All Chapters of The Alpha Hearts Tangle: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

The bruise on Thalia Voss's wrist was shaped like Coraline's hand, and she was covering it with a sleeve before anyone at breakfast could ask.Not that anyone would ask. That was the whole point of being nobody at Alpha Academy. You could walk through the dining hall with a mark blooming purple under your cuff and every wolf in the room would look straight through you, the same way they looked through the furniture."You're late," Coraline said without looking up from her plate. She had claimed the best seat at the family table again, back to the window, morning light doing exactly what it was supposed to do to her face. "I needed my notes copied before the first period. Did you copy them?""They're in your bag." Thalia set the tray down across from her, careful, quiet, the way she'd learned to do everything. Three years of practice had taught her that the less space she took up, the less trouble found her.It hadn't worked last night. She flexed her wrist under the table and said not

Magnus moved first, and he moved to shut down a conversation, not to protect his daughter."That's enough," he said, stepping between Thalia and the Headmaster like a wall going up too late to matter. "Whatever theories you're building from an old bedtime story, I won't have them repeated in front of students.""She's not a student anymore the moment that bloodline wakes up in her," the Headmaster said, unmoved. "You know that better than I do, Magnus. You've known it for eighteen years."The room went very quiet. Coraline's hand was still wrapped around Thalia's sleeve, and Thalia could feel her pulse hammering through it, could hear it almost as clearly as her own."Someone explain what the Ember line actually is," Coraline said, "because I grew up in this pack and I've never heard that name in my life."The Headmaster finally looked away from Thalia, long enough to address the room. "The Ember bloodline was the oldest alpha line in existence before the Great Culling. Stronger than

Thalia didn't sleep that night, not because she couldn't, but because she was afraid of what her wolf might do if she let her guard down for even a few hours.The private wing was quieter than the rest of the academy, carved out of the castle's oldest stone, with its own guarded entrance and a window that looked out over the training field where everything had changed. She sat on the edge of an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room that was somehow already more hers than the one she'd shared with three other servant-ranked girls for the past three years, and she turned Silas's words over and over until they wore grooves into her thinking.Someone already knew. Someone had made sure the right people found out fast.A knock came just after midnight, soft, deliberate, the kind of knock that wasn't trying to wake anyone who was actually asleep. Thalia opened the door to find Kieran standing in the corridor, out of his academy uniform, hair damp as he'd just come from running the perimeter

Silas didn't come back that night, and by the time the sun rose over the training field, Thalia had convinced herself something had happened to him too.She found him instead at breakfast, hollow-eyed, a stack of brittle, water-stained pages balanced carefully beside his tray like he was afraid breathing too hard near them would turn them to dust. Kieran sat across from her, his bandaged forearm half hidden under his sleeve, and Coraline, for the first time in three years, sat down next to Thalia instead of across from her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched."You look like you slept in the archive," Kieran said."I did," Silas said. "Seemed safer than my own bed, given recent events." He slid the pages across the table, carefully, like they were something that might bite. "I found partial Ember line records. Most of it was burned during the Culling, as the Headmaster said, but someone preserved fragments, tucked away behind a restricted shelf that shouldn't have had any