All Chapters of Claimed By The Vampire King: Chapter 51 - Chapter 57

I traced a finger along the edge of the stone fountain, feeling the steady, rhythmic pulse of the Pact humming beneath the palace floorboards. The door the cosmic pressure valve we’d found in the archives was still out there, ticking away like a bomb we didn't know how to disarm."We need to go back to the archives," I said, meeting his eyes. "We missed something in those old texts. If we're going to keep the Wastes from imploding when the Weavers decide to check on us, we need to learn how to lock that thing down for good."We were just starting to map out our next steps, running through the mental checklist of archive sections we needed to tear apart, when the world just stopped. One second the air was still, and the next, the entire palace violently shuddered.It wasn't a normal tremor. The pavers beneath us cracked down the middle with a sharp pop, and the air pressure in the courtyard plummeted so fast my ears popped. A split second later, a sound ripped through the lower corrido

"Be careful," he whispered against my skin. "Find whatever you need down there. Tear the library apart if you have to. I'll handle the court.""Deal," I murmured, pulling back with a small smirk. "Try not to break too much of the palace while I'm gone.""No promises," he replied, his eyes flashing with dark amusement.The deeper you went into the archives, the more the air smelled like ancient parchment, damp stone, and things that were meant to stay buried.Julian and I had dragged a heavy wooden table right into the innermost alcove of the lower sub-levels, surrounded by towering shelves that looked like they hadn't seen the light of a torch in four hundred years. Dust motes drifted lazily through the thin beam of magical light I kept hovering above us, illuminating the chaos we had created. Piles of crumbling, leather-bound manuscripts were stacked everywhere, some open to terrifying diagrams of cosmic seals, others completely illegible until I used a whisper of my power to coax th

The throne room had stopped being a place of formal audience and had instead transformed into something resembling a chaotic war room. We had pushed the heavy oak tables together, burying the polished wood beneath a literal avalanche of crumbling charts, jagged blueprints, and glowing parchment rolls that Julian had pulled up from the deepest sub-levels of the archives. The air smelled of old parchment, and the faint, coppery tang of the magic we were already beginning to channel into the floorboards.Caius was standing at the head of the table, with his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing the pale, corded muscle and the intricate, dark tattoos that seemed to pulse in time with his heartbeat. He wasn’t wearing his crown, he’d tossed the heavy circlet onto a side table hours ago and without it, looking at him, you’d never guess he was a centuries-old monarch who had just spent the morning banishing half his court to the outer provinces. He looked dangerous, focused, and entire