flat against the map-strewn table, made the air in the room feel thin."Zoran has the border," Kael rasped. "Halvenmere. He moved forty wolves in under the cover of the shift change. No declaration. No warning. The headman is already in a Greyveil cell."The silence that followed was a physical weight. Then Caius surged upward, his chair skittering back and clattering against the masonry. "How?""He played the diplomat," Kael said, the words bitter. "He kept us busy with letters while he repositioned. He knew exactly when our eastern scouts rotated out.""He knew because of Vex," I said. My voice sounded strange to my own ears — sharper, colder. Both men turne

Zoran's courier was a wolf named Bresht, -- a man built of thick muscle and clinical observation. He was the type to record every flinch and stutter to report back to his master without a shred of bias. He had been waiting in the west wing, waiting for Ironveil's surrender to a three-day death sentence.He was standing in the main hall when we arrived: Caius on my left, Kael on my right, and Aldric trailing three paces behind like a silent shadow.Bresht straightened instantly. I watched his eyes dart between us, mentally cataloging our formation, our gait, and the sudden, predatory stillness that had settled over the group."I have Ironveil's response to Alpha Zoran," I said. My voice, not Caius's, cut through the room. Bresht blinked, his calculation faltering for a micro-second. "Sit."He sat. It wasn't about rank; it was the sheer weight of the authority bleeding out of me. Whatever had shifted in my blood over the last twenty-four hours was tangible. It commanded the air.I lea

The betrayal didn't come from the shadows; it came from the heart of Ironveil.Kael was the one who found the letter. He had the sharpened instincts of a man who had spent three years managing a slow-motion collapse, and he'd been tracking the pack's internal rhythms with the cold focus of a hawk since Vex's exile. He knew the first strike was rarely the last.He dropped the parchment onto the war room table at midnight. The candle flames flickered in the draft. He said only one word."Reva."I stared at the letter. Caius stared at it. When he finally reached out to pick it up, his expression wasn't the jagged rage I expected. It was grief; thick, quiet, and devastatingly clean."How long?" he asked, his voice hollow."The first contact was twelve days ago," Kael said. "Before the village. She fed Zoran the intel that the substitute bride was developing 'unusual abilities' and that you were becoming protective. She gave him the exact window for the Halvenmere rotation."The silence

My sister arrived on a Thursday.There was no herald, no warning, no frantic rider announcing her approach. She simply appeared at the iron-wrought gates of the fortress in a heavy traveling cloak, flanked by two Ashveil escorts whose armor looked too clean for the mud of the road. She carried a letter from our father; a document drafted in the most suffocatingly formal language I had ever seen him employ. It was a request for a diplomatic audience with the "Luna-designate of Ironveil."The Luna-designate.He couldn't even bring himself to write my name on the parchment. To him, I wasn't a daughter; I was a title he had accidentally minted.Kael brought the letter to the training room, his face a mask of careful neutrality. I read it once, the ink stinging my eyes. I read it again, searching for a trace of the man who had ignored me for nineteen years. There was nothing but the cold smell of wax and desperation. I set the letter on the stone floor and sat in silence for sixty seconds