All Chapters of The Alpha’s Stolen Mate: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The first morning, a guard kicked her awake before dawn. "Kitchen duty. Now." Brynn stood up. Her cheek still throbbed from Rodrick's backhand. The corner she'd slept in was as cold as she remembered. She wrapped her arms around herself and followed the guard out. The kitchen was already chaos. Pots boiling. Cooks shouting. The smell of yesterday's grease still hanging in the air. Like she'd never left. She found her old station. Started scrubbing. It came back too fast. The rhythm of being invisible. The way she'd lowered her shoulders and dropped her eyes for ten years before she'd ever known what it was to lift them. Her body remembered all of it. She hated how easy it was. The head cook saw her and frowned. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. His look said it for him. “You came back. You're an idiot.” She kept scrubbing. Through the bond, she could feel Torrhen. Miles north. Awake too. Furious. He'd been awake the whole night by the feel of it. She sent him w

Forty scratches on the wall beside her corner. Brynn ran her thumb down the rows of them in the dark before she slept, the way some wolves counted prayers. Three hundred twenty-five days to go. The number used to feel impossible. Now it just felt like weather. Something to be endured one day at a time until it passed. She was losing weight. She could feel it. Her clothes hung loose. Her ribs were starting to show. The food rations had been cut. Rodrick's orders. Servants got one meal a day now. Barely enough to survive. She was always hungry. Always tired. Always hurting. But she kept moving. Kept working. Kept training in secret with Mira. Because stopping meant giving up. And she wasn't ready to do that yet. Tonight, she was hauling water from the well. The bucket was heavy. Her arms shook. She made it halfway to the kitchens before her grip failed. The bucket fell. Water splashed everywhere. "Clumsy." She turned. Gareth. One of Rodrick's newer enforcers. Young. Cruel. Eag

The week after the message reached Ashford, Brynn began to feel herself going thin. That was the only word she had for it. Not weak, exactly. Not broken. Thin. Like she was wearing her own life lighter than she used to, like a wolf could see through her now if they looked at the right angle. Days passed and she did not feel them landing. She did the work. She ate when she could. She lay down in her corner at night. And somewhere underneath all of it, the wolf who had once felt all of it was getting quieter. She was stronger than the woman who'd been dragged through the gate. That was the small fact she did not let herself say out loud, even to Mira, even to the bond. Saying it would make it true in a way that would make Rodrick notice. So she said it only in her head, every morning, as she stood up off the cold stone and made her body move. I am stronger than I was. He is not breaking me. He is making me. The work that morning was the laundry. Brynn hauled the heavy baskets from t

One hundred scratches on the wall. Brynn pressed her palm flat against them in the dark. A hundred days. She'd carved a deeper line on the hundredth, a small private milestone, and the stone there was pale where she'd worried it smooth. Two hundred sixty-five days to go. More than a third of the way. She should have felt proud. Instead she felt the way a swimmer feels at the middle of a wide cold lake. Too far from either shore to stop. She was stronger now. The infection had passed. Her back was healing. She could move without gasping. And she was angry. Not the helpless anger she'd felt for ten years. Something sharper. More focused. She'd nearly died. And for what? For stealing bread. For existing. She was done accepting that as normal. Tonight, she was in the servants' quarters with Mira and five others. Training. They'd been meeting secretly for three weeks now. Learning the basics Torrhen had taught her. How to stand. How to strike. How to survive. "Again," Bry

One hundred forty-five scratches on the wall. Brynn had stopped thinking of the count as days left and started thinking of it as ground gained. Two hundred twenty days to go. She'd survived a hundred and forty-five. She told herself the second half always felt shorter than the first. Another useful lie. She'd collected a lot of those. Brynn met with Lena in the storage room. Late. After everyone else was asleep. "You said you had a plan." Lena nodded. "The supply run. It happens once a month. Six servants. Two guards. They go to neutral territory to buy provisions." "I know. I sent a message that way once." "So you know the route. The timing. The weak points." "What are you suggesting?" "We go on the next run. And we don't come back." Brynn stared at her. "That's insane. The guards will stop us." "Not if we're smart about it. The guards get drunk in neutral territory. Every time. While they're distracted, we slip away." "And go where?" "Anywhere. North. East. Somewhere Rod