Semua Bab Claimed by the cruel lycan king: Bab 1 - Bab 10

ElenaThe east wing smelled like cedar and something colder underneath it, something I didn't have a name for yet but would later learn was just what wolves smelled like when there were enough of them in one building. Dorian walked half a step ahead of me, hands clasped behind his back, the picture of a man who'd given this exact tour before and found it faintly tedious."Guest quarters," he said, stopping at a door carved with a symbol I didn't recognize — a crescent wrapped around something jagged, like a moon that had been broken and put back together wrong. "Yours, for now.""For now.""Things change quickly here." He pushed the door open without waiting for permission — mine or anyone's, apparently. "You'll want to get used to that."The room was larger than my entire apartment back home, which felt like an insult dressed up as a kindness. A bed big enough for four people. A window that looked out over grounds I couldn't see the end of. Everything expensive, and none of it mine.

ElenaNobody told me the grounds had rules. That was the first mistake — mine, for assuming a garden was just a garden, and theirs, for letting me find that out the hard way.I'd woken up early, restless in a bed too big for one person, and decided that six days into my captivity — I refused to call it anything softer than that, no matter what Dorian implied about "arrangements" — I'd earned the right to walk somewhere that wasn't a hallway or a dining room. The east wing had a door leading out to a garden, unlocked, unguarded as far as I could tell, and I took that as permission because nobody had told me otherwise.The morning air smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet. Rows of something dark and glossy lined the path, and past them, a low stone wall separating the tended part of the garden from what looked like actual forest — real trees, not landscaping, stretching back farther than I could see.I made it about halfway along that wall before I understood I wasn't alone.He came

ElenaThe lockdown lifted three days later, quietly, the way a held breath releases once the danger's actually passed rather than the moment someone declares it over. Rurik's scouts had pulled back from the boundary. Life in the compound resumed its normal shape — dinners, patrols, the low hum of a court that had learned to function around fear the way a body learns to function around an old injury.Nothing between Kade and me went back to normal, though. I noticed it in small things. The way he no longer waited for a servant to test my food before I ate it — he simply reached over and took a bite himself, without ceremony, without comment, like the gesture from that first dinner had become a habit instead of a statement. The way he'd started finding reasons to walk the same corridors I walked, at the same hours, without ever quite admitting that's what he was doing.I told myself none of it mattered. I told myself a lot of things that week.The Claiming Feast, when it was announced,

ElenaNobody explained what I was supposed to wear to a political test disguised as a courtesy visit, so I chose the plainest dress in my wardrobe out of pure spite — no crimson, no gold thread, nothing that looked like it had been selected to make a point. If the Kesslers wanted to evaluate whether I was worth Kade's loyalty, they could do it without the costume.Kade found me before we left, took one look at the dress, and said nothing except, "Good," which I decided to take as approval rather than analyze further.The northern territory's envoy hall was smaller than Kade's, colder in a way that had nothing to do with temperature — sparse, functional, built by people who apparently didn't believe in wasting resources on comfort. The Kessler brothers sat behind a long table, flanked by advisors, and I recognized the one who'd needled Kade at the feast — the taller of the two, sharper-eyed, clearly the one running the actual conversation while his brother observed."Your Majesty." The

ElenaThe watchtower was still smoking when we reached it, the two men who should have been standing guard nowhere to be found — not dead, Dorian confirmed after a tense hour of searching, just gone, which somehow felt worse. Taken, or paid to look away. Either way, the message was the same: Rurik had reached inside Kade's own walls without needing to set foot past the border himself.The note the guard had mentioned was pinned to what remained of the tower door, untouched by the flames in a way that felt deliberately staged — Rurik wanted it found intact.*Tell your human bride I heard the rumors before you silenced them. A King who can't keep his own court from doubting her isn't a King who can protect her from me. This was a warning. The next one won't leave anyone standing to write it.*Kade read it twice, his expression carved from something colder than I'd seen since my first day in the Great Hall, and then handed it to Dorian without a word."Double the patrols on every border,