Semua Bab Bound To The Alpha: Bab 1 - Bab 7

She hadn't slept.That was the part nobody would ask about — whether the maid had slept, whether she'd sat in that chair until Lucas Blackthorn dismissed her at two in the morning with nothing resolved and nothing promised except the vague, dangerous weight of I'll look into it. Every quiet prayer collected with every version of God she could remember from childhood.Nobody asked. Mira was staff. Staff didn't have nights.She was back in her room before three, sitting on the edge of her narrow bed with Iris's breathing in her ears and the weight of the east wing still on her chest. She should have felt relieved. She'd told him the truth and he hadn't used it against her. That was more than she'd expected. But relief required a kind of safety she didn't have yet, and the night had left her too stripped down to pretend otherwise.She was on her knees scrubbing the entrance hall tiles when Rowan Blackthorn arrived.She'd seen him from a distance before — enough to know his shape, his way

It started as heat.Mira was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed in the room Lucas had moved her to — not the servants' quarters, not the basement she'd been quietly bracing for, just a plain room on the second floor with a lock and a window and Iris breathing more steadily in the bed beside her. The steadiness was something. She was grateful for it. She kept having to remind herself to be grateful for it, because her own body was doing something she had no framework for and the gratitude kept getting interrupted.The heat moved through her like a tide — not fever, nothing as simple or explainable as that. It rose from somewhere behind her sternum and expanded outward, and with it came something that felt absurdly like grief, though she had nothing specific to grieve right now. An ache. Sourceless. Bone-deep. The kind that makes you press your hand flat to your chest and hold very still and wait for it to name itself.She pressed her hand flat to her chest and held still and waited.

The doctor arrived before dawn and Mira was already awake.She'd been awake most of the night. Not from worry exactly — worry implied some distance between you and the thing, some gap where the fear lived. This was closer than that. She sat in the chair next to Iris's bed and listened to her daughter breathe and counted the pauses between each exhale the way she'd been doing for four years, the way she probably did it in her sleep now without knowing.Lucas knocked once. She knew it was him from the knock — two knuckles, no hesitation, the kind of knock that said I'm not asking.He didn't come in. He stood in the threshold with the doctor behind him and his eyes went to Iris first. They always went to Iris first, she'd noticed. She didn't know what to do with that yet so she'd just been watching it happen.The doctor was older than she'd pictured. Grey at his temples, thick hands, and the particular stillness of a man who had done enough of these visits that they no longer required hi