All Chapters of An Heir For The Comatose Alpha: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

ConstanceMy hands were shaking too hard to turn the page carefully, so I forced myself to stop, to breathe, to count the way I had on the examination table. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. I had maybe two minutes left before Julian returned, and I was not going to waste them falling apart over a name I already knew.I made myself look again.*Marcus Hail. Debt Settlement — Blackwood Territory Fund.*Beneath it, a column of figures I didn't fully understand, dates stretching back further than I expected. Not months. Years. The earliest entry was dated nineteen years ago, the ink faded to the color of weak tea, and beside it, in a smaller, more careful hand than the rest of the ledger, someone had written a single word."Approved."Nineteen years ago I would have been a year old. My father's debts, the ones he'd never explained, the ones Ferdinand had asked about with that too-careful lightness in his voice, had started before I could walk. Before I could have done a single

ConstanceNight came the way it always did in the keep, slow and then all at once, torches guttering to life along the corridors while somewhere below the walls the first watch changed with a clatter of boots and armor. I sat by the window in my own quarters, the ones I was technically still assigned even though I spent most of my hours in William's chamber, and watched the dark settle over the courtyard like something with weight to it.Elias's note sat unfolded on my lap. I'd read it so many times the crease had worn soft, the ink starting to smudge where my thumb kept returning to the same line. *Come alone, or I go straight to Ferdinand himself.*I thought about what William had said only hours earlier, pacing this same restless line across his own chamber. "Everything from here forward has to be carefully, or we end up exactly where Priya did." I thought about Ayesha's white knuckles on the doorframe, her voice cracking on a dead girl's name. I thought about the torn page in that

ConstanceI told him everything.I started with the note pressed into my hand at the candidates' meal, the six cruel words that had turned tomorrow's deadline into tonight's, and worked forward from there — the servants' gate, the way Elias had circled me in the dark like he was deciding how much pressure a person could take before they broke. I told him what Elias wanted, not money but access, a way back into a life he'd thrown away the moment he decided Daphne was worth more to him than three years of promises. I told him about the twig snapping in the dark, about Julian stepping out of the shadow like he'd been sent by something other than coincidence.William listened without interrupting, his hand still wrapped carefully around my wrist, thumb tracing slow, absent circles just above the bruise like he could smooth it away by touch alone. When I finally ran out of words, the silence that followed stretched long enough that I started to regret every part of the decision that had le

ConstanceWilliam opened the door before I could reach it, and Julian slipped inside so fast he nearly caught his own sleeve on the frame, pulling the bolt shut behind him with hands that weren't quite steady."You need to listen to me carefully," he said, without preamble, without the careful courtesy he usually wrapped around everything. "They're asking questions."William's whole body went still in that particular way that meant he was already three steps ahead of whatever Julian was about to say. "Who?"Julian hesitated, just long enough that I felt the answer before he gave it."The regent's men."The words landed in the quiet room like a stone dropped down a well, and for a moment none of us moved."About the archive," I said."About the archive," Julian confirmed. "And about you." His eyes found mine, dark with something that looked almost like guilt, though I understood now it was guilt for a debt he hadn't yet paid rather than a betrayal he'd already committed. "Corwin gave t

ConstanceI waited outside Ferdinand's study for what felt like an hour, though it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes, pacing a short line into the stone floor while servants and guards passed without once looking at me directly. Nobody in this keep looked at anything directly if they could help it. I was starting to understand why.When the door finally opened, Julian stepped out alone, and one look at his face told me whatever had happened in that room, he wasn't going to tell me about it standing in a public corridor."Walk with me," he said, quiet, already moving.I fell into step beside him, studying him sideways as we went. He looked the same as he had going in, coat pressed, expression composed, and yet something underneath all of it had shifted, some subtle recalibration in the way he held his shoulders, like a man who'd just been handed a weight he now had to carry without letting anyone see him bend under it."Julian.""Not here," he said.We didn't speak again unti