Semua Bab The Alpha Rejected Me, His Father Claimed Me: Bab 41 - Bab 50

The horn sounded twice, short and sharp, the signal for breach rather than attack, and the household came awake in stages; a door slamming somewhere above, boots on stone, a dog barking itself hoarse in the kennels. Aeloria was out of bed before she'd fully placed the sound, heart already hammering by the time she reached the corridor.Corvin sealed the gates within the hour."No one leaves. No one arrives without my personal clearance." He was already moving through the entrance hall, barking orders to guards who scattered at the sound of his voice, the whole household waking to chaos in the middle of what should have been an ordinary night. "Every letter that's gone out in the last month, I want copies or accounts of. Every visitor. Every delivery.""That's going to take days," Nyra said, still in her nightclothes, hair loose, clearly having run from her own bed the moment the alarm reached her."Then it takes days." Corvin didn't slow down. "Voss knew things he had no business know

Bram talked for three hours, and by the end of it Corvin had filled an entire notebook with names, dates, and details that reshaped everything they thought they understood about Voss's timeline. Aeloria stayed for most of it, though she left twice, unable to sit through certain parts without needing air, the sheer scope of Voss's patience laid bare in ledger entries and half-remembered overheard conversations."He's not planning to attack Blood Moon's border first," Bram said, exhausted, voice hoarse from talking. "That's a diversion. The soldiers gathering there are real, but they're not his main force. I overheard him say it to my contact once, weeks ago, before I understood what I was actually hearing. Something about drawing the largest army toward the wrong door.""Then what's the real target?""Here. Silver Hollow itself." Bram's hands hadn't stopped shaking since the confession began. "He wants the girl. Aeloria. Not dead, not at first. He wants her for something, some ritual,

The attack came at night, and it came from the one direction nobody had fully prepared for.Not the border. Not Blood Moon's territory, where Valthor's forces stood ready for exactly this. The strike came directly at Silver Hollow's own walls, a force smaller than the one gathering at the border but faster, better coordinated, moving with the precision of soldiers who'd been given a single clear objective rather than a broad campaign.Aeloria woke to Corvin's voice shouting through the corridor, and this time there was no confusion about what the horns meant. She'd slept fitfully at best since Wystan's warning about the ritual, some part of her mind always half-listening for exactly this sound, and she was on her feet before she'd fully registered being awake."They're inside the outer wall!"She was dressed and moving before she'd fully processed the words, fire already gathering in her palms without conscious summons, and found Kaelen in the entrance hall already armed, already shou

The battle lasted less than an hour, though it felt considerably longer to anyone living through it. Silver Hollow's riders held the ridge once they finally reached higher ground, forcing the ambushing force to fight uphill into fire and steel both, and by the time the attackers broke and scattered into the treeline, they'd left behind more dead than they'd taken with them. It was not, Aeloria understood even through her own exhaustion, a victory anyone could afford to celebrate. Six of their own lay dead in the grass. A dozen more were wounded badly enough to need carrying. "Cost us," Corvin's second said grimly, wiping his blade clean on a dead man's coat. "Cost us more than it should have, for an ambush we should have seen coming." "We didn't see it because it wasn't meant to be seen." Kaelen knelt beside one of the fallen attackers, and when he reached for the man's dropped weapon, his hand actually paused an inch above it, as though touching the thing required some private

Fire rose in Aeloria's palms without her fully deciding to call it, throwing pale light across the clearing, and Kaelen stepped in front of her with his blade already drawn, both of them braced for whatever was about to step out of the trees.What emerged instead was an old woman, small and stooped, wrapped in a patched grey cloak, one hand raised palm-out against the firelight as though shielding her eyes from something far brighter than she was used to."Put that away," she said, her voice thin and cracked with age but not with fear. "I've been coming to this clearing for thirty years. I think I've earned the right to walk it without being burned for the trouble."Kaelen didn't lower his blade. "Who are you?""Someone who's watched this place a great deal longer than either of you have been alive to care about it." The old woman lowered her hand slowly, studying them both in the firelight with eyes that were sharper than her frail frame suggested. "I saw you kneeling at Seraphin