Semua Bab My Alpha Lost Me To The Lycan King : Bab 61 - Bab 70

EliseThe smoke recoiled from my open palm the way a wounded animal recoils from a hand it doesn't trust yet — not fleeing, exactly, but coiling tighter into itself, wary, watching. I felt the weight of every eye in that ruined chamber settle on me. My mother's, wide with a fear too raw for words. My father's, flickering between horror and something that might once have been love before the Court hollowed it into strategy. Ismene's, luminous with disbelieving hope. And Alaric's, black veins still crawling slow and merciless beneath his skin, his jaw locked tight against pain he refused to let me see in full.I had asked him to trust me. Now I had to make that trust worth something."I know you're not just hunger," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I had any right to feel with three centuries of stolen grief and a stranger's fury both roaring through my blood at once. "I know that's the story they told you, the same way they told my great-grandmother

King AlaricI read the parchment twice, hoping the words might rearrange themselves into something less catastrophic the second time. They didn't.*While you defended a valley, we opened a door you never thought to guard. Isabeau was never our only asset within your walls. Return quickly, Your Majesty — assuming there is still a throne worth returning to.*"What door," I said, my voice gone flat with a dread too large to carry any other tone. "Reyes betrayed the ward panel. Corwin took the infant. Isabeau opened the western gate. What door is left?"Ismene's face had drained to a pallor I hadn't seen on her even facing down a chained, half-forgotten queen. "The council chamber," she said slowly. "It's the only sanctum in that palace I never once thought to ward personally, because I trusted the men and women who sit in it far more than I trusted any wall.""The council," I repeated, and the full, sickening weight of it landed. Every noble house. Every Alpha still loyal to the crown. E

King AlaricThe council chamber went from uncertain murmuring to outright panic in the space of a single breath, nobles rising from their seats in a chaotic scramble, voices rising louder and more frantic with every passing second."Silence." The word came out of me with enough force that the chamber actually obeyed, chairs scraping to a halt, frightened eyes turning toward me with the particular desperation of people who wanted, more than anything, to be told this was survivable. "Panic will not hold our walls. Discipline will. Reyes—" I turned to find him already at the doorway, blood-streaked but steady, some fragment of the trust I'd nearly lost tonight fully rebuilt in the grim set of his jaw. "Full muster, every able body, every gate reinforced. I want reports on troop numbers within the quarter hour.""Yes, Your Majesty." He was gone before I'd finished speaking, shouting orders down the corridor, and I felt a fraction of steadiness return simply from watching a man I'd trusted

  King Alaric I felt her fear before I heard it in her voice — raw and sudden, transmitted straight through the joined circle of our hands like a current jumping a gap it shouldn't have been able to cross. "Elise, what is it," I said, tightening my grip, refusing to let the bond between us slacken even as her whole body began to tremble with the strain of holding three thousand chains at once. "Something old," she gasped, her eyes still closed, her face bone-white beneath the mist gathering along the ridge. "Older than the priests. Older than the first queen's binding. It's — Alaric, it's *waking up*, and I don't think the Hollow Court summoned this army to fight us at all. I think they summoned it to feed something." Beside her, Elise's mother made a strangled sound, her own grip on the circle faltering for a heartbeat before she forced it steady again. "The old

  King Alaric I threw myself in front of Elise on pure instinct, sword raised though every fiber of me understood, with a sickening certainty, that steel would do nothing against a thing built from three centuries of pure, ravenous absence. The lunge never landed. It stopped inches from us, close enough that I felt the cold, hungry pressure of it against my skin like standing too near an open grave, and then, impossibly, it recoiled — not retreating, but drawing back into itself, some vast internal struggle rippling visibly through its formless bulk. "It heard her," Ismene breathed from somewhere behind us, disbelief and terror tangled together in her voice. "Moon Goddess, it actually heard her." *Free,* the creature said again, and this time the word carried something closer to agony than menace, its voice scraping through the air like something t