All Chapters of Dumped By The Alpha, I Married His Stepbrother: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

"Orchestrated to destroy innocent families."Marcus's words landed like a punch, and for a moment none of us spoke, the acrid smell of smoke still clinging to our clothes as the horror of Regina's accusation settled in."That's absurd," Isolde said. "She burned the archive herself. We have the wound on Tobias's head, we have his testimony that she set the fire.""Testimony from a man Bartholomew's family paid for thirty years," Marcus said grimly. "The council might not weigh that as heavily as we'd like, especially with Regina standing there claiming the opposite.""We need to get to that chamber before she finishes turning the entire council against us," Lucien said, already moving toward the vehicle."There's more," Marcus said, reading further down the message. "Damien says she's brought her own evidence. Documents she claims prove Elena fabricated her identity as Elena Kingsley entirely, that the reconstruction surgery was staged to install an imposter capable of manipulating the

"The children." The words hit harder than anything Margery had said so far, settling cold and immediate in my chest. "What burden," Lucien asked, his voice tightening. "I don't know precisely," Margery said. "The records from that generation are incomplete, deliberately so, I suspect, given how carefully everything else about this arrangement was hidden. But the old accounts suggest the children born from these unions would carry the curse's final test within them. Whether they'd shift normally, whether the pack bond would hold, or whether generations of dilution simply delayed an inevitable collapse." "That's not proof of anything happening to any specific child," I said, though my voice shook more than I wanted it to. "No," Margery agreed. "It's a warning, passed down through fragmented records and half remembered stories. Nothing more concrete than that. But given everything Regina revealed today, given how deeply this arrangement reached into your generation specifically,

"Someone none of us have considered as a suspect."Marcus's words landed heavier than the smoke still clinging faintly to our clothes from hours earlier."Does Chloe say who," Lucien asked."No," Marcus said, scrolling further. "She says she doesn't know for certain, only that Regina told her once, in a moment of drunken carelessness years ago, that the true fifth child had been protected far more carefully than any of the rest of Bartholomew's arrangement.""Protected how," I asked."By being kept completely unaware," Marcus said. "Raised without any connection to pack politics at all, positioned somewhere ordinary enough that no one would ever think to look.""Then Regina claiming herself as the fifth child," Isolde said slowly, "was never about protecting her own secret. It was about protecting someone else's, by giving us a target we'd believe was the whole truth.""Exactly," Marcus said. "And it worked. We stopped looking the moment she confessed."Victoria shifted against her pi

"Chloe."The name landed heavier than exhaustion should have allowed it to."That's not possible," I said. "She was the one who came forward with information about the fifth child. If she's part of this arrangement too, why help expose it at all.""Maybe that's exactly why she helped," Lucien said slowly. "If she's been carrying this weight her whole life without understanding it, exposing everyone else might have felt like the only way to finally understand herself."Marcus scrolled further through the message. "The physician's team found a birth record cross referenced against the Kingsley file we recovered. Chloe's mother worked as a seamstress for the founding families generations ago. The timing, the arrangement, it matches the same pattern as Martha's placement.""Then she doesn't know either," Isolde said. "The same as Martha. The same as most of us, until this week.""We need to find her," I said. "Tonight, if possible. Before whatever's happening to Martha starts happening to

"No memory of anything happening."Marcus's words landed cold and strange in the exhausted quiet of the vehicle."That's not possible," Lucien said. "Two trained guards, and neither of them remembers a single detail of the entire drive.""That's exactly what the message says," Marcus replied, scrolling further. "They recall leaving the council chambers with Caleb secured in the back seat. Their next memory is arriving at the facility, doors opening, no prisoner inside, hours having passed that neither of them can account for.""Someone erased their memories," Isolde said slowly. "That's not a simple escape. That takes resources, someone with knowledge of methods most people wouldn't even know existed.""Vale," I said, the name landing bitter in my mouth. "He specializes in exactly this kind of clean extraction.""But Vale was working for Bartholomew," Lucien said. "Bartholomew's locked away, stripped of every resource. Why would Vale still be operating on his behalf.""Maybe he isn't,