All Chapters of In Love With My Dad's Best Friend : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

KaelWe hit the keep at full stretch, still carrying orchard dust from a different wound than the one waiting inside.Seraphina took Liana straight toward a sealed workroom for the counter-mark staging. Elias refused a litter and walked the last stairs on pride and bad blood. I went to the steward hall because Adrian’s advance note had one line that mattered more than greeting:Pipeline has a name.Harren was already in the antechamber, polished for inquiry. Corvin’s envoy stood with him like a second clean hand over a dirty ledger. Between them sat a bound clerk I did not expect to see alive: Pell’s old rotation partner, mouth split, eyes darting.Adrian met me at the rail. “Not Pell. Higher. The clove oil orders and the petition copy-run both cleared through Steward-Principal Meren Voss, Corvin household placement inside our stewardy for nine years. He countersigned second-key rotations. He authorized night access on the vault illness list. He also sealed the first stack of separati

LianaThe hall was already full when we entered.Not soldiers only, border seats, stewards, petitioners, the kind of crowd that made air feel thinner. Harren stood near the threshold stones as if he owned the mortar. Corvin’s envoy had a clean mouth and dirty timing. Father took a place on the side with his wounded body held rigid, operational and unsmiling.Kael’s presence at my shoulder drew sound down into mutters.Then the trip line under my counter-mark kicked.Not full pull. A hard twitch, as if the hall’s fear had fingers. Gold flared at the edge of my sight. Someone in the front rank stepped back on instinct and that single movement made the whole crowd shift like cattle scenting a storm.“Stay with me,” Kael said under his breath.“I am.”Harren lifted his voice. “The dual-wolf enters under unstable blood marks while our captains wait on delayed seals. This is not a partnership. This is a risk in human shape.”The word *risk* hit the trip line like a hammer.Power shoved side

LianaThe trees I grew up under were breathing wrong.Pale vapor hung low between the trunks, thin enough to invite a charge, thick enough in the hollows to punish one. Signal fire chewed the south fence. Figures moved through the rows, not a full army, a surgical wedge. Doctrine shapes. Local guides bought it cheap. A force built to break a family point while the border burned elsewhere.Father hit the ground before his horse fully stopped. “Clear the hollow first. Do not push the green fog.”Seraphina was already cracking counter-sachets along the path, hands fast. “Trip line?”“Quiet,” I said. Almost true. The counter-mark was held. My second form watched the vapor like a dog watching a door.Kael cut the yard into orders. No speeches. Steel and intervals. He did not look at the porch where he used to leave his cloak in another life. He looked at angles of death.We went in.---KaelWe held the first row.Ugly, workable holding: archers in the loft, blades in the trees, vapor avoi

LianaWe did not wait for morning.Adrian took the charter maps. Kael took the names. Seraphina pulled the first illness-access lists from sealed storage because the limp woman’s parting line was not decoration. Father stayed under a double screen with guards who answered to Seraphina first.The earliest pages should have been ink and boredom.They were not.Seraphina’s finger stopped on the first three approvals. “Before Voss. Different hand. Cleaner.”Kael leaned in. The bond carried the hit before he spoke.“Harren.”Not a clerk. A board mouth with closed-session habits.“Harren signed the first doors doctrine walked through,” Seraphina said. “Voss was the branch. Not the root.”Adrian blocked the urge to accuse in an open hall with nothing but handwriting. “We need a live link to Venn’s capture line or he calls it smear.”Liana’s eyes were gold-rimmed for half a second, then forced clean. “Venn first. Harren runs if he feels the wall move.”We rode a short strike out through the

LianaCalder woke at dusk and died before full darkness.Not from Seraphina’s dose. From a hair-thin needle in his water. The carrier bit a poison tooth when Adrian cornered him, foam, no speech, one last twitch toward the wall.Seraphina sealed the cup with hard gloves. “They’re cutting their own tongues out. The next stage doesn’t need them alive.”Kael stood over the body in a silence that made the guards look elsewhere. His house. His soft titles. Used for years.Father, forced into a corridor chair, spoke first. “How deep?”“Deep enough that death is cheaper than answers,” Adrian said. “And timed to the fires.”The boundary markers still burned in sequence. Three. Disputed stone.Summoning code.---KaelNo board.Only the people who still moved when they kept lying: Adrian, Seraphina, Liana, Elias by stubborn blood, two strike captains who had not withheld levies.“Calder named the pattern,” I said. “Harren used it. Voss sold copies. The limp woman bought outcomes. The older hand