All Chapters of In Love With My Dad's Best Friend : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

LianaThe petition did not wait for dawn.Copies hit three doors before the horn smoke cleared: Kael’s, Elias’s, and the steward hall where gossip became law. Separation of the dual-wolf asset from the Alpha King’s direct command. Clean language for a dirty aim.Strip Kael of me. Strip me of the seat. Call it neutral judgment.I was still in the east yard when Seraphina found us, hair unbound, eyes hard, a cloth-wrapped board under her arm like a weapon.“You can fight Corvin on paper until your ink dies,” she said. “Or you can look at what I pulled from the sealed Veyne pages your mother left in my care for ‘after first blood.’ After the stairs, this counts.”Kael’s voice was rough. “Say it in the war room.”“No,” Seraphina said. “Say it now, with fewer mouths. This fragment will scare the wrong men into worse choices.”Elias did not pick up his case. He followed because fear of knowledge had never stopped him needing it.---KaelSeraphina laid the board on the yard stone under

LianaThe second bell should have been Corvin’s stage.Kael made it a dock.House Corvin’s envoy entered with soft hands and hard ink, petition copies ready, mouth shaped for concern. Then he saw Pell in chains, the clove-stained pouch, and the sun-wheel wax drip under glass.The soft hands slowed.“This is a review of command neutrality,” the envoy said. “Not a criminal theater.”“It is both,” Kael answered. “Your courier routes moved payment for scheduled theft. Your petition landed on the same night dual-wolf pages were stolen. Speak carefully.”The chamber shifted. Men who had wanted me removed from Kael’s side suddenly wanted distance from Corvin paper.Harren did not rise this time. He watched. Calculating.The envoy tried one clean cut. “Circumstance is not proof.”Elias laughed once, ugly and short. “My daughter’s blood on the stairs is also circumstance. Sit with it.”They did not hang Corvin in that hour. Lords that old never fell in one bell. But the petition lost air. Two

LianaThey gave me an hour in the infirmary before they started arguing over what my power meant.I used forty minutes of it throwing up solvent aftertaste and shaking through after-surge. The other twenty I spent with Kael’s hand clenched around the bedframe like if he touched me he would not stop at comfort.“You held the second form,” he said.“I know.”“You could have torn the passage open.”“I know that too.” My voice came out scraped. “Stop looking at me like I am a miracle and a bomb in the same breath. It makes me want to kiss you and hit you.”His eyes flashed. “Do both. Just stay alive while you do it.”Elias sat three beds away with his shoulder stitched, pretending not to listen, failing. Every time Kael leaned closer, Father’s jaw flexed like he was chewing glass.Seraphina saved us from the next ugly sentence by slamming a cloth board onto the side table.“No speeches,” she said. “The scrap from the extractor’s route stitch referenced a sealed Veyne page-set: “for Kael,

LianaWe took the broken letter into a locked room and shut the door on the whole keep.No captains. No petitions. Just Father, Kael, Seraphina, and the page that had rearranged my life in ink older than my anger.I spread it on the table and read every remaining line out loud, raw-voiced, so no one could protect me with silence.Mother had suspected the bond before I was born. She had bound Kael anyway. Distance was a cage until my dual nature either killed me or demanded an anchor. If I lived long enough to force the letter open, Kael was not allowed to lie that he only loved me as duty.The torn edge sat under my fingers like a missing tooth.“What did the end say?” I asked Seraphina.“I can only mark probabilities,” she said. “Anchor conditions. Timing. Maybe a second-bloodline warning. Maybe a rite. That is why they took it.”Father stood with his back against the wall, wounded shoulder rigid, eyes burning. “She used my friendship as housing for fate.”Kael did not deny it.

LianaThey did not need the whole letter.They only needed the ugliest line.By the time Kael and I reached the antechamber, I bound you anyway was already in mouths that had never cared about my mother as a person. Corvin’s envoy read it like scripture. Harren stood beside him with a face full of false concern. Captains watched me for heat in my cheeks, for disordered hair, for any proof that the Alpha King’s forbidden claim had become flesh.My body still ached from Kael in the map room. That ache now had an audience.“This council requires clarity,” the envoy said. “Was the dual-wolf’s place at the war table born of strategy… or of a dead woman’s private arrangement with our king?”Elias was already there. Shoulder bandaged. Face white with a new kind of rage. When his eyes met mine, he flinched, not from politics. From what he could smell and guess.I did not look away.Kael stepped forward. “The letter is incomplete and stolen in part by enemies. Using one line as law is conve