All Chapters of BOUGHT BY THE BEAST: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

I told Ana on a Wednesday.We were in the kitchen, our place, the morning before the day arrived and required things from us. She was eating and I was watching the city wake up through the window and holding my tea with both hands because the mornings had been cold lately and warmth wherever available had taken on new significance.I said it without planning to.Just turned from the window and said it."I'm pregnant."Ana put her spoon down.She looked at me with those dark wolf eyes and for one long second, her face was completely still.Then it broke open.Not into sadness, but into something warm and enormous and unguarded... the expression of a person feeling something too large to keep any surface smooth over. Her eyes went bright. Her mouth pressed together and then gave up pressing. She pressed her hand over her mouth instead."Rielle," she said.Just my name.But the weight of it, the whole weight of what it meant to her, the permanence of it, the proof that this was real and l

Ezra did not take it well.I do not mean badly, I mean he stood in the corridor outside the library when Caspian told him and he did not speak for a full twenty seconds.Which for Ezra was approximately the equivalent of sitting on the floor and crying."I need a drink," he said finally.Caspian poured him one and they disappeared into the library for the brothers-only conversation that I was not invited to because it needed its room and I knew it and respected it.I sat on the bench in the corridor outside and did not listen.Through the bond, I felt Caspian. The register of something that had been carefully held for a long time, releasing slowly. I felt it in layers, like ice coming off a river in spring. Not sudden. Patient. The particular release of something that has been frozen long enough to forget it was ever water.An hour passed.I sat on the bench and let it pass. The guards changed at the end of the corridor. A servant moved through with fresh linens and nodded at me and di

The nausea arrived on a Tuesday with complete commitment and zero warning.I made it to the bathroom, which I counted as the one available victory, and spent the next twenty minutes regretting everything I had eaten in the past two days in vivid and specific detail.Caspian was there before I had finished.He did not ask if I was okay. He simply sat on the bathroom floor beside me and held my hair back with his scarred hand and said nothing at all, which was exactly the right response and which I would tell him later.When it passed, I sat back against the cool stone of the tub and breathed very carefully."How long has that been happening?" he asked."Three mornings." I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth. "It passes. This one was the worst.""You didn't tell me.""I didn't want to make it into a crisis.""It's not a crisis." He was looking at me with silver eyes that were very awake for four in the morning. "But you should tell me things.""I tell you everything.""You tell

We left Thorncross on a cold morning ten days later.Not a military procession, that was the point. It was a royal progress meant being seen as a monarch who moved freely through her kingdom, not an army mobilizing to intimidate recalcitrant territories. We rode with thirty warriors, two council members, and enough ceremony to signal authority without weaponizing it.Seraphine had explained the calculation three times. I had understood it the first time. I let her explain it three times because she needed to, because she was using the explanation to manage her own anxiety about sending me toward a problem she felt partly responsible for creating.I did not point that out.I had learned which observations helped and which ones simply cost.The first day's ride was long and quiet and beautiful in the particular way of late autumn country, stripped of color but full of form. Bare trees and silver sky and the particular smell of cold earth that my wolf loved with a directness that bypassed

House Stellan's Lord was a woman.Lady Mira Stellan was forty-five and had inherited the house from her father at twenty-two and had spent the subsequent decades making everyone who had doubted that inheritance regret their doubt personally. She was small and precise and had the particular economy of movement that came from a lifetime of being underestimated and choosing to weaponize it.She reminded me of myself in ways that were not entirely comfortable.She met us at her keep with full ceremony and a smile that was entirely opaque. The perfect hostess. The perfect political operator. Everything presented exactly as it should be, which meant nothing was visible at all.I had been warned about her.Seraphine had said Lady Stellan was the most dangerous of the three precisely because she was the most intelligent. She would not be cultivated the way Varen had been or confused the way Korrath had been. She would be making a calculated decision, and the only way to influence it was to cha