บททั้งหมดของ EVEN ALPHAS KNEEL: The Rejected Mightiest Luna : บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

Chapter ElevenPOV: Sera Ashwood"Go and fetch the pack herbalist right now," I told Mira, and my voice came out sharper than I intended it to because Lyra's face was still doing that thing that scared me, that pinched pale look she got when something was genuinely wrong and she was trying to minimize it for my sake. "Tell him it is urgent and I need him here immediately, not when he finishes what he is doing, right now."Mira was already moving before I finished the sentence.I turned back to Lyra and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and held both her hands in mine and told her to breathe and she breathed and I sat there watching her face slowly come back to its normal color and felt the tight frightened thing in my chest loosen by small degrees.The herbalist arrived within twenty minutes, assessed her thoroughly, asked her questions I hovered over like I had medical training I absolutely did not have, and told us it was likely something she had eaten at the engagement

Chapter Thirteen POV: DamienI sat in the backyard with my phone face down on the table beside me and my mind running through everything that had been happening recently with the particular focused attention I gave to problems that were accumulating faster than I could manage them cleanly.Reuel Ashton. That was the one that would not leave me alone no matter how many times I tried to push it to the back of everything else where it belonged."That dirty bastard," I said quietly to the empty yard. "He thinks he can find a chance this time around."What he had whispered in my ear in Sera's bedroom had been four seconds of words that had rearranged something inside me completely and I had spent every single hour since then deciding what to do about it. He knew things he should not know. Things about me specifically, about what I was doing inside this territory and about who I answered to and where the money was moving and what the real objective behind the engagement actually was, and a

Chapter 15 Kael Dravon The herbalist set three ledgers on the desk as he arrived. "Start from the beginning again," I said. "Not the compound before that. I want to know everything from who ordered it, who mixed it, and who carried it out of your workshop." "The order came from the ceremony coordinator's office, which was three weeks before the ceremony." "For what, exactly?" "A calming drought with a standard formula, the same one I've used for the last four ceremonies in the territory. Which has a root base, mild dosage and it is meant to settle nerves before the bonding, nothing stronger than that." "Who mixed it?" I questioned. This time anger and curious was burning in me "I did, I mixed it myself. My apprentice weighed the ingredients a second time after I finished, and we both signed off on the batch record." He turned the ledger around and tapped the entry. "Two witnesses were there with the correct weight and correct water-to-root ratio. It left my workshop ex

Chapter 17 Damien I spent the better part of the day trying to catch Inez alone, and I came away with nothing to show for it. The first time, she was in the kitchen with two of the cooking staff, close enough to the ovens that pulling her aside would have meant doing it in front of witnesses. The second time, I caught sight of her at the far end of the laundry corridor, and by the time I closed the distance she had already ducked into the linen room with another maid trailing behind her. The third time, I waited near the stairwell she usually took on her afternoon rounds, and she simply did not take it. She came down a different set of stairs entirely, one that cost her ten extra minutes, and kept herself clear of me for the rest of the afternoon. That was not luck. That was a woman trying her entire day around avoiding one person, and doing it well enough that I had to give her credit even while it cost me. I stood at my window that evening turning the problem over in my head. I

Chapter Nineteen POV: ZaraI found Kael standing near the elder's house and walked up beside him and stood there quietly for a moment before I spoke because I had learned early that with Kael the approach mattered as much as the words and rushing into his silence was the fastest way to make him close off completely."You have been out here for a while," I said."Thinking," he said."About the attack?""Among other things."I looked at the side of his face and I already knew what the other things were because I had been standing beside this man long enough to know exactly where his mind went when it went somewhere he did not announce, and it always went to the same place, and that place had a name, and I was so completely tired of that name living in the space between us like a permanent uninvited guest that neither of us ever acknowledged directly."I heard about the engagement," I said carefully.He did not respond."She cancelled it herself apparently," I said. "Found him in her fri