Todos los capítulos de Bound to Four Alphas : Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

The horn sounds again, closer this time, and the chamber erupts into motion before I can even finish processing what the woman just told me. "Move," Jodan snaps, already pulling me toward the stairs we came down. "Now, April." "Wait, Jax—" "I've got him." Riven is already at the chains, and this time he doesn't bother testing the iron first. He simply tears it from the post with a sound like the earth splitting, hauling Jax up by the arm. Jax staggers, barely able to stand, but he doesn't argue. The woman, my aunt, if that word means anything at all yet, is already retreating into the shadows at the chamber's edge, her cloak swallowing her outline until she's barely more than a shape. "You're leaving," I say, disbelief sharpening my voice. "After everything you just told me." "I have nowhere else to be that keeps either of us alive," she says. "The Council doesn't know I exist. I intend to keep it that way a little longer. Trust the ring, April. Trust nothing else down here."

The healing mark catches the moonlight wrong, too pink at the edges, too new, and once I see it I can't unsee it. "That mark," I say slowly, my voice barely above a whisper. "You said the rebellion branded you decades ago." My aunt's expression doesn't change, but something behind her eyes goes very still, the particular stillness of someone recalculating a plan in real time. "Decades ago," she agrees. "This is a second one. Fresher wounds heal faster when there's urgency behind them." "Convenient," Queen Maerwen says dryly, not moving from where she stands near the shattered window, gold ring still resting in her open palm. "An urgent need to reopen old scars, precisely when your niece happens to be holding the one artifact capable of proving whose blood actually runs the fifth house." "I don't need to prove anything to you," my aunt says, and for the first time her calm cracks, just slightly, just enough that I catch the flash of something underneath. Not fear exactly. Impatie

For a moment, nobody breathes. Selene goes rigid under her mother's hand, every muscle locked, like her body hasn't decided yet whether to lean into the touch or flinch away from it. Fourteen years of absence stand between them, and it shows in the way her shoulders shake, the way her voice comes out smaller than I've ever heard it. I watch her search her mother's face for something, anything, that might still resemble the woman she remembers from a childhood spent trailing after her through royal gardens, and I can tell by the way her expression falters that whatever she's looking for isn't there anymore, if it ever was. "Mother?" "Look at you." The woman's hood falls back, revealing a face that could be Selene's in twenty years, sharp-chinned, pale-haired, eyes the same restless blue. "All grown. I imagined this moment a thousand times, and none of them looked quite like this." "You're supposed to be dead," Selene whispers. "I'm supposed to be a great many things I'm not," the

The word leaves my mouth before I've even decided to say it. "My sister." The girl in the doorway doesn't move, doesn't speak, just stares at me with eyes the exact same shade of gray as mine, as my father's, as the woman who supposedly died bearing only one child, not two. I search her face the way I searched my father's minutes ago, looking for something undeniable, something that would let me believe this without having to ask a single question first. I find it almost immediately. The same slight tilt to her chin when she's bracing herself. The same habit of pressing her lips together instead of letting her mouth shake. "That's not possible," Selene says again, quieter this time. "Apparently," my father says, and there's something in his voice I haven't heard from him yet tonight, something close to shame, "a great many things I allowed to be possible without ever telling April the truth of them." "You knew," I say, turning on him, all the fragile trust I'd started building i

"Expendable." Riven's voice comes out low and lethal. "Say that again. I want to make sure I heard you correctly before I break every bone in the hand you just raised." General Thorne doesn't so much as blink. "Threats are the last resource of people who've already lost the room, wolf. Look around you. My guards outnumber your little coalition three to one, and that's before accounting for the reinforcements currently securing the courtyard outside." She lets the words settle, unhurried, like she's already counted every exit in the chapel and found each of them equally useless to us. "Then why haven't you attacked yet?" Jodan asks, and there's something sharp and calculating in the question, like he's already found the flaw in her confidence and is simply waiting for her to admit it herself. Thorne's mouth curves, not quite a smile. "Because my employer specifically requested that the fifth house's true heir arrive undamaged. The other two," her gaze flicks dismissively toward Wre