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Lahat ng Kabanata ng Alpha's Obsession With His Pet: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

100 Kabanata

Chapter 92 – The Counter

(Brynn)They send for me before I've finished my coffee, which tells me everything about my standing in this house now.Not invited.Sent for.The study's crowded.Rene behind the desk.Angelique by the window, keeping her face neutral in a way that must take effort.The Warden in the good chair, and Cole by the door like furniture with opinions."Sit," Rene says."I'll stand. Whatever this is, I’m sure it won’t take long."Levi Knox smiles like I've said something pleasant.I hate that about him.You can't land anything on the man.It all just sinks in and disappears, and he looks at you like he saw where it came from."Your mother made the Alpha an offer," he says."Her life for the unbinding of the working. She believes she's the only door out.""She usually is.""Not this time."And then he lays it out, plain, the way you'd explain a recipe.Capital workings fall under Warden's law.The unbinding takes the hand that cast it, and they have that hand, sitting in a cell, already trad

Chapter 93 – Everything Owed

(Angelique)Rene shuts the bedroom door and says, "Before the council sits, I need to give you something. It's ugly.""More ugly than this week?""Different ugly. Mine."He stays standing, which is how I know he’s worried."The restaurant. When I told you Brynn tastes sweeter."My stomach drops the way it dropped then.Stupid, that a few words can still do that after everything that’s happened between us."It was a lie. All of it. I never touched her. Not once. Not before you left, not in the five years I thought you were dead, not after."His jaw works."I wanted to hurt you the exact way you'd hurt me, and I aimed for the one place I knew you couldn't armor. So I invented it, and I watched it cause you pain, and I enjoyed it."I already suspected as much, but couldn’t be sure."Why tell me now?""Because in three days I stand in front of a council and swear to tell the truth, and I'm not walking in there with a lie still living in my own house. And because you cringe when she walks

Chapter 94 – The Trial

(Cole)By nine the hall that held a crowning holds a court, and I've got wolves on every door and a bad feeling I can't assign a post to.Twelve council seats.Knox presiding.Two prisoners' chairs, set apart.Maliyah takes hers like it's the head of a table.Valeria takes hers like it's a bus seat.Rene stands at the rail with Angelique.Brynn sits alone in the second row, and I sent Tova to sit behind her, because somebody should, and Tova's the only one who'd agree.Victor sits with the pack.Not accused yet.Confessed, but not yet charged.Levi Know runs his floor in a particular order, and I've stopped trying to predict it."This council convenes on three matters," Knox says.No gavel. His voice just makes the room go quiet on its own."A capital working purchased against Alpha Beck. The murder of Beta Theodore Pruitt, ten years past. And collusion with the circle that conducted both."The morning goes the way evidence goes.Slow, then all at once.Marta's page from Theodore Prui

Chapter 95 – The Crown or the Grave

(Rene)They draw the circle in the same hall where Maliyah died yesterday, because Knox says the law doesn't care about ghosts.Chalk on stone.Valeria in the center, unchained.Brynn at the edge with a paper in her fist.Knox presiding, and me on the mark they told me to stand on, over a stain nobody's managed to scrub out.My father is in a cell under this floor. Sentence comes tomorrow.That's all the room I'm giving that tonight."Beneficiary," Knox says.Brynn steps up.She reads it fast and flat, like ripping tape off."I, Brynn Pruitt, named beneficiary, renounce the claim purchased in my name. Crown, standing, inheritance. Unmake it.""Caster."Valeria kneels at the chalk and puts both palms flat on the stone.No drama.A woman letting herself into a house she built."Alpha," Knox says to me. "You'll feel it."I feel it.It starts as the old pressure I always put down to pain over losing my fated mate.Then it turns into a vice.A fist that closes on my heart four times, and I

Chapter 96 – Sentences

(Rene)Knox reads the ruling at nine and it takes him under a minute."For colluding with Maliyah Pruitt. For the murder of Beta Theodore Pruitt. For ten years of concealment. For a killing done in Warden's custody, before this council's eyes."He doesn't raise his voice."Death. And by the law of this pack, the sentence belongs to the Alpha's hand. Dusk today."The hall empties quietly.Nobody looks at me on the way out.Cole stays."I can find precedent for a proxy," he says. "Old cases. Nobody would blame you-""No.""Rene-""He’s my father. He doesn't get a stranger."Cole nods once and goes to build a dusk I don't want to arrive.The cell is clean and my father is sitting on the cot like a man waiting for a train.He looks old.He's looked old for years and I called it grief and age, and now I know it was neither, it was a woman avenging his refusal to crown her.And he brought it on himself. I don't know where to put that so I push it aside."You came," he says. "Good. Sit down,

