All Chapters of My Second Chance with the Alpha King: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

~Oswald~ "Nobody move."It came again. Not loud. That was the thing about it — it was a small sound, and it came from behind a slab of stone set into a hill, and it was the sound of something very large shifting its weight a long way off.Kerrin had his blade out. "Alpha—""Put that away. What are you going to do with it?"He put it away.We stood there in the grey light for a long time and it did not come again."Six hours." Artemis was still on the ground where they'd dropped him. "Six hours I had my ear against that and there was nothing. I told you. It was the quietest thing I've ever put my hands on.""And now?""And now the line's hanging." He wouldn't look at it. "You've all seen it. It's slack from top to bottom and it's slack because of me, and whatever's in there has spent four hundred years not being able to hear us.""And it can now.""I don't know, Alpha." His voice cr

~Oswald's POV~The sound hadn't finished dying before I had my sword half out of its sheath, my body already turning, already between Nyla and the stone before my mind caught up to why."Don't," Jenna snapped, close to my ear, sharp enough to sting. "Don't draw on a rock, Alpha."I didn't sheath it. My free hand found Nyla's shoulder instead, pulling her back a step, and she let me — which told me more than anything she'd said all hour. Nyla didn't yield ground easily."What did you hear?" I asked her, my voice low, rough at the edges.She didn't answer right away. Her eyes stayed fixed on the slab, on the dark line running through it like a scar that hadn't decided whether to heal. Her jaw was tight, the muscle there working once, twice, before she spoke."Wind," she said finally, too fast, too flat. "Just wind through the crack."I knew a lie when I heard one. I'd built a kingdom on knowing when men lied to me. I let it sit anyway, my grip easing on my sword hilt without quite letti

~Nyla~I read the line a second time, and then a third, and somewhere in the third pass a single word snagged like a hook in cloth.Forgotten how to count.Nobody said it that way. Nobody but the priestess, who'd used those exact words to me once, nine days before any of this began, in a version of the timeline nobody else remembered but me. She'd stood in the temple doorway and told me grief made people forgotten how to count their own blessings, and I'd thought nothing of it then, filed it away as the strange kindness of an old woman.My hands went still on the paper."Nyla." Oswald's voice, low, closer than I'd realized he'd gotten.I looked up. He wasn't watching the guards anymore, wasn't watching Jenna working the ropes off the last man's wrists. He was watching me, and whatever had shown on my face, he'd caught every bit of it."You know the hand," he said. Not a question."I don't know a name," I said, which was true enough to say without lying outright.Jenna's head came up f

~Nyla~ "That's yours," Redmayne said again, quieter this time, like saying it twice might change what the ledger showed. The guards nearest us shifted, hands drifting toward hilts that hadn't been drawn a moment before. I felt the change in the corridor before I understood it, a stiffening in every man's shoulders, eyes sliding toward Oswald in a way they hadn't been sliding a minute ago. "I signed nothing," Oswald said. His voice stayed level, but I caught the tightness at the corner of his jaw, the same tell he'd shown me at the old ground when he was holding something back. "I've been east since before dawn. You know that, Redmayne. You saw us ride out." "I know," Redmayne said, and his hands shook faintly around the ledger's spine. "I'm not accusing you, my lord. I'm telling you what the log shows, because someone else will read it before I get the chance to explain it kindly." 

~Nyla~ "Corwyn's dead," the messenger gasped, before he'd even fully cleared the doorway. "Second patrol caught them at the fork past Ashfell."Jenna crossed the room so fast the candle guttered in her wake. "Dead how?""He wouldn't give up the prisoner." The messenger's chest heaved, sweat cutting pale tracks through the soot on his face. "They called for his surrender twice. He drew on them instead. Took two of ours down with him before they put him on the ground.""And Artemis?" Oswald demanded, his hand closing hard on the edge of Vann's writing table."Gone." The word came out flat, and the man's eyes dropped to the floorboards rather than meet any of ours. "Taken in the scramble. Three riders came out of the treeline while the patrol was still standing over Corwyn's body. Nobody saw which way they went after the ridge."The room went quiet in a way that felt worse than shouting.Jenna's hands curled into fists at h