Todos os capítulos de Broken by My Family, Reclaimed by the Alpha King: Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

Murielle's POVOphelia Draeger's private sitting room smelled of orange blossom and old paper, the kind of room that had been arranged rather than simply lived in, every object placed exactly where it would flatter the light. I counted two exits before I'd fully crossed the threshold, a habit I hadn't managed to unlearn no matter how many rooms I sat in that weren't cells.She rose when I entered, not far, not low, the precise measure of respect owed to a guest whose status hadn't been fully decided yet. Everything about the gesture had been calibrated, and I understood, watching her do it, that very little in this room happened by accident."Lady Ravensworth." She said it without a trace of the word that usually followed my name in Court's mouth. "Thank you for coming. Please, sit."She poured the tea herself, unhurried, her hands moving through the motion like she'd performed it ten thousand times and found genuine rest in the repetition rather than mere habit."I imagine you expec

Murielle's POVI buried myself in the archive the next morning, in part because the work demanded it, in part because it was easier to catalog someone else's suspicious paperwork than sit with whatever I'd felt the night before when Rook's face had risen in my mind instead of a king's.The archivist assigned to me, a thin, precise man named Fenwick who clearly resented having his careful order disturbed by an outsider's authorization, brought the Ravensworth registry box without comment and set it down like it personally offended him."Everything relevant to the reopened inquiry is in there," he said. "In sequence."It wasn't, not quite. I noticed the gap before I'd even opened the folder properly, a number missing from the catalogue tag stitched into the binding, the kind of thing nobody would catch unless they'd spent three years learning to read exactly this sort of silence for what it actually meant."This entry's numbered out of sequence with the ones around it," I said. "Was thi

Murielle's POVI noticed it the moment I stepped back into my room, though I couldn't have said what, exactly, for a full minute after the door closed behind me.Nothing had been thrown open. Nothing lay broken or scattered across the floor the way it would have if someone had torn the room apart looking for whatever they wanted. A search like that would have been easy to spot and easy to dismiss as ordinary Court clumsiness.This was quieter, and considerably more unsettling for exactly that reason.The thread I'd left across the gap in my writing desk drawer, a habit three years of prison had drilled into me until it no longer felt strange to do, hung loose against the wood instead of stretched taut across the opening.Someone had opened that drawer and closed it again, carefully, confident nobody would think to check for a piece of thread no wider than a hair.I checked the rest of the room with the same methodical patience, moving slowly enough that Callum would have called it obs

Murielle's POVThe records review wasn't the Council session everyone had been whispering about. That was still weeks away. This was supposed to be routine, one of the smaller hearings held throughout the month for cases still active under Crown review.I hadn't expected an audience quite this large, nor quite this interested in a woman most of them had only heard about secondhand.Half the room had turned their chairs a few degrees off true, angled toward me rather than the podium, the way people arrange themselves when the actual proceedings are beside the point.Rook stood near the back wall in his plain clothes, close enough to matter, far enough to stay unremarkable, exactly the balance he'd learned to walk since we'd arrived.A councilman I didn't recognize rose during the general session, addressing the room rather than me directly, though his eyes never left my face while he spoke."I raise a procedural question," he said. "A woman formally branded for treason currently holds

Murielle's POVFor a long time I stayed exactly where I was, back against the door, and did not go near the bed.Three years ago I had watched a case assembled around me by hands that touched everything before anyone wrote down where it had lain. I knew what that did to evidence. It made it mean whatever the next person needed it to mean.So I did the work first. The window was latched from inside. The hearth flue was too narrow for a child. The floor rushes held no marks but my own. I walked the room twice, slowly, and found nothing that explained how a sealed record had come to lie on my coverlet.The spare key would answer one question, and I would ask it at first light, before anyone had warning that I meant to.I opened the door instead.The guard at the end of the corridor straightened. "My lady?""Send for Fenwick at the archive, and tell him to bring the Ravensworth registry box. Say a certified record has been tampered with and cannot wait for morning." I kept my voice level.