Todos os capítulos de My Second Chance with the Alpha King: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

~Nyla~ Whatever he asks you for, he won't ask for it."Jenna had caught my sleeve outside the wash house and hadn't let go of it."That isn't a sentence.""It's the only useful thing my father ever taught me, so listen." She glanced up the path, then back. "Alphas don't ask for the thing they want. They ask for the small end of it. Then the small end turns out to have the rest attached, and by the time you feel the weight of it you've already said yes.""The summons came through Vann, then.""Sentinels have cousins." She let go. "Eastern gardens. After the midday meal.""You could have let me be surprised.""I could." Jenna said. "Enjoy your walk."He was on the bench already, elbows on his knees. The garden had come on green in the eleven days since. Somewhere behind the hedge the same bird was still failing at the same four notes."Sit."I sat. The bench felt shorter than it had."I t

~Nyla~I did not take her hand."Sit down.""No.""You're going to fall over.""Then I'll fall over."She looked at me for a moment. Then she laughed, a real one, short and surprised and entirely out of place in that room, and dropped onto a crate herself, arranging her robe over her knees like a woman settling in at somebody's fire."Good." She said. "Stand, then. Not one of the others stood.""Others.""Mm.""You said others.""I say a great many things. You'll learn which ones I meant." She nodded at my fist. "You're holding it too tightly. It isn't a snake."I opened my hand. The cloth had gone damp at the folds."What is it?""Not poison." She said. "That's what you would all like it to be. Poison is such a small imagination. It's what you reach for when you want a man dead on a Tuesday.""Then what?""It goes in a mating cup." She said. "And afterward, the bond doesn't take."The floor lamps guttered in the draught from the doorway. I heard my own breath go out of me."That's al

~Nyla~ Jenna reached her father before anybody else did.She went across that ring at a dead run, straight through the space between the fires with the whole pack watching, and hit him hard enough to take him back a step."Five days." Her fists were in his shirt. "Five days, and you walk in off the hill like you've been to the mill.""Jenna.""Where were you?""The border posts." Artemis put his hands over hers, gentle, the way you'd calm a horse. He was smiling. That was the part I could not look away from. He was smiling at her with mud to his knees and five days of beard on him. "Where else would I be?""You didn't take a horse.""Of course I took a horse.""There's no horse signed out to you." Oswald came down off the ring's edge with his hand still round mine, and he didn't let go of it, which two hundred wolves noticed. "Not on Tuesday. Not any day since. I had the stable rolls up Thursday night and w

~Nyla~ Maya came in on the second evening, two hours before dark, on her own two feet.Half the pack turned out to watch it. Word had gone round by then — the kitchen girl who ran, walking back up the east road with her shoes in pieces and eleven days of road on her — and they lined the fence like it was a procession.She didn't look at any of them. She came up the track with her arms hanging and her eyes on the middle distance, and when Oswald stepped out in front of her she stopped the way a cart stops when the horse is pulled up."Maya of the kitchens.""Alpha." Her voice had gone to nothing. Eleven days of road will do that."Where have you been?""The border villages." She swayed a little. "Then the road.""Cobb met you on the Wednesday. Three days out. Walking this way.""Yes.""Why?"Maya's eyes came up, and for the first time since she'd cleared the fence line she looked at

~Oswald~ "Say that again.""Which part?" The priestess stopped six feet from us and folded her hands. "I'll say all of it, if you like. I've been saving it a long while and I'd rather not rush.""My mother.""Ilsabet." She said the name gently. "That was her name, and I notice you didn't use it. Nobody has used it in front of you since you were eight years old. Have you ever wondered about that?"Two hundred wolves stood in a ring around six fires and did not make one sound."Alpha." Redmayne, somewhere behind my shoulder, very low. "Alpha, whatever she says next, this pack is going to hear it."I knew that. That was the whole of the trap and I could see every wall of it.Take her now, in front of everybody, and she becomes a woman seized by an alpha who has just been publicly humiliated — a priestess dragged off her own ground by a man with a grievance and no proof. Let her talk, and she says whatever she l