All Chapters of In Love With My Dad's Best Friend : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

LianaCalder woke at dusk and died before full darkness.Not from Seraphina’s dose. From a hair-thin needle in his water. The carrier wore a borrowed steward face and bit through a poison tooth when Adrian cornered him in the service cut. Foam. No speech. One last twitch toward the wall, as if pointing still mattered.Seraphina sealed the cup with hard gloves. “They’re cutting their own tongues out. The next stage does not need these men alive.”Kael stood over Calder’s body in a silence that made the guards find other places to look. Through the bond I felt the blow land where pride and duty shared a nerve. His house. His soft titles. His trust rotations. Used for years while he thought the danger lived outside the walls.Father, forced into a corridor chair because he refused the bed, 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 the reported sequence. Three. Steady. Disputed ston

LianaThe drums cut out.That was worse.They came in silence first, hooks, wire teams, men who had practiced on prisoners until quiet felt like skill. Kael’s line met them with shields and teeth. No speeches. No second chances for the first rank.I opened it.Not full. Enough.Gold ripped my vision wide. The nearest wire man hit the slab so hard his spine spoke. The cost punched through my shoulder and hips. I stayed standing because falling was a different kind of invitation.Kael killed the one behind me without looking at me. I felt it through the bond anyway, his rage was clean, useful, close.“Left!” Adrian roared.I went left.---KaelThe gate-line became meat and grit.I stopped counting faces. I counted angles. A solvent flask rose. I put a blade through the wrist that held it. Vapor bled uselessly into stone. Someone screamed in a language my border captains used for drinking songs. Someone else did not scream at all.Liana made a hard decision. Every time her power flare

LianaThe wall hit, and the cut became a throat full of bodies.I lost Kael for three seconds in the crush and felt the bond go sharp with panic that was not mine. Then he was back, blood-slick, shoulders wedged against a shield rim, carving space like a man refusing the idea of a grave.Riven came through the center as if the crush parted for him.Not magic. Training. Men dying on purpose to make him a lane.He did not look at Kael first.He looked at me.“Bridge,” he said. “Step out, or I take the step through your dead.”Father tried to rise from the cart brace and failed. Seraphina shoved him down with a bloodied forearm. “Move and you bleed out. Stay and she still has a father.”Elias’s eyes found mine across the horror and held.Not soft.A demand.Do not become their object.---KaelI met Riven before he reached her.Our blades locked close enough that I smelled the oil on his leather. He was stronger in the clinch than he had any right to be. Second bloodline residue, Ser

LianaDawn did not bring quiet.It brought scavengers and second chances.Riven’s men came at first light in a thin probing wave, not to retake the cut, to reclaim bodies and broken core shards. Kael met them with archers and no patience. The probe broke after six ugly minutes. One enemy captain fell inside our line, still breathing, laughing blood onto his chin.In his fist: a stone plate wired to his belt, warm as skin.Seraphina took it with sealed gloves and went still.“This is not just a command token,” she said. “It’s a memory plate. Second-line work. Older than this war.”Riven’s retreat had not been only survival.He had tried to pull history out of the rocks and failed.---KaelWe held the captain long enough for truth, not theater.Adrian’s knife did the convincing. I asked the questions. Liana stood through all of it, bandaged and grey, refusing a cot like the cot had insulted her.“What does Riven think she is?” I asked.The captain’s eyes flicked to Liana. Fear and reve

LianaWe did not enter the keep like survivors.We entered like a contradiction with blood still drying.Father sat upright in the cart by force of will and spite, color terrible, eyes open for every window we passed. If the keep had declared him dead, he wanted the lie to have to look at him. Kael rode the point with his ribs bound and his crown-authority carried in the set of his shoulders instead of a banner. I rode where people could see my face and the gold that still refused to fully leave my eyes.Containment language had been spoken in our absence.We brought the opposite.At the inner gate, process guards tried to form a polite wall.Kael did not slow. “Open.”“By emergency regency order—”“Open, or be remembered as the men who blocked a living war party with paper.”They opened.---KaelThe central hall was already half full of seats, stewards, and the specific silence of people waiting to see which version of power still had teeth.Harren’s bloc stood under a temporary sea