All Chapters of The Alpha's Cursed Bride : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

71 Chapters

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE — WHERE SHE WAS IN THE ROOM

ORIONHe noticed it on the final morning of the summit.Not for the first time if he was honest with himself it had been happening since the first night in the valley but for the first time, he noticed that he was noticing. There was a distinction. The first was something that happened. The second was something you were doing.He was aware of where she was in the room.Not the way he was aware of threats not the wolf's territorial sense, the orientation toward danger. Something else. Something that did not have a name in the part of his vocabulary that he usually used for useful things. He knew, at any given moment, which part of the gathering she was in and approximately who she was speaking to and whether her posture had the specific quality of managed attention she used when a conversation required management.He had not decided to track this. He had simply found himself doing it.He thought about Crest's words from the previous evening, eleven times during the formal dinner, not w

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO — WHAT THE ROAD GAVE BACK

NYRAThe ride home was different from the ride out.Not in any way that would have been visible to the escort wolves behind us. The track was the same, north through the same forest, the same cold air, and the same bare-branched trees and the same pale winter sky above it all. We rode at the same pace. We were the same two people.But the quality of it had changed.On the way to the summit, there had been the awkward newness of proximity without the Keep's walls to organize it. By the second day, it had worn smooth. By the summit itself, something had accumulated: the small true things on the road, the ceremony, and what he had done during it, the fire in the evening, and the silence that had been its own kind of conversation.The ride home had all of that already in it.We talked more. Not about the war or the curse or the even days or anything that required management. About the summit, the specific moments, the pack lords we had read differently than expected, the things that had s

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE — WHAT CAIUS FOUND

ORIONThe message was four pages.Caius had written it in the compressed, precise language he used for intelligence reports, no context that was not necessary, no sentence longer than it needed to be. Orion had learned to read it years ago and he read it now the way you read something you are running alongside in your head while it also runs alongside everything else you know.The first page was Edra.She had spoken to Caius directly, at length, in a location he had arranged outside the Thorne palace's visibility. She had confirmed everything in the letter she had sent to Nyra and added three details that had not made it into the written version because she had not trusted paper with all of it.The first: the visitor she had seen in the east passage that night had not been alone. There had been a second person, further up the stairs, whose face she had not seen. She had registered the presence and kept moving because she had been frightened and had told herself it was nothing.The sec

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR — WHAT WAS ALWAYS TRUE

NYRAThe intelligence archive was in the lower records hall separate from the territorial and legal records, kept under a different lock, organized by the operational logic of someone who had built it for use rather than for preservation. Every file labelled by source and date and confidence level, the connections between them marked in a shorthand I needed twenty minutes to learn and could read fluently after that.I had three candidates from my father's council. Lord Harwick. Lord Callen. Lord Destan.I ran all three against the archive.It took four hours. Not because the records were unclear but because I needed to be certain. I was not going to name a man inside my father's council on incomplete evidence. I had been the person accused of things on incomplete evidence too many times to do it to someone else.By the second hour, I had eliminated Lord Destan.By the third hour, I had Lord Callen in strong alignment. His introduction of the operative into the Thorne court. His access

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE — WHAT HE DID NOT SAY

ORIONHe sat in the war room until midday.There were orders to write and positions to confirm and the intelligence from the archive to process into something actionable, and he did all of it with the efficiency that was the only thing that remained constant regardless of what else was happening. The orders went out. The positions were confirmed. The intelligence was organized into a dispatch for the garrison commanders.He worked.He thought about Lord Callen and what his involvement meant for the Thorne court's reliability as an intelligence channel going forward. He thought about the operative still in the region and where Caius was and what the standard ten-day interval meant for their response time. He thought about the contact inside the Keep who still had not been identified and was still somewhere in the household and was almost certainly aware that the summit had gone badly for the faction's position.He thought about what she had said.I was placed here.He had known, when s

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX — THE MORNING AFTER AND WHAT CAME WITH IT

NYRAI woke up and he was gone.I had known I was going to. Known it the way you know things about people after eleven weeks of paying close attention to the particular quality of his commitment to the performance of the arrangement, the need to be the Alpha King in the corridors by morning regardless of what the night had been. He would not stay past the light. That was the rule he had not said but kept.Lena was in the adjoining room. I could hear her moving quietly, doing something small, giving me space. She had been doing that since we returned from the summit giving me more space than usual, in the way she gave me space when she had noticed something and was waiting for me to be ready to talk about it.I was not ready to talk about it.I lay in the light of the early morning and I thought about what it meant that he had not left before the fire burned down and I did not reach any conclusions that I was prepared to act on. He had stayed. That was a fact. Everything around the fac

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN — THREE DAYS

ORIONThey had three days.He used them the way he used every resource that had a defined end completely, without wasting anything.The garrison was repositioned on the first day. He had prepared for a direct assault and the direct assault was coming, but it was coming on a shorter timeline than any of his defensive planning had accounted for. The Verith pass unit was already in position Nyra's identification, weeks ago, now the most critical piece of the eastern defense. The southern routes were covered. The allied packs had made their commitments at the summit and he sent messages to each of them now using the channels that were clean.He did not sleep on the first day. He slept for three hours on the second night.She was in the war room for most of both days.He had stopped thinking of it as her presence in his space. Somewhere in the past few weeks it had stopped being that and become simply the room where they worked. He moved around her as naturally as he moved around the maps

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT — WHAT SHE DID FROM THE KEEP

NYRAHe rode out at midmorning.The garrison had been deployed at dawn with the Verith pass unit already in position, the eastern approach covered, the allied pack forces converging on the agreed points from three directions. The faction's three columns had been identified and matched to their defensive positions before the sun was fully up. Everything was where it needed to be.Orion was not going to stay at the Keep while his wolves fought.He told me that he was going to the eastern command point. Not asking. Not explaining. Simply informing me of where he would be, which was itself different from what he would have done three months ago. Three months ago, he would have told the garrison and left a message for Mira.He told me.I said: "The third column. When they reach the valley floor, they will need to resupply within six hours. The southern route they were using to feed the advance is the one I marked; you have wolves covering it, but not the secondary branch. If the supply cha

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE — I KNOW IT WAS YOU

ORIONHe read the morning reports at dawn.The eastern command point was a waystation two hours from the Keep, a structure built for exactly this kind of use, large enough for a field command, defensible, positioned to give clear lines of communication in both directions. He had slept for three hours in it and was awake before the first light, and the reports were already stacked on the table when he came out.He read them in order.Unit confirmations, supply status, and the overnight position reports from the allied packs. The faction's third column had stopped moving as of the eleventh hour supply chain collapse, exactly as predicted. They had pulled back to a consolidated position five miles east of the Verith pass and had not moved since.He found the unit repositioning in the third report.A single unit, redirected from its assigned position to cover the secondary branch of the southern supply route, at the fifteenth hour. Priority channel message from the Keep.He read the messa

CHAPTER FORTY — WHAT HE WAS SENT TO DO

NYRAThe man's name was Derro. He had been in the faction's network for four years. He had entered the Keep through the civilian supply route three days before the war engagement started, using a forged trade permit that had passed the gate inspection because it was well constructed and the inspection had not been looking for something that well constructed.He sat across from me in the lower interrogation room with the garrison's second commander on one side of him and Caius on the other. He had the organized quality of someone who had decided in advance exactly how much he was going to say and had arranged himself around that decision like a man organizing a defense.He said more than he planned to.He said it because I did not ask him what I wanted to know. I asked him what he could tell me that would reduce the consequences of his situation. That was a different question. It required him to assess what he actually had to offer and in the process of doing that assessment he told me

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