Todos los capítulos de The crown system: four kings bound to me: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

I didn't know what to do as panic set in within me. I tried my absolute best to calm down—panicking wouldn't help either of us, and Azriel needed someone steady right now, not someone falling apart beside him.I knelt down next to him and said, "Fine. I won't call anyone. But if you lose consciousness, I'm ignoring everything you just said and calling for help. That's not negotiable."Azriel gave a faint nod, his eyes half-lidded, as though even that small motion cost him more than it should have.The living room wasn't safe—not with Orion, Lucian, or Kael liable to walk through the front door at any moment. He needed to be somewhere out of sight. Thankfully, his room was on the ground floor, just off the hallway, so I wouldn't have to drag him up an entire flight of stairs on top of everything else.I looped his arm over my shoulder and tried to help him up, and immediately regretted underestimating just how much dead weight a barely-conscious person could be. He was tall, broad-shou

By morning, she had already dozed off, her head resting against the edge of the bed beside him.Azriel was the first to wake. For a moment he simply lay there, disoriented, the pale light of dawn creeping in through the curtains before the memory of the night settled back over him—the wound, the fever, the quiet weight of someone sitting beside him through every hour of it. He turned his head slightly and found her there, slumped forward with her cheek pressed against the mattress, a stray strand of hair falling across her face with each slow breath.He stayed still for a long moment, just watching her.Carefully, almost hesitantly, he reached over and brushed the strand of hair away from her face, his movements slow enough not to wake her. He let his gaze linger a moment longer than he probably should have, a quiet, unreadable expression settling over his features. *Why would she go through all this trouble for me?* he thought. Staying up through the night, wiping his forehead over a

The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of lectures and half-finished thoughts. Auriel sat through her remaining classes with her body present and her mind somewhere else entirely—back in that dim room, watching Azriel's chest rise and fall while his fever climbed higher than it should have, no matter what she tried. Every so often, Lyra would nudge her elbow to pull her attention back to whatever the professor was saying, and every time, Auriel would offer an apologetic smile and force herself to focus for another few minutes before her thoughts wandered off again.By the time the final bell rang, the sky outside had already begun sliding toward that soft amber shade that meant evening wasn't far behind. She said a quick goodbye to Lyra at the usual intersection, waving off the halfhearted offer to grab a snack together, and made her way back toward the dorm at a pace just short of running.The house was quiet when she stepped inside—no sign of Orion or Lucian, no sound of Kael's

For a moment, neither of them moved.Orion's expression had already smoothed itself back into something composed, something almost convincingly normal, but Auriel had seen it—that flicker of raw emotion before he'd caught himself, dark and sharp enough to leave an impression even after it vanished. Whatever had been in that letter, it wasn't nothing."Sorry," she said carefully, still standing in the doorway. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I just saw the light on.""You're not interrupting," Orion said, his voice even, though his hand drifted briefly to his pocket, as if to confirm the letter was still safely out of sight. "I was just finishing up some correspondence."She wanted to ask. The question sat right there at the front of her mind—*what was that letter, and why did it make you look like that*—but something about the careful blankness he'd wrapped around himself told her pushing wouldn't get her anywhere. Not tonight, at least."Long day," she offered instead, stepping back fro

The ward cracked open with a sound like ice breaking under too much weight, and then everything happened at once. They came through the gap in a pack of hellhounds, unmistakably, though nothing like the storybook version Auriel had grown up hearing about. These were bigger, leaner, their black hides steaming faintly in the cold night air, eyes burning a dull orange where a normal dog's would catch the light. She'd read about them in passing during one of Professor Aldren's lectures — creatures bound to old battlefields, drawn to concentrations of mana and blood. She'd never expected to actually see one, let alone a dozen crossing the training field at once. "Stay close," Lucian said, already moving, positioning himself half a step ahead of her as the first wave broke past the collapsing barrier line. She stayed close. For a while, it actually worked. They fought back to back through the first stretch of chaos, and there was something almost steadying about it. his blade catching