All Chapters of Married to the Alpha Who Killed My Father: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The household staff found the stain on the floorboards three mornings after the wedding, and Aria had a lie ready before the maid had even finished asking about it."Wine," she said smoothly, not looking up from the letter she was pretending to read. "I knocked the glass over the first night. I should have mentioned it, I'm sorry for the mess."The maid, a soft-spoken young woman named Mira who'd been assigned to Aria's chambers, nodded and set about scrubbing the mark with lye soap, and Aria let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. It was, she reflected, remarkably easy to lie to people who had no reason to doubt her. It was Kade she worried about.She needn't have worried quite so much, not yet. Kade Thorne was many things, attentive, careful, uncomfortably perceptive in ways that kept catching her off guard, but he was also, in these first days of their marriage, determined to give her exactly the space he'd promised on their wedding night. He didn't ask about the stai

 The reception honoring the one-month anniversary of the treaty was, by every outward measure, a triumph.Both packs had turned out in full formal dress, the Thorne great hall transformed with garlands and firelight, elders from both sides trading toasts that would have been unthinkable a year earlier. Aria moved through the crowd at Kade's side, performing warmth that had, disconcertingly, stopped requiring quite so much performance, and told herself the evening was simply another public obligation to endure.

The diplomatic dinner had been scheduled for weeks, a formal gathering meant to introduce Aria properly to the wider circle of Thorne allies and neighboring pack dignitaries, the kind of evening that demanded careful performance from both bride and groom in equal measure.Aria arrived at it exhausted in ways that had nothing to do with the evening's demands and everything to do with three sleepless nights spent turning a crescent-shaped mark over and over in her mind, searching for a pattern she couldn't yet complete. She dressed carefully, composed her expression into practiced warmth, and told herself she could hold the performance together for one more evening.

The name came from an unexpected source, a brief mention in a decade-old Voss household ledger Aria requested be sent from her family's holdings, buried among routine domestic expenses: a servant's wage, paid out for eleven years and then, abruptly, discontinued the same season her father died.Joran Kessick, border watchman.Aria remembered him, vaguely, from childhood, a quiet man who'd served her father's household guard, present at nearly every gathering of significance in the years before the execution. She had never once wondered, in the ten years since, what had become of him. Household staff

The Bonding Rite arrived with little warning, a ceremonial requirement, Rurik explained apologetically, that both packs had quietly insisted upon in the weeks following the wedding, a formal ritual beneath the full moon meant to seal a mated pair's union before the assembled witness of both Alpha lines."It's old custom," Rurik said when Kade protested the timing, given everything currently unraveling between his wife and the Council's trusted peace broker. "Skipping it would raise questions neither of you can afford right now. Whatever else is happening, the ceremony needs to proceed as planned."Aria