Semua Bab The Alpha Rejected Me, His Father Claimed Me: Bab 11 - Bab 20

She found the east garden three days later, quite by accident, wandering the grounds while Nyra was occupied charming information out of the kitchen staff. Three days of small, careful routines had begun to settle over her like a second skin: mornings in the library, afternoons avoiding Corvin's watchful eye, evenings spent waiting for a knock that sometimes came and sometimes didn't. She'd told herself she was simply exploring. She wasn't entirely sure that was true.It was exactly as described: a stretch of wild, overgrown beauty that didn't match the careful order of the rest of Silver Hollow's grounds, moonflowers and silverbell run half-feral among older, more deliberate plantings, as though whoever tended the rest of the estate simply couldn't bring themselves to touch this one corner of it. Someone had loved this garden once, and then stopped, all at once, and never come back to finish loving it.The wing beside it was unused. She could tell before she even opened the door, tha

She took him up on it three mornings later, mostly because Nyra had grown tired of watching her pace the length of her chambers and had all but shoved her out the door."You're driving me to distraction," Nyra had said, not unkindly, tossing a practice tunic at her head. "Go hit something. Preferably something that isn't me."Corvin was already in the yard when she arrived, setting out practice blades with the brisk efficiency of a man who'd done this exact task ten thousand mornings before."Hold the stance," Corvin said, adjusting her grip on the practice blade with two efficient fingers. "You're gripping it like you're afraid it'll bite you.""I've never held one before.""That's obvious." He stepped back, arms crossed in the posture she was beginning to recognize as his default. "Again."She'd expected training to feel like one more obligation, one more thing this new life demanded of her without asking first. Instead it felt, unexpectedly, like relief: a problem with a physical a

The letter to the archivist at Hollow Court went out the next morning, sealed with Kaelen's own signet rather than trusted to a household steward, and with it went a request Aeloria hadn't expected: that her training begin immediately, and that it begin with him.She'd assumed, in the days since the training yard incident, that she would be handed off to some tutor, some scholar of old bloodline magic summoned from a dusty archive somewhere, and had spent those days bracing herself for another stranger's careful, clinical assessment of what she was. Kaelen's offer caught her entirely off guard."You want to teach me yourself.""I want to make certain the next time that fire finds you, it doesn't find you in the middle of a crowded yard with no warning at all." Kaelen led her past the training ring, past the kennels, down a narrow path she hadn't yet explored that wound deeper into the silver-barked forest ringing the estate. Morning mist still clung to the undergrowth, softening the l

He arrived nine days later, unannounced except for a rider sent ahead by less than an hour, which Kaelen made clear was itself a kind of message."Thane Voss doesn't travel without purpose," he told Aeloria, watching from the study window as a modest procession wound up the long drive toward the house. "And he certainly doesn't visit Silver Hollow without an agenda considerably larger than the courtesy call he'll claim this is.""Who is he?""Council Elder. Has been for longer than I've been alive, or very nearly. Survived the fall of an entire noble house decades ago as a young man, back when I was barely more than a pup myself, and has spent every year since building a reputation as the Council's most reasonable voice." Kaelen's tone gave nothing away, carefully neutral in a way that told her more than the words themselves. "He is, by every account I've ever heard, extraordinarily good at seeming reasonable.""But you don't trust him.""I've never had cause not to trust him. That, i

Thessaly settled into Silver Hollow with the quick, easy adaptability of the very young, taking to upheaval with a resilience Aeloria found she almost envied. Within a week her sister had charmed half the kitchen staff, made a cautious friend of a stable hand near her own age, and taken to trailing after Nyra with the devotion of a girl who'd found, for the first time in years, someone willing to simply let her be young. Even Corvin, gruff as he was with nearly everyone, had taken to slipping her extra bread at meals when he thought no one was watching, a small kindness Aeloria noticed and said nothing about, unwilling to embarrass either of them by acknowledging it aloud.Aeloria's training continued in the mornings, her Council preparation in the evenings, and for nearly two weeks something like peace settled over the household. She was almost afraid to trust it, certain some new crisis waited just beyond it. The pendant's letter remained unread in the bottom of a drawer, a small st