All Chapters of The Alpha Triplets’ Rejected Omega: Violet Blood Reign: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Ava's POVI woke up with a plan.The plan was simple, clean, and entirely survivable: pretend nothing happened, be extremely busy, and under no circumstances allow my face to do anything interesting in the vicinity of Ryker or anyone who knew Ryker or anyone who had ever been in the same building as Ryker.I sat up, assessed the plan, decided it was excellent, and got dressed with the focused efficiency of someone who had somewhere very important to be and absolutely no feelings about anything.Leta was in the corridor when I came out, carrying a stack of fresh linens and looking at me with the specific expression she used when she had noticed something and was deciding whether to say it out loud."Morning," she said."Morning," I said, and kept walking.She fell into step beside me, which I had not invited but also did not have the energy to address at seven in the morning with the bond doing something new and inconvenient in my chest, lower and warmer than it had been before, like s

Zephyr's POVI had been cataloguing her routine for eleven days.Not for the mission, that was the part that would have concerned the Sylvan soul if I had let it examine the distinction too closely, so I didn't, I just kept the information in the part of my mind that belonged to me and not to it and used it the way I had decided to use it, which was to be where she needed someone to be before she had to ask.She never asked for anything, that was the pattern I had noticed first, she worked around her needs instead of toward them, rerouting and adjusting and managing alone until managing alone wasn't possible anymore and even then she found a third option rather than asking, and the specific shape of that pattern was familiar to me in a way I didn't examine directly because examining it directly would have required me to look at things about my own situation that the Sylvan soul would have used against me.The courtyard off the servants' wing was small and mostly forgotten, a square of

Ava's POVThe formal dinner started at seven and by seven thirty I already knew it was going to be a long night.The main hall was full, forty people at the table and another twenty moving around them, servers and staff and the specific organized chaos of a large formal service where everything had to happen in the right order at the right time and any deviation created a ripple that the head maid would feel personally and trace back to its source with alarming efficiency.I kept my head down and my tray level and worked.The council representatives had returned, which nobody had explained to me and which I had simply accepted as another entry in the long list of things happening in this palace that I wasn't fully briefed on, and they occupied the honored seats near the head of the table with the settled authority of people who believed they belonged wherever they chose to sit.Max had appeared near the kitchen entrance at seven fifteen, which was not his station and not his role in t

Cax's POVThe first minute after Ryder said her name was the one where nobody moved and the candles were the loudest thing in the room and I was counting my own heartbeat without meaning to, measuring the space between each one the way you measured distance when you needed to know how fast you could cover it.Ava had gone still beside me, and I had felt enough of her through the bond over the past weeks to know the difference between her versions of still, the frightened one and the controlled one and the one she used when she was performing calm for other people's benefit, and this wasn't any of those, this was something quieter and more specific, the stillness of someone who had already been through the worst thing and was standing very carefully to see if it was coming again.That particular stillness was the one I found hardest to look at directly.Ryker was to my left, three feet back, and I could feel his presence the way I always could, the specific weight of him in a room when

Max's POVThe monitoring position was a storage room on the upper level of the east wing with a ventilation grille that looked directly down into the dining hall at an angle the original architects had almost certainly not intended to create but had anyway, and I had identified it on day six and furnished it with a small stool and a notebook and had been using it intermittently ever since.Tonight I was using it continuously.Pell was beside me, which was tight in the small space but manageable, and we had been watching the room below since the fifth course, since I had felt the shift in the air that came through the grille and had looked down and seen Ava's hand tighten on the tray."Elara's compound worked faster than she predicted," Pell said quietly."Yes." I watched Cax move across the room in three seconds and reach Ava before anyone else registered she had stumbled, and I filed the speed of it away, the specific quality of a man who had been tracking someone's location in a roo