All Chapters of After My Alpha Rejected Me, I Became the Lycan Queen: Chapter 111 - Chapter 118

The Temple did not send a letter this time. The Temple sent a woman.She arrived at Carrow at noon in a plain grey travelling habit with no insignia on it anywhere, which is the Temple's way of arriving with all of its insignia, and she asked for me by name at the desk in a voice that carried exactly as far as it needed to and not one inch further.Her name was Sister Verrell. She was perhaps sixty. She had the hands of a woman who had spent forty years in a registry and the eyes of a woman who had spent forty years reading what was in it."You will want to do this outside," she said. "There is a garden of sorts behind the stable. It is not a garden, it is a place where they keep the cabbages, but nobody stands in it and I have found that useful before."We stood among the cabbages."I am going to make you an offer," said Sister Verrell, "and I want you to understand before I open my mouth that it is a real one. I am not here to frighten you and I am not here to flatter you. I have be

The brother at the east gate of Moonfall had a ledger, a lamp, a brazier and a cold, and he was losing to all four.We came up to his lectern a little after six on the second evening, with the snow easing and the lamps of the city going on in rows below us, and he wrote my mother first without looking up. AURORA VALE, and the hour. He wrote Cassian, and looked up then, because the name Thorne makes men look up. Then he said, "And the lady," and I gave him my name, and he dipped his pen and did not use it.He ran his finger down the inside of the board, where the Temple pastes its circulars, and stopped."I cannot enter you," he said."Why not?""Because you are entered already." He turned the book round so that I could read it, and held the lamp for me, which I thought was kind.It was a printed circular from the registry of the Crown Chamber, the sort they send to every gate in the city, listing the persons who are to be struck from any roll on which they appear. There were six names

The door the Keeper opened was not the one I had come in by, and behind it there was no corridor at all. There was a stair going down into the rock, and it was nine steps, and every one of them was worn into a shallow dish in the middle, the way stone wears when a great many people have used it over a very long time and then, quite suddenly, nobody has."I will be here," the Keeper said, "when you come up. I will not be here if you call."Then she shut the door behind me, and I stood on the top step with a lamp in one hand and my grandmother's file in the other, and I counted down.Nine is not many. I want that on the record, because I had built it into something enormous on the way up the White Stair, and it was nine ordinary steps with a turn at the fifth, and at the bottom of them there was a low vaulted room about the size of my father's morning room, full of shelves.It was very cold and very dry and it smelled of nothing at all, which in a registry is the most unsettling smell t

Brother Idris gave me the address because the statute obliged him to, and he gave it in the same tone he had used for Corin, which I appreciated even while it made me want to run.Two rooms over a candle-maker's in Wick Lane. No servants listed.I did not run. A woman seen running across Moonfall three days before the thirtieth is a story by noon. I walked, with Cassian a dozen paces behind me on the other side of the street, and it took twenty-two minutes, and I spent every one of them deciding what I would say and throwing it away.Seraphina opened the door herself.Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow and her hands were red from cold water, and there was a basin on the table behind her with something grey soaking in it. Her hair was pinned up plainly, the way you pin it when nobody is going to see it, and she had not been expecting anybody, and she looked at me on her step for one long second without any expression at all."You are supposed to be dead," she said."You have seen the