Todos los capítulos de THE LYCAN PRINCESS THEY BURIED : Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

Theron’s POVTwo days into my visit, I’d begun noticing a pattern I couldn’t quite dismiss, no matter how many reasonable explanations I offered myself for it.Elira avoided every gathering that didn’t strictly require her attendance. When she couldn’t avoid one entirely, she positioned herself at its furthest edge, spoke only when directly addressed, and left at the earliest respectable moment. I watched her do this at breakfast, at the afternoon reception held for a visiting delegation from a neighboring territory, and again at a small musical evening Selene organized in the main parlor, where Elira sat near the door for exactly as long as courtesy demanded before slipping out during the second piece.I found myself tracking it almost against my own will — the particular economy of her movements, the way she seemed to calculate the minimum acceptable presence required by any given occasion and then extract herself the moment that threshold was met. It wasn’t rudeness, exactly. There

Kael’s POVI spent the better part of two days telling myself the date meant nothing, and the better part of two nights failing to fully believe it.It wasn’t the kind of suspicion I could simply set aside and return to when convenient. It sat with me through council meetings with Ronan’s advisors, through a formal luncheon with the visiting delegation, through every polite, meaningless exchange the King’s schedule required of me — a low, persistent hum beneath the surface of everything else I was meant to be attending to. I found myself half-listening during a lengthy discussion of grain tariffs, my attention drifting toward a single sheet of paper sitting in a drawer two floors above the room where the discussion was taking place, as though I could feel its presence through the walls.So on the third day, I did what careful instinct had always told me to do when a suspicion refused to quiet itself: I stopped waiting for it to resolve on its own, and went looking for the proof that w

Elira’s POVThe pendant never turned up.Ronan had the staff search the entire east wing twice over, and by the second morning, the household had largely settled into the quiet, unspoken assumption that it never would — misplaced, most likely, lost somewhere in the ordinary chaos of a house still adjusting to a King’s extended visit, though no one said as much directly in front of Selene, whose grief over it remained carefully, visibly present at every meal. I’d offered twice more to help cover its replacement, and twice more Ronan had waved the offer away, distracted, already moving on to whatever next crisis the day required of him.I didn’t think about it as much as I probably should have. There were only so many places my mind could hold at once, and most of mine had settled, in the days since, into a kind of careful numbness I’d learned to recognize as its own form of self-preservation — the same skill that had gotten me through two years of grey stone walls, repurposed now for a

Ronan’s POVI didn’t sleep that night, not properly. I lay awake long after the candles had burned low, turning Elira’s request over in my mind like a stone I couldn’t quite set down, no matter how many angles I tried to view it from.I’d told myself, walking away from our conversation, that this was grief talking. Trauma, dressed up as decisiveness. A woman who’d endured two years of unimaginable hardship, reaching for the first available illusion of control because control was the one thing prison had stripped from her entirely. It was a reasonable explanation. It was, I kept insisting to myself through the small hours of the night, almost certainly the correct one.And yet something about the memory of her voice kept undermining my own certainty. She hadn’t sounded like a woman spiraling. She’d sounded calm. Deliberate. Like someone reciting a decision she’d already fully made peace with, rather than someone testing the edges of an impulsive idea to see if it might hold.I thought

Selene’s POVI told myself, when I first heard about the mate request, that I should be relieved.It was, after all, exactly the kind of resolution I’d quietly hoped for since the moment Elira walked back through that gate looking like a stranger wearing my sister’s face. A tidy solution. She’d find someone, somewhere else, build whatever life she wanted far from here, and the household could finally settle back into the rhythm it had spent two years learning without her in it — a rhythm I’d worked hard to make comfortable, familiar, mine in every way that mattered.I sat with my needlework that afternoon, half-listening to the household’s ordinary chatter drifting through the open window, and waited for the relief to arrive. I pictured it clearly, the way I sometimes pictured things to make them feel more certain: Elira gone, a new name attached to hers, a new territory far enough away that her presence would only ever reach me as occasional, distant news rather than a daily reminder