All Chapters of Thalia’s Unbecoming: From Killer To Cancer Luna: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

THALIA's POVI knew it was him before his boots ever reached my floor.I had spent the entire evening sitting in the heavy silence of the east tower, tracking the sounds of the castle like a lifeline. The guard change had occurred at dusk—exactly three minutes earlier than last night. That was a vulnerability. A funny sounding creak from two floors above happened on a precise, unvarying interval, which I had already mapped in my head as a standard patrol rotation. Even the distant, muffled sound of the pack down in the dining hall had gone quiet earlier than usual tonight, a detail that told me their meal schedule was shifting.I knew the exact weight of my regular guard on the stairs by now. This sound was entirely different. It was heavier, slower, and completely deliberate. Each step landed with the full weight of a man who moved with absolute intention behind it. This wasn't a routine rotation. It wasn't an errand.I stood up from the mattress, my heart delivering a sharp, sudden

THALIA's POV "Get up," the guard said, slamming the heavy iron cell door open. "The Alpha King wants you downstairs."I stood up from the edge of the bed and smoothed down the front of my gray dress. "Why? What is happening downstairs?""You don't need to know the reasons," the guard barked, stepping back into the stone hallway and gesturing with his spear. "Move. Now."It was becoming a predictable pattern with this pack. Information always arrived at the very last second, stripped of all useful context, delivered by someone who either didn't know the truth or had been strictly ordered to keep their mouth shut. I walked out of the cell and followed him down the spiral stairs, focusing entirely on the tiny things I could actually control. I checked the corners of my eyes out of habit—the dark contacts were perfectly in place. I kept my chin up and my spine rigid. As we walked through the winding corridors, I memorized every single turn, every door, and every window we passed.When w

RAEL's povI almost never send for Gerard at the end of the day, because for three hundred long years, my rule has been completely simple. You let Gerard come to you, you let every single motion happen entirely on his initiative, and you never give him the satisfaction of thinking he can move the pieces on your board. When you are the Alpha King, initiating contact creates the weak, dangerous appearance of a leader who is reacting instead of leading, and if you wait, you force your enemies to play on your territory, at your pace, under your terms.But today, I made a massive exception.Today, Gerard stood up in a grand room packed to the brim with my elders, my observers, and my wolves, and he pointed a finger at Thalia in the exact way a man points at a piece of meat he has already decided is his to consume. I have been patient with Gerard for decades, swallowing my pride because patience was the only strategically correct path to take, but today, I am in the specific mood where my w

THALIA's POVI was on the window seat, wrapped tightly in my blanket with the fire gone low, sitting alone in the dimming light with the empty bowl Constance had brought up and the heavy things she had just told me about Conan's secret ledger, my mind spinning completely out of control with the scale of the trap closing around me as I tried to organize the pieces just to find a way to survive it. That was when I heard his footsteps on the stairs, then my entire body went instantly rigid because I had heard those same boots last night, and the night before that, but tonight the footsteps didn't hesitate, and they didn't stop outside the landing, but instead they came all the way up, steady and terrifyingly heavy, until the door swung open and the Alpha King was just standing there. He hadn't brought a lantern, so it was just himself, still wearing his heavy coat, looking massive and completely dangerous standing in the narrow doorway, which sent a hard prickle of pure fear down my s

THALIA's povThe silence in the tower room felt heavier than usual, a thick and suffocating weight that pressed against my lungs now that he was gone. I woke to the biting morning air, the space beside me on the mattress long since abandoned and already losing the warmth he had left behind.My body felt like it belonged to a different person because every part of me ached with the memory of his touch, and a treacherous, warm spark flickered in my gut when I remembered the way he had moved against me. How his mouth...FUCK!I pressed my face into the pillow, trying to scrub the scent of him from my skin, but it was useless. I could still feel the phantom pressure of his hands on my waist and the way his voice had dropped, rough and commanding, against my ear in the dead of night. It had felt so real, so impossibly right, that for a few hours, I had forgotten I was a captive.You are a fool, I whispered to the empty room, my teeth sinking into my lower lip until I tasted the sharp tang