2024-09-27 07:45:49
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 723
Jennifer reached the east wall first, boots skidding through gravel still settling from whatever had hit it."Hold!" Her hand shot up before she'd finished crossing the yard. "Crown Wardens! Stand down, we talk this through before anyone bleeds for it!"For one breath, it almost worked. The shapes past the broken gate slowed.Then a voice cracked back, mocking. "Wardens siding with Calder now? Since when do you take a house's coin to guard its lies?""Nobody's taking anyone's coin—""They poisoned their own beast and blamed us for it! And you're protecting the ones who did it!"That was all it took. Someone threw first — Jennifer never saw who — and after that there was nothing left to argue, only a fight nobody had wanted five seconds ago and everybody was in now.Steel met steel. A beast screamed past the treeline. The gate gave up the last of its resistance, and men poured through.Inside, none of it had reached the office yet. Just sound, muffled through stone, closer every second
Chapter 722
The next morning, Grim smelled the fear before either of them said a word.Three steps into the Warden building, his hackles rose. Not aggressive — alert.Ears swiveling toward the double doors down the hall, where a knot of voices had gone too tight, too quiet, too fast. Alex didn't need the bond to read that kind of silence.He'd heard it enough times now to know exactly what it meant.Jennifer stood behind her desk, arms crossed, listening to a man old enough to be someone's grandfather grip the desk's edge like it was the only thing holding him up.Beside him, a woman in traveling clothes too fine for traveling. Behind them both, a girl young enough to still be sharp about everything — the kind of sharp that only came from never having paid for it yet.Alex leaned against the doorframe. Watched."...collapsed before dawn." The old man's voice was thin, wrung out. "No warning. No wound we could find. One moment he was resting in the eastern pen. The next—" He stopped. Couldn't fini
Chapter 721
Alex looked at the three of them for a long moment. Dorian, shaking. Kass, forehead nearly in the dirt. Bram, still talking — still trying to buy his own skin with someone else's.An hour ago, all three had been ready to open him up. Now they couldn't hold his eyes."I don't care who wanted to blame who." His voice stayed flat. "You were all three swinging something at me."Bram's mouth snapped shut."I'm not going to kill you." He let that sit long enough for them to feel exactly how little comfort it was. "But you're not walking away from this owing nothing.""One year. Full obedience. No refusals — to anything I ask, whenever I ask it, no matter the hour. No matter the inconvenience."He crossed to Dorian first. Two fingers, flat against his forehead. Barely a touch. A thread of inner force slid in and settled — the same trick he'd once learned, planting something a body would never find until it was already too late.Dorian gasped like he'd been struck."That's a seed." Alex moved
Chapter 720
The pitchfork caught Alex square in the ribs and didn't so much as wrinkle his shirt.Dorian's face went through confusion before it reached fear. He wrenched the tines back and drove them in again, harder, both hands behind it this time — and again, nothing. No give. No blood. Not even the small satisfaction of a man staggering back a step.“Trying to scratch me?” Alex asked. “Funny. I’ve been feeling itchy. Stab a little harder on my back.”“What—”Bram’s iron pipe smashed into Alex’s shoulder and rang out like it had struck a bell instead of flesh.“Decent massage,” Alex said. “But nowhere near enough. Put some real strength into it.”All three of them stared as if they had just faced a monster. Then they attacked with everything they could—hitting, stabbing, and striking harder than before.Alex didn't bother stepping out of range. His whole body ran thick with inner force, layered so deep under the skin that a blunt weapon might as well have been swung at a mountain. Kass, scramb
Chapter 719
Dorian double cabin truck dropped the three of them at White Field a little after eight, the terraces already visible from the road, brown-edged and sunken where something had been eating the roots out from under them for weeks.Dorian had brought two people. He introduced them without much ceremony — Kass, wiry and quiet, with a badger-shaped digger pacing low at his heel; Bram, heavier through the shoulders, his beast a hooded, dust-colored viper coiled loose around one arm like a bracelet that had decided to wake up.“Citizen quota,” Dorian said. “They’re short on theirs as well. Thought we’d clear it all in one go. Team quota—more hands, the better.”"Efficient," Alex said, and didn't ask anything else.Kass's eyes moved once over Grim, cataloguing, then moved away too fast to be casual about it. Bram didn't look at Grim at all, which was its own kind of tell.A farmer met them at the gate with the tired relief of a man who'd stopped expecting anyone to actually come. "North terrac
Chapter 718
The Rime Lynx hit the dirt on its side and didn't get back up, one paw twitching against the packed ground, out cold before its own keeper had finished registering what he'd just watched happen.Dorian Vance stood frozen at the rail, mouth open, no sound coming out of it.His vision actually swam for a second — a genuine, physical lurch, like the ground had shifted under a match he'd already spent in his head.Fluke, he told himself, and didn't believe it even as the thought formed.His Rime Lynx had trained under a licensed handler since it was a kit. It had never gone down in one exchange. Not once. Not to anything.How, he thought, and had no second half to the sentence.The breeder-woman at the rail had gone the color of old paper. "That's not—" she started, to no one, and didn't finish that either.Grim didn't gloat. He didn't need to. He simply turned his head toward Dorian and held the look, calm and unhurried.Behind Alex, the row of keepers who'd called this the easiest match
You may also like
I Made $900 Trillion In 24 Hours
Jericho Chase179.5K viewsTRILLIONAIRE IN DISGUISE
Lyonlee334.7K viewsBuilding My Life
Anderson José156.2K viewsIncredible Oliver Storm
Dragon Sly106.4K viewsThe Price Of Hatred
Kelly Ex 58 viewsThe Shadow Boy and the City of Glass
Mganus Abi105 viewsTHE WALL STREET IMMORTAL
Jeany Chase118 viewsRise of the Rejected Son-in-Law
visk 130 views
Reader Comments
The chapter is too small to read, mind description is more than actions too