All Chapters of Broken by My Family, Reclaimed by the Alpha King: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Alpha King Cassian's POVThe estate looked worse in daylight than it had through smoke.I walked the ground floor with Soren a step behind me, past rooms stripped down to bare shelves and drawers left hanging open, the kind of emptiness that only comes from someone packing with intention rather than fleeing in a panic. A study near the back still held the outline of where books had sat for years, dust gathered thick around rectangles of clean wood where the volumes themselves were gone."This wasn't done this morning," Soren said, crouching to look under a desk that had been cleared of everything but its own weight. "Whoever ran this place has been thinning it out for weeks. Maybe longer.""Which means the fire wasn't panic either." I turned a slow circle in the room, cataloguing what was missing instead of what remained. "It was insurance. In case thinning it out slowly didn't finish the job in time."We found the burned papers in the hearth of what had once been a sitting room, cur

Murielle's POVAlizeh had me sitting on the edge of a proper bed within minutes of Callum stopping in that yard, her hands already moving over me with the same brisk efficiency I remembered from every other time she'd patched me back together since I came home."Feet first." She crouched, lifting one of mine into her lap without waiting for permission. "You've been barefoot in freezing weather for half the night, and I want to know how bad it actually is before you decide to tell me you're fine.""I'm fine.""See, there it is." She pressed a thumb into the ball of my heel, watching my face rather than my foot. "That's the least convincing thing you've said to me all morning, and you've said several unconvincing things already."I let her work in silence after that, mostly because arguing took more out of me than simply letting her finish. She cleaned and wrapped both feet, checked the raw skin at my wrists a second time, pressed careful fingers along my ribs where the old injury still

Murielle's POVCallum brought the file to my room himself that evening, set it on the small table without a word, and told me, almost as an afterthought on his way out, that Colm's quarters had been found emptied, no sign of him since before the kidnapping. He left before I had to remind him this wasn't his decision to soften.Rook arrived not long after, two cups of something warm balanced in one hand, and pulled the second chair up beside mine without asking whether I wanted the company. I let him stay anyway. Three years of learning to trust almost no one, and somehow this man had become the one person I wanted beside me while I tore my own history apart."You don't have to do this tonight," he said, setting the cups down."I know.""You're doing it anyway.""I know that too."He didn't push further. He simply opened the file to the first page and turned it so we could both read, and something about that small, unremarked gesture, the ease with which he assumed we were doing thi

Murielle's POVCallum found me not long after breakfast, his face carrying enough weight that I set my cup down before he'd said a word."There's been a fire," he said. "A storehouse, outside the border. It burned two nights past. This morning, someone sifting the wreckage found a piece of your old cleaning satchel.""My satchel." The words came out flat. "I haven't carried that satchel in weeks.""I know.""Then how does a bag I haven't touched in weeks end up in a fire two nights ago?"Neither of us had an answer yet, and for once I let the silence sit instead of rushing to fill it with fear.Word moved through Silver Moon faster than either of us could stop it. By the time I made it downstairs, I felt it in the way conversations died half a beat too late as I passed, the way two guards near the kitchen door found somewhere else to look. Someone murmured the word traitor loud enough for it to reach me on purpose."Confine her until it's sorted," someone else said, closer, not bother

Alpha King Cassian's POVI waited until Murielle finally let Alizeh take her back upstairs before I went looking for Soren. I found him in the room we'd claimed as a war room since the kidnapping, maps and reports spread across a table that hadn't been cleared once since we'd started using it. He looked up when I came in, and whatever he saw on my face made him set down the page in his hand without finishing it."You were there for most of it." He didn't wait for me to sit. "So I'll skip straight to what you weren't.""Good.""Whoever planted Murielle's satchel expected this house to behave exactly the way it did three years ago." He leaned back, arms crossed. "Plant something with her name on it. Let the household's own certainty finish the job before anyone thought to check whether it was even possible. Whether the same person also set the fire is a separate question. We don't have anything yet that answers it.""Except it didn't work this time.""No. It didn't." I sat across from