All Chapters of Reborn Before the Mark: I Married His Wolfless Uncle: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

Valerian read the report twice before he allowed himself to touch it.The paper lay flat on the blackwood table in the Noctis command room, pinned at its corners by four small knives. Names filled the first page: Aria, Beatrix, Corinne, Diana. Below them came the payments, broken into neat sums and routed through Whitecliff accounts that had pretended to buy winter grain. The final sheet described the missing reagent, the service corridor, and the false alarm intended to pull Karl from Lorelai's side.He had expected greed. He had expected the old pack houses to make a weapon of fear. What irritated him was their carelessness. They wanted Lorelai dead before the assembly without understanding what they would destroy with her."The medical dispatch reached her table," said the spy beside the door.Valerian did not look up. "Of course it did.""She logged it."That earned the spy his attention. The man lowered his eyes. Even from a distance, L

Karl set the alarm notice beside the early Noctis dispatch without touching either seal.Lorelai stood across the operational table, her bandaged palm tucked carefully against her waist. The false emergency claimed that Greyhaven's western stores had been breached and that a border party was moving toward the relief roads. It carried a Moonridge command stamp, but the wax had been pressed too deeply on one side."The stamp is mine," Karl said. "The wording is not."She bent over the page. The lamp light caught the uneven edge of the seal. "It asks for you by title, not by the route command. Whoever wrote it wants you to leave quickly enough not to check the route.""The western stores are two days from Greyhaven.""Which means the warning traveled faster than the threat could." Lorelai looked toward the assembly doors. "And it arrives after Noctis prepares healers and antidotes before anyone has been hurt."Karl's hand flattened on the table

Lorelai opened the assembly with the statute of Avelune beneath her uninjured hand.The hall quieted in degrees. Delegates settled at the long tables; clerks lifted their pens; the three guards Lorelai had selected took their assigned places within sight of the exits. The Noctis stretcher remained behind the screen, its gray blanket folded with the patience of an object waiting for a future it had not earned.A clerk bumped the witness table and sent an inkwell sliding toward the statute. Lorelai caught it before it tipped, folded a blank scrap beneath the short table leg, and waited until the surface held steady.Valerian had taken a place beyond the Noctis screen, close enough that Lorelai had to pass within his reach to reach the central table. He offered no hand. She turned her injured side away and made the distance herself."This assembly will hear no claim made over a body," Lorelai said. "No crown, marriage, bloodline, or emergency grants a person

Lorelai smelled the metal beneath the wine before the first blade reached her.It was not the clean iron scent of blood. It was sharper, medicinal, threaded through the spill that darkened the stones beside the overturned assembly table. The same bitter base clung to the knife in the radical wolf's hand."Eve, left," Lorelai said.Eve didn’t ask why. She crawled toward the shelter of a stone bench, torn mantle gathered around her knees. The first attacker stepped over the table's broken edge, blade lowered as if he meant to make the movement look merciful.Lorelai caught his wrist before he could choose a target. The treated metal grazed her sleeve. She drove the heel of her palm into the joint beneath his thumb. His fingers opened. The knife struck the floor and spun beyond the spill."Do not touch it," she called to the nearest clerk. "Name who saw it fall."The clerk stared at her, white-faced. Then she swallowed. "I saw it. The bla

Lorelai ran toward the infirmary before the last echo of the alarm had left the assembly hall.The passage ahead was too narrow for the crowd already pressing through it. A toppled stool lay against one wall. A strip of torn mantle had caught on the other, marking where someone had been dragged. Behind her, men in borrowed wolf insignia shouted for the witnesses to be returned.Lorelai kept moving. The contaminated knife was already in the Veyr witness’s custody at the side exit; she would not break that chain of custody for the comfort of carrying a weapon.At the first storage niche, she caught the rack of folded blankets and shoved it into the center of the passage. Its wheels skidded. She put her shoulder into it again until it tipped, linen spilling across the stones and the metal frame lodging between both walls.The sound behind her changed. Boots stopped. Someone cursed.“Find another way,” she called without looking back.