Todos os capítulos de THE FOUR HOCKEY KINGS' FORBIDDEN MATE: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

~ Kaia ~By the second week, I'd learned to read the Royal Elite Unit the way you learn to read weather.Ryker was a closed sky — flat, controlled, giving nothing away until he decided to. Luca was sunshine that occasionally forgot to check the forecast, warm and unpredictable in a way that somehow never felt dangerous. Van had become something else entirely. Distant. Deliberately so, like he'd built a wall overnight and was standing guard behind it, watching me through the cracks whether he meant to or not.And Elias.Elias was fog. You didn't notice him rolling in until you were already standing in the middle of it."You're doing it again," I told him, halfway through a passing drill.He didn't look up from where he stood at center ice, notebook tucked against his side like it had grown there. "Doing what?""Watching me like I'm a science experiment.""I'm watching everyone.""You're watching me more."A faint pause. Not quite a denial. "You're the newest variable.""That's not comf

~ Kaia ~The invitation showed up taped to my locker two days after the fountain conversation, my name written across the front in loopy, deliberate handwriting.**Isolde:** A few of us are doing team bonding after practice. Locker room, 6pm. You should come — new players never get invited to anything and it's honestly a little sad. Don't be shy.I read it three times, trying to find the trap in it and not quite managing to. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Isolde Dacre just wanted to be nice, and I was being paranoid because paranoid was the only setting I had left these days."You're staring at that note like it bit you," Mason said, appearing at the locker beside mine."Isolde invited me to some team thing tonight."His eyebrows went up. "Isolde Dacre invited *you*?""Is that weird?""She doesn't usually notice freshmen exist." He shrugged, pulling his bag over one shoulder. "Maybe she's turning over a new leaf. You going?"I thought about the note in my jacket pocket, still there, stil

~ Kaia ~I started small.Half a dose the first night, instead of a full one. I told myself it was an experiment, nothing more — the kind of careful, controlled thing Elias would probably approve of if he knew, which he absolutely could not.I sat on my bed with the pill bottle open in my lap and a notebook of my own, cheap and spiral-bound, purchased from the campus store specifically for this.**Night 1 — half dose.** Warmth returns within forty minutes. Manageable. No visible symptoms.I wrote it in small, careful letters, the same way Elias wrote in his, and the irony of that wasn't lost on me even as I did it.The second night, I skipped the dose entirely until morning.**Night 2 — delayed dose, twelve hours.** Warmth present but low. Slight tremor in hands after practice. No light. No loss of control.By the fourth night, I'd started timing things with my phone, tracking exactly how long I could go before the warmth became something closer to fire.**Night 4 — no dose since morn

~ Van ~I went to the private rink at midnight because I couldn't stand being inside my own skin anymore.No coach. No brothers. No witnesses except the dark and the ice and whatever was left of my control after two weeks of losing it in pieces I couldn't hide anymore.I skated until my lungs burned, until the burn in my legs matched the burn under my ribs, until exhaustion felt like the only language my wolf still understood. It didn't work. It never worked anymore. Every lap just brought the same thing back around — golden eyes, a trembling hand, a scent that didn't belong to anything I'd ever smelled before and somehow felt more familiar than my own name.I hit the boards harder than I meant to on the last turn, stick cracking against the glass, and stood there gripping it with both hands, breathing like I'd been running from something instead of skating toward nothing."You'll break your stick before you break whatever this is."I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. "Go back to

~ Elias ~The Royal House archive occupied the entire east wing of the library — restricted access, centuries of bound records nobody bothered reading anymore except when a succession dispute required it. I'd spent three nights there since the scrimmage, running on coffee and the particular clarity that came from finally having a working theory instead of a collection of loose threads.*Interference with mate recognition, deliberate rather than natural.*Van's theory, technically, though I'd been circling the edges of it for weeks without letting myself land on it directly. Deliberate interference required a method. A method required precedent. And precedent, if it existed at all, would be buried somewhere in three hundred years of royal record-keeping nobody had cross-referenced properly in decades.I found it on the third night, in a section on suppressed bloodlines I'd almost skipped entirely.*Witch-cast suppression bindings: historical application.*The entry was old, formal, wri