All Chapters of The Wolfless Bride No One Wanted, Except the Alpha: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

NIARI couldn't sit still in Lady Aquine's tower, not with Elira sitting in some cell beneath the estate while I recovered in a warm chair by a fire I hadn't earned the comfort of."You need rest," Lady Aquine told me, not unkindly, when she found me pacing the small room for the third time that hour."I need to do something," I said. "She came back for me. Twice. I'm not sitting here doing nothing while they build a case to hang her with."Lady Aquine studied me for a long moment, and something in her face softened. "What did you have in mind?""The other candidates," I said. "Some of them have watched Elira closely these past weeks. Not the noble ones, not Tanya's crowd, but some of the others, the ones nobody pays attention to. I think some of them would speak up, if they thought it would actually matter."I left before Lady Aquine could tell me to rest again, my wrists still wrapped in bandages, my legs still unsteady beneath me, and I went looking for anyone who might listen.I f

RURIKThe first thing I noticed was the silence.I woke before sunrise, staring at the ceiling while the room remained dark and cold around me.For a few seconds, I didn't remember what was wrong.Then I reached for the bond.Nothing.My chest tightened.I tried again.Still nothing.“Elira?”The name barely left my throat.I waited.There should have been something. A small warmth somewhere at the edge of my mind. A sense that she was awake. A feeling that she was frightened, angry, or simply thinking about me.Anything.But there was only silence.I closed my eyes and reached deeper.Pain shot through my head.I stopped breathing for a moment.The bond had never felt like this before.Even when Elira was far away, I could still feel her. Sometimes it was faint. Sometimes it was nothing more than a small pressure behind my ribs.But I knew she was there.Now I couldn't find her at all.It felt like someone had taken a knife and cut through the one thing keeping me connected to the wo

ELIRAThey brought me up from the cell on the third morning, my wrists bound in front of me with rope that cut into skin already raw from the cuffs I'd worn too recently. Two enforcers walked on either side of me, and neither one spoke a single word the whole way up through the winding stone stairs toward the Council chamber.The chamber looked different than it had the last time I'd stood inside it. More formal somehow. Rows of benches had been added along the back wall, filled now with watching faces, servants and household staff who had never before been permitted to witness a Council proceeding. Laron wanted an audience. I understood that the moment I saw the crowd.He wanted everyone in this house to see exactly what happened to people who dug too deep.The enforcers walked me to a small wooden chair positioned at the center of the chamber floor, facing the raised dais where the elders sat. I lowered myself into it because I had no other choice, my bound hands resting awkwardly i

ELIRAThe chamber erupted into overlapping conversation almost immediately, elders leaning toward one another, whispering fast and urgent, and I watched the careful, confident expression Laron had worn since the trial began finally start to crack beneath the sheer weight of it."Silence," Elder Wren called out, rising fully to her feet, her voice cutting hard through the noise. "This Council will hear this properly, or we will hear nothing at all today."The room settled, slowly, reluctantly, the murmurs dying down to a tense, waiting hush."I want to see this ledger," said an elder I didn't recognize, an older man seated near the far end of the dais, his voice gruff with impatience. "Not described to me secondhand. Shown. If payments from Ironfang truly exist in writing somewhere, produce the actual document and let us examine it ourselves.""The ledger has remained hidden for its own protection," Lady Aquine said, standing firm beside me. "Given everything that has already happened

LADY AQUINEI watched the chamber descend further into chaos, elders shouting over one another now, Brennick's composure fully shattered, Laron's expression shifting rapidly between fury and cold calculation as he realized his hidden ally had just exposed himself in front of the entire Council, undone by a single careless sentence.I understood, standing there in the middle of it all, that we had reached the exact moment where evidence alone would never be enough. Too many elders remained too afraid, too uncertain, too willing to let doubt protect a man they'd trusted for six months rather than condemn him outright on testimony and documents they could still, technically, choose not to fully believe if they wanted an excuse.I needed something undeniable. Something that left absolutely no room for doubt, no matter how much fear or loyalty still clouded this room.I thought of the old laws, the ones taught to every Larkspur child from the cradle but rarely invoked in living memory, law