บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha's Betrayed Mate: Ten Years Behind Bars : บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 9

ELARIS POV The drive took forty minutes, and I spent every one of them with my back pressed against the leather and my fingers curled around the plastic bag, watching the city thin into forest as though the road were peeling me away from everything I knew. Dorian did not try to fill the silence, which I appreciated more than I wanted to admit, and when the trees finally parted to reveal iron gates taller than the prison walls, I felt my pulse kick hard against my throat. Beyond them, at the end of a long drive lined with black pines, stood the Thornevale estate, a sprawl of pale stone and glowing windows that looked less like a home and more like a kingdom someone had forgotten to tell the world about. Men in dark jackets stood at the gates and bowed their heads as the car passed, and I caught my own reflection in the window, a thin woman in a faded gray dress, and thought that I looked like a stain on a very expensive painting.I had barely stepped out onto the gravel when the front

ELARIS POV I woke at 3:17 in the morning with my heart slamming against my ribs and my hand already curled around a weapon that did not exist, ten years in Blackthorn had taught my body that the dark was never empty. The room around me was silent and enormous, the white sheets tangled around my legs and the moon laying a pale square across the carpet, and it took me a long, humiliating minute to understand that the sound that had jolted me awake was only the old house settling, not a boot in a corridor or a key scraping in a lock. I sat on the edge of that obscenely soft bed with my feet pressed to the floor, counting my breaths the way I had taught myself to, and I thought how ridiculous it was that freedom could feel so much like a threat. The bed was too wide, the walls too far away, and the quiet too complete, so I dragged the blanket onto the floor beside the window and lay there staring at the stars until the sky bled from black to gray, which was the only way my body knew ho

ELARIS POV I slept on the floor again that night, curled beneath the window with Kaiven's coat pulled over the blanket, and when I woke at dawn with my neck stiff and my pulse steady for the first time in days, I noticed that no one had knocked, no one had hovered, and no one had tried to coax me back into the bed. Somewhere between midnight and morning the household had rearranged itself around me: the maid who brought my tea left it outside the door with a soft word instead of entering, a brass key to my own room waited on the tray beside the cup, and a note in Yseldra's looping hand explained that nobody in the house would cross my threshold unless I opened the door myself. I held that key in my palm for a long while, feeling its small cold weight, and understood that Kaiven had done exactly what he promised on the bench, which was to hand me control without making me thank him for it.By breakfast I had made my decision, and I laid it on the table between the eggs and the fruit l

ELARIS POV The man with the bureau badge took one more step toward us, and in that single stretched second my body remembered everything Blackthorn had ever taught it: never run first, never look at the weapon, and always put the wall at your back so that the only direction anyone can come from is the front. I pulled Nessa behind me and backed us both against the concrete, keeping my voice low and level as I told the man that the whole depot was covered by cameras and that a woman had already been alerted to exactly where we stood. It was only half a lie, since Kaiven's alert was a silent promise rather than a camera, but the man's smile faltered for the length of a heartbeat, and I felt something strange crawl beneath my skin, a prickling wrongness, like a violin string tuned a hair off true, which seemed to hum louder every time his gaze slid toward Nessa's jacket. I had no name for the sensation and no time to wonder about it, so I filed it away and watched his left hand, which h