All Chapters of MARKED BY FATE: THE ALPHA PRINCE'S REGRET: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Three months in the capital, sitting through council sessions, and Bianca finally saw what everyone else kept missing.She tried to explain it in her letters, but it didn’t really land until she showed up at Sterling without warning. She had a satchel stuffed with notes, pages and pages, like Corvin’s archive if Corvin cared about gossip, who sat where, and exactly how nobles talked about Seer bloodlines when they thought no one was listening."Everyone keeps treating this like a simple divide," she said, spreading her notes across Rhys's war table with the brisk efficiency she'd once reserved for planning which gowns would draw the most favorable comparisons at court functions. "Pro-Seer, anti-Seer. Reform versus tradition. It's not that simple, and I think the people negotiating this transition are going to keep failing until someone admits it.""Explain," Kaelan said, arriving in time to catch the tail end of her declaration, exhaustion from another difficult council session still

Serrin asked for the council session. No one forced her. That alone told me everything she wasn't the same girl who left the healer's cottage."I want it formal," she said when I found her the morning before, methodically packing a single small bag with the particular calm of someone who'd already made peace with whatever came next. "Not a quiet arrangement between friends who've decided to forgive me privately. I want the full council present. I want it recorded. I want every consequence that comes from it to be real, not simply symbolic.""You don't have to do this," I said, though I understood, even as I said it, that she'd already decided the opposite months ago."I do," Serrin said. "Not because anyone's forcing me to. Because I spent this entire past year believing consequences were something that happened to other people, while I remained clever enough, or desperate enough, or simply important enough to be exempted from them. I don't believe that anymore. I don't want to believ

The offer came back. Three times. Always in my dreams, always softer than the bone-deep exhaustion waiting for me when I woke up.I kept it to myself. Told myself I was protecting everyone else from a fear that belonged to me alone. Same old instinct, the one that made me hide the truth about my gift, until Bianca dragged it out of me on that bench by the training yard. I should have learned by now. But I hadn't. Not really. Not when the fear felt this sharp, this personal.The exhaustion crept in, slow and steady. Council sessions. Serrin's sentencing. Bianca fighting through endless negotiations. The fourth-thread question hanging over us. Wren still barely holding together after what she saw at the crack. I told myself it was normal to be this tired. Anyone would be, with this much on their shoulders. I didn't let myself think about how much of it was the Hollow, quietly feeding on me, waiting for me to break.I barely remember leaving Sterling that night.I remember going to bed,

Corvin called us together before the week was out. I was still dragging the weight of that night at the hollow, exhaustion clinging to me like a second skin. It never really let go."I don't believe we can continue simply reacting," he said, spreading his research across the war table with a new, focused urgency I hadn't seen from him since the earliest days of translating the boundary's history. "The Hollow will keep asking, patiently, until exhaustion or desperation eventually gives it the answer it wants. I believe the only way to end that pattern is to meet it deliberately, on terms we choose, rather than waiting for it to catch one of you unguarded again.""You're suggesting we go to it," Serrin said, arriving from her new duties with Corvin's archive, something steady and purposeful in her bearing that hadn't been there even a month earlier."I'm suggesting the three of you go to it," Corvin said, "together, with full understanding of what you're choosing, rather than a single f

That night, it found me again. Even as sleep dragged me under, I could feel that something about the invitation was different this time."I would like to show you something," it said, before the black forest had even fully finished forming around me. "Only you, this time. Not because I mean to divide you from the others. Because what I wish to share belongs, I think, most naturally to the one among you whose gift concerns itself with truth above all else.""I'm listening," I said, though caution still colored every word.The forest melted away, and suddenly I was somewhere new. Not the endless darkness filled with distant minds, but something smaller. Closer. Intimate, though that word felt too small for anything this old.I stood in what might have been a garden, if gardens could exist without soil or sky. There were no boundaries here, nothing to separate one living thing from another. Watching it, I realized I was seeing a memory or something close to it, shaped by a mind that didn