Lahat ng Kabanata ng CURSED TO THE TRIPLET ALPHAS : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

"You raised my rent again and you didn't even give me a reason."Sloane stood at the counter with her arms crossed, staring down her landlord like she wasn't half his size. He hated when she did that. Good, let him hate it."Market rates," he muttered, not looking up from his clipboard. "Everything is going up.""Everything isn't going up by two hundred dollars.""Take it or leave it, Miss Calloway."She almost laughed. Take it or leave it, as if she had somewhere else to go or anyone was lining up to help her figure out rent, or bills, or anything else that came with being twenty years old and completely on her own. She'd stopped waiting for backup a long time ago. Nobody was coming, and that was fine. She'd learned to fight her own fights."Fine," she said. "I'll take it. But you're fixing the heater this time."He grunted something that wasn't quite a yes and walked off toward the back office, leaving her standing there with her jaw tight and her hands curled into fists at her side

"Just keep walking. Don't look back."Sloane muttered it to herself like a spell, arms wrapped tight around her middle, sneakers slapping fast against wet pavement. She had no plan, no coat and nothing but the cold night air with a mark still burning faint under her collar, and somehow that felt safer than being anywhere near those brothers and their impossible words.The street behind her apartment was quiet this late, too quiet. She noticed it too late, the way the usual hum of traffic had thinned out, the way her own footsteps sounded too loud against the silence.A shape moved out of the alley to her left.She didn't even have time to scream. A hand clamped over her mouth, an arm hooked around her waist, and she was yanked sideways into the dark so fast her vision blurred. Panic exploded through her chest, sharper than anything the mark had done to her all day. She kicked, clawed at the arm locked around her, but whoever had her was strong, inhumanly strong, dragging her deeper in

"I heard you say curse. Don't you dare tell me I didn't."Sloane stepped into the doorway before either of them could stop her, arms crossed, chin lifted despite the way her whole body still shook from the word she'd overheard. Griffin froze mid sentence. Cassian's expression shuttered instantly, careful and unreadable."Sloane," Griffin started."No." She cut him off, voice sharper than she felt inside. "I have spent an entire day getting fed pieces of a story nobody wants to finish. I almost got dragged off a street tonight. I am standing in a house full of people who look at me like I'm something dangerous. I think I have earned more than half a sentence overheard through a door."Cassian and Griffin exchanged a look, some silent negotiation passing between them that ended with Griffin exhaling and gesturing her further into the room."Sit down," he said. "We'll tell you what we can."She didn't sit. She stood in the middle of the room with her arms still crossed, daring either of

"Absolutely not.”Griffin didn’t even look up from the map spread across the table, like the conversation was already over before Sloane finished making her request.“That wasn’t a question,” she said. “I’m going in there.”“You are not.”“He looked at me like he knew exactly who I was, Griffin. He said everyone would know soon enough. That means something, and I want to hear what he says when someone asks him directly instead of getting the version you decide to tell me after.”Griffin finally lifted his head, jaw tight, eyes doing that thing where they went flat and unreadable, the alpha mask sliding into place. “It’s not safe. He’s dangerous, and cornered men say worse things than the truth just to unsettle whoever’s in the room.”“Then let him unsettle me. I’ve had a rough week.”Somewhere behind her, Dax made a sound that might have been a laugh if the room weren’t so tense. Cassian didn’t laugh. He watched her with the same calculating focus he always did, like he was already th

Cassian didn’t sleep that night. Sloane knew because she woke twice, disoriented in the unfamiliar dark, and both times found him at the small desk in the corner, surrounded by books that looked older than the house itself, a lantern burning low beside him.By morning the desk had disappeared under paper.“You look like you didn’t rest at all,” she said, sitting up slowly, the ache from the mark’s triple flare still humming faint under her collarbone like an aftershock that hadn’t fully settled.“I didn’t.” He didn’t look up from the page in front of him, eyes tracking fast down lines of handwriting too cramped and old to be modern. “I couldn’t. Not after what happened.”“Found anything?”He was quiet long enough that she pushed the blanket back and crossed the room to look over his shoulder. The book was old, the pages brittle and yellowed, filled with a language she half recognized as some older version of the pack’s records, names and dates stretching back further than she could ea