Chapter 41: Unmarked

The pack saw him at breakfast and the hall nearly stopped breathing.Not because he made an entrance. Caius never made entrances. He came in through the side door the way he always did on the mornings he came at all, crossed the room without ceremony, and sat at the head of the table. He reached for the bread. That was when Danna saw his hands and her cup stopped halfway to her mouth and just stayed there, suspended, while her brain processed what her eyes were sending it.I watched it happen from my seat at the lower table. Clean skin. Both hands. No trace of anything that had lived on them for three years. The curse markings were gone the way a storm was gone after it passed -- not gradually, not in stages, but completely, the sky simply different on the other side of it. His forearms were clear. His collar sat open and the skin of his throat was unmarked. The corner of his eye where the lines had been crawling steadily for months showed nothing at all.I had done that. Last night,

Chapter 42: When This Is Over

He found me in the library at ten that night.I had gone there after the war room meeting -- after Zoran's letter had been read aloud and the implications laid out across the table and everyone said the things that needed saying about strategy and response and next steps. After Caius sat at the head of that table and absorbed it all with the calm clarity of a man who had been handed a future he didn't expect and was already identifying what needed protecting inside it. After Kael left to draft the formal response. After Aldric went to the training room to document the breaking the way he documented everything, methodically, for the record.I took a candle and went to the library because the library was the one place in Ironveil that had always felt like mine without negotiation. I had claimed it by going there every day and no one had stopped me and that made it mine in the only way that mattered.I was sitting cross-legged on the floor between the stacks with the Valdenmere Codex sum

Chapter 43: The Ghost Comes Home

Sable arrived at Ironveil's gate on a Wednesday morning with a horse that looked exhausted and a face that said she had made a decision she wasn't entirely sure about and was committed to it anyway. I was in the courtyard when the gate opened. I had been working through my morning exercises in the cold air -- nothing magical, just the physical discipline Aldric had added to the training regimen two weeks in, the theory being that a Bloodanchor who couldn't manage her own body under stress was a Bloodanchor with an unpredictable access problem. I saw the horse first. Then the rider. Then I saw Kael, who had been crossing the courtyard toward the stables, stop walking completely. He stopped so hard that Pip, three steps behind him carrying a saddle, walked directly into his back. Pip bounced off, stumbled, caught himself, started to apologize, looked at Kael's face, looked at the gate, and went very quiet. The woman who dismounted was lean and brown-skinned, perhaps thirty, with

All Chapters of The Cursed Alpha's Substitute Bride : Chapter 41 - Chapter 43

Chapter 41: Unmarked

Chapter 42: When This Is Over

Chapter 43: The Ghost Comes Home