Alle Kapitel von The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride : Kapitel 31 – Kapitel 38

Kael had a contact in Ashenmoor.He dropped the information the way he dropped most things; flatly, without decoration, sitting across the scarred war room table with his hands folded. His face was a fortress of neutrality, offering nothing to help us navigate how he felt about the admission."I have a contact in Ashenmoor who can access private archives," he said. Then he simply stopped talking and waited for the inevitable interrogation.Caius leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. "A contact?""Yes.""In the heart of Greyveil territory?""Precisely.""A contact you apparently failed to mention until this exact second," Caius's voice dropped into a dangerous, low vibrato, "despite three years of us needing a window into Greyveil's records."*There was a brief of pause.*"The contact operates under strict conditions," Kael said, his voice clipped. "One of which is that I do not expose her existence unless every other avenue has turned into a wall.""Her?" Caius noted, his gaze tracking

Sable's first report arrived on a Tuesday, folded inside a merchant's shipping invoice. It was written in a cipher so dense it looked like a ledger of grain prices. We watched Kael decode it in the war room: Caius and I standing like statues, because watching Kael work a cipher was the kind of activity that didn't benefit from breathing, let alone commentary.He read the decoded text. Then he read it again. Finally, he set the parchment on the table face-up and pushed it toward us without a word.I read it first, my eyes skittering over the jagged lines. Then I read it again, slower. I then slid it toward Caius and watched his face. He wore the controlled-blank expression he used when he was genuinely alarmed and absolutely refusing to show it.Sable had accessed the Codex. She had found the relevant section after three hours of frantic searching. She described the document as a thousand-page tomb written in four languages, two of which hadn't been spoken for centuries. The section

On day seven of the accelerated sessions, I broke through.It didn't happen gradually. There was no slow, incremental crawl like the previous six days. I was forty minutes into the morning session, sitting on the cold stone floor with the iron block between my palms. I was running the opening technique exactly as my mother had documented it: breath steady, mind clear, the dark magic flowing through the contact point in a managed, silver current when the very architecture of the power shifted.It was like a massive stone wall that had been resisting my weight for a week suddenly decided to simply step aside.The contact deepened, plunging past any level I had reached before. I wasn't just touching the iron block anymore; I was moving through it. The full, jagged geometry of the dark magic spread out in my mind like a map I hadn't realized I could read. I felt every knot, every structural joint, every place where the magic had been woven together with terrifying, surgical precision.Thi

Aldric walked into the war room, looked at our faces, and knew immediately.There was no guilt, no flinch, no sudden hesitation, no frantic attempt to construct a mask. He was simply a very old man reading a room and understanding in three seconds what had taken us three hours of agonizing over ciphers to piece together. He sat down in the nearest heavy oak chair with the exhausted certainty of someone who had been waiting for a specific, dreaded conversation for a very long time."The advisor," he said, his voice raspy. "In Zoran's household. The silver eyes.""Yes," Caius said, his voice like grinding stones."His name is Vel," Aldric said, staring at the scarred surface of the table. "He is my brother."The war room went dead silent. The only sound was the faint hiss of a torch in the corridor."Your brother," Caius repeated."Half-brother. We share a mother. He is six years my senior. He has been with Zoran for fourteen years, not ten. Your source is slightly off on the timeline."