Semua Bab The Alpha Rejected Me, His Father Claimed Me: Bab 21 - Bab 30

The rumor reached Silver Hollow three days before the rumor's origin became clear, which was, Kaelen said grimly, exactly how a well-placed rumor was supposed to work. Aeloria had spent those three days in the training clearing each morning, chasing steadier control over a fire that still occasionally surprised her, and had returned each afternoon to a household growing quieter in ways she couldn't immediately name until Corvin finally laid the reason on the study desk between them."Witchcraft." Corvin spat the word, dropping a folded broadsheet onto the desk. "Printed and circulated out of a stall two streets from Hollow Court's market square. Somebody paid good coin to have it copied fast and spread wide."Aeloria picked it up. The ink was cheap, smudged at the edges, but the words were clear enough: ‘Silver Hollow's Bewitched King', and beneath it, in smaller print, an account of a servant girl who had ensnared the retired Alpha King with forbidden fire, stolen from a bloodline be

They didn't speak until the carriage had cleared Hollow Court's gates, the chamber's cold stone replaced by open road and a sky gone the color of old bruises with the promise of rain. Aeloria kept her hands folded in her lap, watching the last of the Council's grey towers recede behind them, and found she couldn't quite settle the strange, hollow feeling of having survived something without actually winning it."That wasn't a victory," she said finally."No." Kaelen's jaw was tight, his hands folded too neatly in his lap for the gesture to be anything but restraint. "It was a delay dressed up as one.""Voss did that on purpose. Gave us just enough to feel grateful, and took just enough back that we can't actually rest.""Yes." He said it without hesitation, which somehow made it worse than if he'd tried to soften it. "I watched him build that compromise sentence by sentence, and I still couldn't find the seam where I might have argued against it. That's what frightens me about him, Ae

She read it that night, finally, three weeks after finding it, in the quiet of her chamber with Nyra asleep down the hall and Silver Hollow settling into the hush of a house that had survived one crisis and was bracing, quietly, for the next.The courtyard demonstration had changed something in the household's rhythm these past days, a cautious new confidence settling over Corvin's guards, a warmth from the kitchen staff that hadn't been there before, as though the whole estate had exhaled at once. Aeloria had told herself, each night since, that she would finally open the box beneath her floorboards, the one she'd carried from Blood Moon Pack and never once managed to face fully. Each night she'd found a reason to wait one more day. Tonight, with the pendant warm against her collarbone and the letter's folded edge worn soft from months of almost-reading, she finally ran out of reasons.The seal broke easily. Her mother's handwriting filled the page in tight, deliberate strokes, the s

The formal announcement came three weeks later, timed deliberately to follow close on the heels of the Council's provisional recognition, before anyone could argue the demonstration hadn't been enough. Three weeks of careful, quiet preparation in between, Corvin's investigation into the struck-through name progressing slower than any of them wanted, the archive's secrets refusing to surrender themselves on any schedule but their own.Silver Hollow's great hall had been transformed for the occasion, banners in deep silver and blue Aeloria didn't recognize until Kaelen explained they were House Duskmoon's own colors, recovered from an old tapestry Corvin had found folded at the bottom of a chest in the sealed east wing. Wearing them felt like stepping into a future she hadn't fully chosen yet, and looking down at the fabric draped across her shoulders, she felt the ghost of a bloodline she was still only beginning to understand settle over her like a second skin."You don't have to do t

The list, when Corvin finally compiled it, was shorter than any of them wanted it to be. Two days had passed since the ambush, the wounded guard recovering steadily, the household still moving with the wariness of people who'd been reminded, violently, that danger didn't announce itself before arriving."Household staff who arranged the hunt. Myself. You two." Corvin laid the names out on the study desk like evidence in a trial none of them had asked to conduct. "And the guest list from the betrothal, since the hunt was announced there, publicly, to every Alpha and Elder in that hall.""That's not a suspect list," Nyra said, arms crossed, pacing the length of the study in a way that suggested she'd been doing it for a while before Aeloria arrived. "That's half the region.""It's more specific than that." Corvin tapped a second sheet. "The trail itself wasn't public. I chose it the morning of, on a whim, changed the route from what I'd originally planned because the eastern path had fl