Chapter 97 – The Girl in the Cage

(Brynn)Nobody sends for me anymore.That's the first thing about being free.Twenty-one years of sent for, countless hours spent in her sitting room, running her errands, learning her scripts, and now whole mornings go by where no one requires me at all.I sit in my room like a phone with no signal, and apparently this is what I fought for.My mother's buried.My father's been buried ten years, and I spent every one of them believing a rogue did it.His love for me was the purest thing I’d known in my life and he was taken when I was so young.Last week I sat in a hall and learned she held the knife herself.She murdered my father.Then she raised me to poison his other daughter.That's my inheritance.I renounced the rest on paper.By noon I can't stand my own company anymore, so I walk aimlessly.Nobody stops me.Nobody follows me anymore either.Freedom's mostly a list of things that stopped it seems.Out the side window, on the drive, I see Tova, one-armed, trying to wrestle a fe

Chapter 98 – The Run

(Angelique)"Stop stalling," Rene says."I'm stretching.""You've stretched for ten minutes. You're stalling."We're at the tree line in the dark, and I'm in his shirt and nothing else, and my heart is thundering like I'm eighteen and about to jump off the quarry rock.Five years of herbs and then weeks of being afraid to try, telling myself there was no safe place for it, no time, telling myself anything except the truth, which is that she hates me and I know it and I've been putting off the conversation.My wolf has rarely spoken to me in the last five years. Most of the sentences when she did contained the word traitor."What if she won't come?" I ask. "What if it’s been so long, I can’t change anymore.""Then we walk back and try tomorrow, and the day after, for as long as it takes."He pulls the shirt over my head, folds it over a branch, matter-of-fact, like he's not stripping me in the woods."But she'll come. She's been pacing since we walked out here. I can feel her through y

Chapter 99 – The Biggest Crown

(Rene)The hall's held a near crowning and a trial and a killing, and today it holds three hundred wolves who came back to watch me get it right.Same altar.Same cloth.Same crown, which is lighter than it looks.I learned that the last time, holding it over the wrong head.Alpha Doyle's in the third row again.Arms uncrossed, this time.He caught me in the corridor an hour ago, gripped my hand hard enough to grind bone, and said, "Took you long enough to believe what the whole east wing could smell."One line, and he'd clearly been polishing it for weeks.I let him have the last word without argument.The front row is filled to capacity.Cole, looking far happier than he did the last time.Tova, arm out of the bandage, in an actual dress, under protest.Brynn, who tried to argue against it, but Angelique insisted she was family and belong there.It cost her something to do and cost the room something to see, but I believe in the end it will make things better for everyone.Parker is

Chapter 100 – Two Roads

(Parker)I stuffed Donovan's letter in my jacket pocket before coming out for the last night of the crowning feast and Tova finds it in two minutes."Hold still."She's supposedly fixing my collar.Her hand dips, comes out with the envelope, and she steps back out of arm's reach to read it, because she is a thief with excellent instincts."That's private.""Nothing's private, I occasionally help with the laundry."Her eyes move down the page."Karth wants you back. Alpha seat. Donovan says," she squints,"Eleven years is a long time to keep a man's chair from wobbling, come home before I start liking it.'"She lowers the letter."He's funny. Why do you have funny friends and no personality?""I have a personality.""You have a gruff tone and a hard stare."She hands the letter back."So. When do you leave?"And there it is.The question I've been carrying around like a stone since getting that letter.Eleven years I knew what every morning was for.Follow up on all leads and wait for

Chapter 101 – Booth Six, Again

(Angelique)Zack wakes us at six by starfishing into the middle of the bed and announcing, "It's THE DAY."He's five.He's ours.And in about four hours he's going to eat his body weight in diner pancakes, because today we're driving down to the old town, and I'm not scared of a single mile of it.No herbs in his juice.He’s discovered he loves apple juice when it doesn’t taste like dirt and feet.My son smells like Beck and dirt and grass and boy, all the way down the highway, with the windows open, because he can.Mrs. Acheson's trailer looks exactly the same and so does she.She takes one look at the enormous black SUV, then at Rene unfolding out of it, then at me, and lights a menthol with the unhurried air of a woman confirming a theory."So that's the fella," she says."Knew you weren't hiding from nothing worth less than that."Her letter found us in the spring.Three lines, no return address needed apparently, ending with ‘whatever you ran from, I hope it either died or smarte

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