The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 61 - 챕터 70

Mira knocked on my door that night.Not the connecting door — the corridor door, which told me she had not been given the north wing room, which told me Heda had read the situation correctly and placed her in the east wing with our father's escorts where the geography alone communicated something about standing. Heda communicated a great deal through room assignments. I had come to appreciate this.I opened the door.Mira stood in the corridor in a traveling robe she had changed into, her dark hair down, and she looked different from the woman who had stood in the main hall two weeks ago with the silk pouch of sleeping herbs and relief written across her face. She had looked composed then, performing composure the way she always performed it, the armor so well-fitted it was easy to mistake for skin. Tonight the armor was not on. She looked tired in the way people looked tired when they had been carrying something for a long time and had finally arrived at the place they had been trave

I found my father in the east courtyard.Not inside, not at a table in a formal room where the furniture could provide structure and distance and the architecture of a difficult conversation. He was outside in the thin morning light, standing near the courtyard wall with a cup of something warm in his hands, looking at the winter garden the way people looked at things when they were not actually seeing them — using the view as somewhere to put their eyes while their mind was somewhere else entirely.He heard me approach and turned. He looked at me directly. He was still doing that — the eye contact, deliberate and held, the thing he had committed to in the main hall yesterday and was clearly working to maintain. It cost him something. I could see that it cost him something. I was not going to credit him for it out loud but I noted it internally because I was trying, in this process, to be accurate rather than just angry. Accuracy required noting the things that were real even when the

Sable's report came in two days instead of three.She sent it through a courier route that bypassed the compromised channel entirely -- a new path she had established after discovering the leak, running through a neutral trading post three territories east that had no connection to either Ironveil or Greyveil and therefore no reason to be monitored by anyone with an interest in our correspondence. Kael had the letter in his hands by early morning and was at my door before I had finished my first training session of the day.He did not knock with urgency. Kael never knocked with urgency. He knocked with a particular rhythm that I had learned to read the way I read everything in this house -- by what it was not as much as what it was. This knock was not alarm. It was the knock of a man carrying information that required immediate processing.I opened the door. He handed me the letter. I read it standing in the doorway.Carver's real name was not Carver.His name was Edric Vane and he ha

He was mucking out the third stall when I found him. Not because it was his turn -- Pip had reorganized the stable duty rotation three weeks ago in a way that technically gave him every third stall on alternating days, which was the kind of administrative maneuvering that went completely unnoticed until you looked at the schedule and realized that the third stall was the one closest to the east courtyard entrance and therefore the one with the best sightline to the main gate. Pip had given himself the best surveillance position in the stables and done it through roster management and I had only noticed because I noticed things. He looked up when I came in. Read my face immediately the way he read most things -- fast and accurately and without making a performance of it. "That's your serious face," he said. "I have a serious face?" "You have several," he said. "There's the one that means you're planning something, the one that means Kael told you something you're still processing,

Sable's second report arrived before breakfast. Not through the new courier route this time -- through something faster and more direct, a method she described in a single line at the top of the letter as a channel I've been saving for when it mattered. Which told me two things simultaneously: that she had been holding this route in reserve for an emergency, and that whatever she had found was significant enough to qualify as one. I read it at the desk in my room with the candle still burning from the night before, the winter morning dark outside my window, the estate quiet around me in the specific way it was quiet before the first training bell rang and the day officially began. I read it twice. Then I went to find Caius. He was already in the war room. So was Kael, which meant Kael had received the same report through a separate channel and had beaten me there, which was the kind of thing Kael did with the complete serenity of someone who considered being first to the inf