LOGINShare
CHAPTER 36
publish date:
2026-05-10 18:08:55
Latest chapter
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 102
SeraphineThe Ridgeline road used to take four days in good weather with a proper column. The three of us made it in three, because Rell rides like she's owed something by the ground and Amara rides like someone who's stopped factoring comfort into the calculation, and I ride however the job needs me to ride, which in this case was fast.I knew the road. That was the whole point of my being there and also the whole difficulty of it. Every waystation we passed I'd built or rebuilt or stripped for parts when Corvus needed the timber elsewhere. Every fork I could tell you which pack had held it, which captain I'd put in place to hold it, what the captain's name was and whether they'd still be alive and whether they'd recognize me and whether recognizing me would make things better or worse."You've gone quiet," Rell said, on the second day."I'm navigating.""You're navigating a road you could ride blind. Try again."I looked at the hills we were passing through, the particular shape of
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 101
RellI gave them one day.One day to be back in the world, to eat Bram's porridge and sit in the yard and look at the sky and do all the things people do when they've been somewhere they weren't supposed to survive and have survived it anyway. One day because I'm not a monster and because they'd earned it and because Seraphine told me, with the flat certainty she uses when she means it, that if I walked in there with my list before they'd had a morning she would personally put me through the wall.I gave them the day.On the second morning I called the meeting."Barath first," I said, when we were all seated... the three of them, Wren on the end with the cord in her fist as always, Sela beside Bram, Seraphine across from me, Corin in the corner with his journal. "He gave us thirty days. We're on day twenty-three. He's been south of the river every evening, counting.""He said thirty days thinking we'd fail," Amara said. She looked different in the morning light. All white hair and ste
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 100
AldricThe first thing I did in the morning was stand outside and watch the sun come up.That sounds simple. It wasn't. I'd forgotten, somewhere in the months of dark, how much light there actually is in morning, how the sky doesn't just get bright but gets color, the particular gray-pink of the east before the sun clears the hills. I stood in the yard of Greywater and watched it happen and my eyes kept doing something involuntary, some adjustment they make for darkness that they didn't need to make anymore and hadn't been told yet.Amara found me there. She'd been awake before I had, which isn't unusual, but she'd been sitting in the keeper-house with Wren for hours, just sitting, not talking much, and when she came out into the yard her face had the look of someone who'd put something down that she'd been carrying for a long time and was only now working out what to do with the hands.She stood beside me. We watched the sky do its colors."I keep reaching for the bond," she said. "T
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 99
SelaI was on the wall when the grave's warmth spread.Bram had put me on the wall specifically because I'm the best set of eyes in Greywater for anything that isn't a fight, and because Barath's thirty-seven were still a smudge on the southern horizon some evenings, and because watching a horizon was something I could do on a bad leg without embarrassing myself.I wasn't watching the south when it happened. I was watching the north, the dead ground.Not all at once. From the center out, a slow pulse of green, the way you drop something into still water and the rings go outward, except this was warmth instead of water and the dead ground instead of a pond, and at the center of it, where the warm stone sat, where Orsel had been holding for an age and Amara and Aldric and Zane had been holding for months...something changed.The frost line retreated. A foot, ten feet, a hundred, the white pulling back from the green the way a tide goes out, and the dead ground underneath wasn't dead an
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 98
WrenI felt the answer come up the rope before Amara sent it in words, because the rope had been warm for months but it had never felt like this... like three things breathing out at once, the held breath of everyone in there finally, finally releasing.I had the cord in both hands and I was already on my knees on the keeper-house floor without deciding to be.Corin was beside me. He'd been there for days, barely sleeping, the cipher journal open and the lamp lit and his gray hand flat on the table where he could always see it, which is how he keeps himself honest about what the work costs. When he felt the change in me he looked up and I couldn't speak yet so I just nodded.His eyes went to water. Just briefly. Then he pressed them dry with the heel of his palm and turned to the journal and said, "Tell me what I need to write down."That's Corin. That's the whole of him, in one sentence."It said yes," I managed. "It said it would like to try."He wrote it down. I watched him write i
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 97
AmaraWren sent the offer down the rope... warm first, then the shape of it, then the words. I've learned to wait for all three before I try to answer, because the words without the shape are just language, and language in here doesn't carry the way it does in the warm world.The offer came in three parts, which I recognized because everything true comes in three parts, which is the kind of thing you start to believe after enough time in the dark with nothing to do but notice patterns.First: release. The three of us, out of the door, into the warm world, whole, whatever whole means after this long in here.Second: the old want, bounded. Not caged the way we cage it now, against our hands, against our will... but held in a covenant it would choose to keep.Third: being known. Genuine, ongoing, renewed. The keeper-line forever, or as close to forever as humans can mean it, witnessing, speaking, hearing. The thing it had spent a thousand years taking the wrong shape of, finally offered
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 3
Amara For a moment nobody moved, and the only sound in the house was the fire I'd built hours ago, ticking down to ash in the next room. Then the first one laughed... short, pleased... and pulled out the stool across from me and dropped onto it like he'd been waiting all night for me to ask. "
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 2
Amara I was off the bed and against the wall before I'd finished the thought, my bag already in my hand, because three lives had built that into me whether I wanted it or not. I stood in the dark of my room and made myself small and quiet and listened. Footsteps, in my kitchen. Slow ones. Not th
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 1
Amara "His feet are cold," my mother said from the doorway. "Build the fire up." I had my hands in the dishwater, and it had gone cold an hour ago, but I didn't say so. I dried them on my skirt and crossed to the fireplace and knelt on the stone where I had knelt a hundred times before. I coul
Three Lives, Two Mates, One Enemy CHAPTER 31
Amara He came at first light, the way the worst things always come. The boy who didn't sleep gave the warning. He came down off the high rock without a sound and put his hand on Aldric's shoulder, and Aldric was awake and standing before the boy finished the word. "East approach," the boy said. "
You may also like
The Alpha King's Daughter
Jane Doe769.2K viewsMated To Big Brother-in-law
AlisTae933.7K viewsAlpha Dante
Crystal L542.1K viewsAlpha's Claimed Mate
~S.Y684.4K viewsALPHA SIGNED MY DIVORCE BY MISTAKE
Adunolapen 136 viewsTHE PROXY LUNA
Momo130 viewsMy Sister Stole My Husband, Now Two Alpha Wants Me
Author K.45 viewsRejected For My Curves. Desired By The War Alpha
Rarejewel152 views
