Todos los capítulos de BOUND TO THE FORBIDDEN ALPHA PRINCE • BOOK II: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

🩸WARREN🩸No mark.I had searched every inch of her, every curve, every plane of skin bared beneath my crimson eyes that saw perfectly well in a dark she could not penetrate at all, and there had been nothing.No star.No glow waiting to answer the dark the way the old texts claimed it would.Nothing but skin, soft in a way that made my jaw ache with the effort of holding still, soft in a way I had spent the entire encounter hating myself for wanting to touch.That was the worst part of it.Not the absence of proof. I had expected that, had gone into the room already certain the prophecy would fail her the same way it had failed every other candidate for twenty-four years. What I had not expected was how badly I wanted to keep looking anyway, mark or no mark, prophecy be damned, my hands curling into fists at my sides the entire time just to keep them from reaching for her.Kian had not cared about stars or prophecy or any of it. He had cared only about the shape of her, unguarded, t

💫RAYNE💫 I found the smallest corner of the sleeping hall, tucked behind the last row of beds where the shadows sat thickest, and let myself finally fall apart. I do not know how long I stayed there. Long enough that the light through the high windows shifted from gray afternoon to something deeper, dimmer, edging toward evening. Long enough that my knees ached from being pulled tight against my chest, my back cramping against the cold stone wall behind me. I cried until there was nothing left in me to cry with, until my chest simply hollowed itself out and left me sitting there empty, staring at nothing, replaying the same handful of moments over and over until they stopped feeling real at all. His hand on my jaw. That impossible heat spreading through my body in a place fear should never have been able to reach. The darkness swallowing him whole while his eyes stayed lit like two dying embers, watching me undress one piece at a time, watching me stand there stripped of everythi

💫RAYNE💫 Greta’s voice carried across the sleeping hall before most of us had even finished tying our aprons for the morning. “Special guests are arriving today.” She stood at the front of the room the way she always did, arms crossed, eyes sweeping the rows of us like she was already counting the ways we might disappoint her. “High maidens. Noble bloodlines. Every single one of you will be on your absolute best behavior, or you will answer to me personally.” Her eyes found mine before she finished speaking, holding there a beat longer than necessary. “Rayne. I want no mistakes from you today. None.” I nodded, though something in her tone told me she expected more than a nod, expected some deeper assurance I did not fully know how to give her. I had not meant to spill wine on Emery’s dress. I had not meant to open Warren’s curtains and set his entire chamber ablaze with morning light. Mistakes seemed to find me regardless of how hard I tried to avoid them, but I did not say any o

🩸WARREN🩸 A knock sounded against the study door before Garrick could answer the question that still hung unresolved between us. “Enter.” Ronan stepped through, his expression unreadable in the particular way he had learned to hold his face around me these past two days. “The guests have arrived, Alpha.” “Which guests?” I did not look up from the report still spread across my desk, though something in his tone already told me I was not going to like the answer. “The maidens.” Garrick answered before Ronan needed to, his voice carrying the practiced calm of a man delivering news he already expected to detonate badly. “From the noble bloodlines. Aldric wants to perform a series of blessings over them while they’re gathered. It seemed efficient to summon everyone at once rather than drag this search out across another year.” I set the report down slowly, my eyes finding Garrick fully across the desk. “You brought them here without asking me first.” “I attempted to inform you last

💫RAYNE💫 The cold did not simply surround me. It lived inside me now, settled deep into my bones the way heat settles into stone left too long under a summer sun, except this was the opposite of warmth, this was something that ate warmth alive and left nothing behind but an ache that reached all the way to my teeth. I sat curled on the stone floor, my knees pulled tight against my chest, my arms wrapped around them so hard my fingers had long since gone numb against my own sleeves. Every breath scraped raw down my throat, thin and stinging, like breathing frost itself instead of air. My lungs did not want to expand fully anymore. They fought me with every attempt, and I had learned somewhere in the last hour to take small breaths instead of deep ones, quick shallow pulls that barely filled anything at all but did not hurt quite as much going in. My tears had stopped falling somewhere along the way. Not because the crying had stopped, but because the cold caught them the second th