The Lost Heir Of Two Kingdoms 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 4

Evelyn POV I ran barefoot through my family's garden with three men behind me, and not one person in that house had raised a hand to stop them. Rose thorns tore at my ankles. The wet grass slid under my feet. Somewhere behind me, a man shouted my name like I was a dog that had slipped its leash. "Evelyn Ashford! Stop!" Not a chance. I had been adopted at six weeks old. Raised in a mansion, fed at the same table, and reminded every single day that I should be grateful. And the one time my family finally moved fast, the one time they didn't hesitate, was to hand me over like a package. Twenty-four hours earlier, I still believed I just had a bad family. I didn't know I had a price. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS EARLIER "Evelyn. Stop standing there like a statue and refill their cups." "Yes, Mom." I lowered my eyes and obeyed. I'd been doing it since I was nine. The living room was full of laughter that didn't belong to me. My adoptive father, Richard Ashford, sat at the head

Lucien's POV I had been standing at the foot of her bed for the better part of an hour, listening to the slow, careful rhythm of her heartbeat and telling myself that I was only waiting for Aldous to finish his examination, when that rhythm stuttered, just once, and I understood with a cold, sinking certainty that Evelyn Ashford had been awake far longer than she wanted me to believe. I did not turn my head. Four hundred years of surviving courts full of smiling liars had taught me never to show an enemy that I had noticed the knife. But she was not an enemy, and that was precisely the problem. "The emblem is the same, sire," Aldous was saying, his thin fingers still folded around the strap of his bag. "The crescent and the three curved lines. It is the mark from the sealed archive, the one nobody has been permitted to read in two hundred years. I would stake my license on it." "And the pendant?" "Suppressing her. Every reading I take from her blood is muffled, as though it