Alle Kapitel von The Lycan King’s Slave Bride: Kapitel 31 – Kapitel 40

Nadia Voss had grown considerably more talkative in her second week of confinement, though Elena suspected the change had less to do with genuine repentance than with the particular arithmetic of a woman recalculating her odds."She's offering names," Silas reported, meeting Elena and Ronan in the study with a fresh page of transcribed interrogation notes. "Small ones, mostly — a courier here, a bribed merchant there, nothing that reaches as high as Dane or the Steward network proper. I suspect she's testing how much leniency each name buys before she risks anything that might actually endanger her further.""Has she mentioned her father's position?" Ronan asked."Repeatedly. She wants assurance he won't share her punishment before she offers anything more substantial." Silas's mouth thinned. "I've given her nothing beyond what the Council will ultimately decide, which she finds considerably less reassuring than I suspect she'd hoped."Elena studi

They buried the fallen guard two days later, in the small consecrated ground behind Blackthorn Keep's eastern chapel where soldiers who died in the crown's service had been laid to rest for three generations of Blackthorn kings.His name was Tomas. Elena hadn't known him well — a quiet young guard who'd rotated through the sovereign wing's watch more often in recent weeks, one of the many faces that had blurred together during her careful cataloguing of guard patterns back in the laundry cellar days. She stood beside Ronan through the service anyway, feeling the particular weight of a death that had happened, in some indirect but undeniable way, because Marcus Vale wanted her dead badly enough to send silver into a fortress full of strangers who owed her nothing beyond duty."You didn't kill him," Ronan said quietly, reading the guilt plainly enough on her face once the small gathering had dispersed and only the two of them remained beside the fresh grave. "Whateve

Elena woke before dawn with her stomach in open rebellion, and for one disoriented moment lay perfectly still, cataloguing the sensation with the same careful, clinical precision she'd once applied to guard rotations and correspondence patterns.Nausea. Sharp, sudden, entirely unlike the lingering exhaustion of the fever weeks before. Beneath it, fainter but unmistakable, the bond hummed with a warmth that had shifted overnight into something new — not merely steady now, but layered, as though a second, quieter presence had settled somewhere alongside its usual golden hum."Ronan." She kept her voice low, though the urgency in it clearly carried enough to wake him instantly, gold eyes snapping open with the particular alertness of a man who'd trained himself, over eleven years, never to surface from sleep slowly."What's wrong.""I don't know." She pressed a hand against her stomach, the nausea already beginning to ease as quickly as it had arrive

Word traveled through Blackthorn Keep faster than any of them had anticipated, and by the time the Council session properly adjourned, Silas was already waiting outside the chamber doors with an urgency that needed no explanation."Every servant in this keep will know within the hour," he said, falling into step beside Ronan and Elena as they moved swiftly back toward the study. "Council chambers aren't as sealed as the Elders like to pretend, and half their attendants were listening at the doors before the session even concluded properly.""Renner," Elena said, understanding immediately. "If he learns the bond's confirmed and my identity's public before we move on him—""He'll run," Silas finished grimly. "Nine years of patient caution won't save him from a fast enough decision to abandon the household post entirely, and a man who's evaded suspicion this long clearly knows how to disappear when the moment demands it.""Then we don't give him the

Corrin left before dawn with four hand-picked scouts, his ribs still faintly bruised from the fall three weeks past but his eyes sharp with the particular focus of a man determined to make up for what he considered an unfinished job.They approached the eastern hills from the north this time, a wider circle than his first reconnaissance had managed, avoiding the same track that had nearly gotten him and Tessan discovered weeks before. The terrain climbed steadily rougher as the morning wore on, pine forest giving way to rocky outcroppings that offered both cover and treacherous footing in equal measure, and it was well past midday before Corrin finally caught sight of smoke rising from the concealed valley where the camp waited.He signaled his scouts to ground, and they spent the remaining daylight hours working their way to a vantage point overlooking the camp from a wooded ridge, close enough to observe clearly, far enough to remain hidden among the trees.