All Chapters of Broken by My Family, Reclaimed by the Alpha King: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Murielle's POV "Since sundown." I repeated it back to her, my stomach already sinking somewhere I didn't have a name for yet. "Searching for what.""Nobody's saying." Tamsin's grip on my sleeve hadn't loosened. "But it's not a small search, Elle. They've had lanterns going in there for hours."I didn't have an answer for her, and I didn't trust myself to go looking for one standing in a kitchen doorway with half the staff still filing past us. I thanked her, though the word came out thinner than I meant it to, and let her go back to whatever she'd abandoned to find me.I didn't sleep so much as lie there afterward, rehearsing questions I had no right to ask. Whatever those men were searching for, whatever it had to do with Dorian's escape or the name still sitting unspoken in Herta's statement, it wasn't mine to chase before Rook said it was time. I told myself that. I didn't believe it any more than I'd believed anything else I'd tried telling myself since the moment I'd heard that

Murielle's POV Rook was moving before the second toll finished.He caught my wrist, not gently this time, and pulled me flush against the wall behind us, his body angled to put himself between me and whatever the alarm meant. I felt his heartbeat through his shirt, fast, harder than I'd ever felt it, and for one long second neither of us breathed."Stay here." His voice had dropped into something low and final. "Do not move from this spot.""Rook—""Elle." He said my name like it cost him something to spend the extra second saying it instead of running. "Please."Then he was gone, boots eating up the corridor faster than any laborer had any business moving, and I was alone with my back against cold stone and my heart slamming hard enough to hurt.I didn't stay.I gave it exactly as long as it took for his footsteps to fade around the corner, then I followed, keeping close to the wall the way three years of learning how to move unseen had taught me. The alarm kept sounding, sharp and

Murielle's POV "Probably." My voice cracked a little, and I let it. "I'm terrified, if you want the truth of it. Terrified of what you're not telling me. Terrified of what it means that some part of me stopped caring about the answer weeks ago. And I still came out here with you in the middle of the night, because whatever you are underneath all of it, I'd rather have this than not."He didn't kiss me.Not yet.He sat there looking at my mouth like it was a problem he'd been trying not to solve. His thumb kept moving over my knuckles. The falls threw cold mist across both of us. I could hear him breathe."Elle.""Yes."He lifted our joined hands and pressed his mouth to the back of mine. Soft. Warm. Then he turned my hand and kissed the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, and stayed there long enough that I felt my own heartbeat against his lips."You already know what this is between us," he said against my skin. "You've known it since the ridge. Since the stream. I've spent e

Alpha Callum's POV Alizeh found me in the study three days after the papers came in, a stack of her own notes tucked under one arm, her face doing the particular careful work of someone who'd decided something needed saying and hadn't yet worked out how gently she could manage it."You asked me once how bad the internal damage was, the night of the beating." She set her notes down on the desk between us, not opening them yet. "I gave you the short version then, because you didn't need the rest of it in the middle of that chaos.""And now?""Now you're sitting quietly enough that I think you can actually hear it."I set down the pen I hadn't been using anyway. "Tell me.""The wound that nearly killed her wasn't a single blow scattered among three people hitting at once." Alizeh didn't soften it, and I understood, watching her say it, that she'd decided softening it would be its own kind of lie. "It was blunt trauma to her side, one clean impact, consistent with a hard fall against som

Murielle's POV The morning started the way most of them did now, unremarkable, nothing in it to warn anyone the day meant to end differently than it began.I helped in the kitchens before dawn, kneading dough alongside two of the younger girls while the ovens came up to heat, my hands moving through motions I'd known since I was young enough to stand on a stool to reach the counter.Tamsin argued with the baker over how much salt the morning bread needed. Someone's cat got into the flour and left small floured prints across half the kitchen floor before anyone managed to chase it out. Ordinary things, small things, the kind of morning that used to feel like all I had, back before any of this.By midmorning I'd changed out of my flour-dusted clothes and found Rook waiting near the old records archive, a narrow stone room built into the base of the east tower that nobody used for much beyond storing whatever the household didn't want to throw away."You look tired," I said, taking in t