Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 11 - Chapitre 20

KillianThe whiskey stopped tasting like anything somewhere around the second glass.That should probably have concerned me, given it wasn’t yet nine in the morning.It didn’t.I sat behind the desk in my office with the curtains half open and yesterday’s paperwork spread across the surface in front of me. Most of it had nothing to do with Avery — Council correspondence, patrol reports, a trade agreement Dad told me to review three days ago, a complaint from one of the northern packs about territory markers being moved along a disputed border.I read the same paragraph four times and couldn’t have told anybody what it said.Ghost had been quiet since I woke up.I’m not sure when I started checking. Somewhere between lying down at two and giving up before five, probably. I reached for him without deciding to and found the same distant weight that’s been there for wee

KillianBy the time I noticed I was still in yesterday’s shirt, the coffee had gone cold on the desk. I drank it anyway and went back to a report I’d been pretending to read for twenty minutes.The palace had been awake for hours. Messages started coming through before sunrise — a problem on the western boundary, two Council requests I’d already ignored, something from Rowan’s father about the specialists he’d flown in. I read the same paragraph three times and couldn’t have told anybody what it said.Ghost wasn’t helping.He’s been moving since I left the cells, going round and round underneath my ribs in a way that makes it impossible to sit still. Not speaking. Occasionally something that might be a feeling if I could get near enough to it, and then nothing, and then the pacing again.“Enough.”He ignored me.I put the report down and push

Maddox I lasted six days. I’d like that noted somewhere, ideally on something official, because six days of being reasonable is the longest sustained effort I have made at anything in my adult life. Mostly reasonable. There was the thing in Killian’s office, which doesn’t count, because he was being a cunt and I showed extraordinary restraint by not putting his head through the desk. *Agreed.* “Thank you.” *Should have.* “Also thank you.” I’d asked him again that morning whether I could see her. No. I’d asked why. She’s still under investigation. I’d pointed out that visiting somebody and investigating them are not mutually exclusive activities unless the Royal Pack had recently redefined one of those words, and he told me to fuck off. So I did. Technically. I fucked off directly toward the lower cells. There are advantages to being the royal Gamma and most of them come down to two thi

KillianThey burned her at dawn.That was my mother’s decision. I don’t know whether it was for the light or because she wanted it over before the palace filled up, and I never asked her, because by the time it mattered she wasn’t speaking to me in sentences longer than four words.The eastern courtyard is where we do this. It’s the oldest part of the estate, older than the wing beside it, and the boundary stones are cut with the same faded moon marks that turn up everywhere here — over doorways, on the crest behind my father’s chair, beside a bedroom window on the second floor that I had no business thinking about.Three pyres. Two for the warriors. One for her.Hers was in the middle.I got there before anybody. There is a thing that happens to a body when it hasn’t slept properly in a week, where standing becomes something you have to keep deciding to do, and I stood in tha

HadleyI had about four minutes to get ready and I spent all of them working out how much trouble I was in.That’s what I did with it. A healer told me the Alpha and Luna of a pack I have never heard of were on their way to see me, and I lay in that bed with an open door eight feet away and started building the room I was about to be in.An Alpha. Coming to see me personally, on the ninth day, with an escort probably, because that’s what Alphas travel with.They will have been told something.That’s the part I couldn’t get past.I don’t know how I got into this building. That is a genuinely stupid sentence and I have had all morning with it. I went into a stone room in the royal palace and I have come out of it somewhere with yellow curtains and a healer called Isla, and the entire journey between those two things is a blank of exactly the same shape as every other blank I have got.