All Chapters of My Alpha Lost Me To The Lycan King : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Elise The gray world had no wind, and yet I felt it move against my skin like breath — cold, patient, tasting the fear rolling off me in waves. Three heartbeats. I could feel my own pulse somewhere far away, in a body I could no longer quite locate, ticking down like a fuse lit in a room I couldn't reach.*One.*I thought of Alaric's face in the clearing — not the composed king who'd stared down Ashgrave without flinching, not the ruler who'd rebuilt a wing of his palace around a stranger's comfort in a single afternoon, but the man who had looked at me by firelight and said *I love you* like it terrified him more than any army ever could. I thought of his hands, careful even when the rest of him burned with fury, the way he'd knelt in front of me twice tonight instead of looming, because some instinct in him had understood, before I ever said it aloud, that I'd spent three years being loomed over.I thought of the arrow he'd taken for me without a heartbeat of hesitation, the way hi

King AlaricThe laughter reached me a half-second before the heat did, and every instinct I owned went utterly, coldly still.I had heard men laugh before battle. Soldiers did it sometimes, a nervous release before the blood started flowing. This wasn't that. This was slow, unhurried amusement, the sound of something that had already decided the outcome of tonight and found our scrambling faintly, tediously entertaining."Formation," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, some old, drilled discipline taking over where fear threatened to. "Elise behind me. Elliott, Tyler — flank her other side. Reyes, get the horses ready to move the instant I give the word.""Ready to move where?" Reyes asked, already positioning himself."Anywhere but here," I said grimly.The old woman — I still didn't know her name, and some absurd corner of my mind noted that I ought to remedy that before the night ended, assuming it did — had gone rigid beside Maeve, her golden eyes fixed on the tree

King AlaricFor one disbelieving heartbeat, no one moved.The chasm that had swallowed half the Hollow Court's line steamed faintly in the cold night air, its edges too clean, too deliberate to be anything natural — not an earthquake, not some accident of terrain, but something summoned, precise, and utterly merciless.The priest staggered back from the pit's ragged edge, his composure finally, genuinely cracking. "That's not possible," he snarled. "There is no bloodline within a hundred miles capable of—""Wrong bloodline to be counting," a new voice cut in, weary but unmistakably steady, and I turned to find Elise's mother emerging from the tree line behind us, flanked by a dozen of the gray-cloaked strangers who'd sworn themselves to Elise not an hour before, her hands still raised, trembling with the visible cost of whatever she'd just done."Mother?" Elise's voice cracked with disbelief. "How did you—""I told you thirteen years wasn't long enough to erase everything Ashgrave's h

King AlaricI had fought beside Tyler for years, watched him take wounds meant for Elliott, watched him track a stolen infant across an entire palace's grounds without once losing his nerve. Nothing in that history prepared me for the sight of his face lit by black fire, his familiar features gone slack and wrong, his eyes swallowed by the same flat darkness I'd watched claim half the Hollow Court's line only minutes ago."Let him go," I said, my voice low, dangerous, the horse still shifting nervously beneath us as I fought to keep it steady. "Whatever you've done to him, undo it now, or I promise you'll regret ever finding him first.""Undo it?" Tyler's mouth curved into a smile that had never once belonged to the man I knew, something ancient and amused moving behind features stretched thin over it like a mask worn too tight. "You misunderstand, Your Majesty. We didn't *take* anything from him. We simply offered a trade he found considerably easier to accept than you might expect."

ElliottThe Sentinel's shriek still echoed in my skull long after Alaric and Elise vanished into the trees, and I found myself grateful, in some savage, unfamiliar part of my chest, that whatever ancient guardian had dropped from the sky tonight had bought them the distance they needed.It didn't leave much for the rest of us."Fall back to the ravine's edge!" Reyes shouted, blood streaking his temple, his sword arm visibly tiring after what felt like hours of unbroken combat though it could only have been minutes. "We hold here, we don't advance!"I planted myself beside him, my wounded side screaming with every movement, watching Tyler's borrowed body circle at the clearing's edge with two remaining priests flanking him, their black eyes patient, unhurried, the particular calm of predators who understood the prey had nowhere left to run."Tyler." I forced his name out steady despite the fear clawing up my throat, despite everything I'd learned in the last few minutes about a grief h