Reclaimed By My Alpha (Natalia and Andrei) novel Chapter 585

Chapter 585

Andrei’s POV

The ring was too small for every finger except my pinky.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Her hands were still wrapped around mine, and she was saying something. Not out loud, but somewhere deep and resonant. Inside of me, where my Lord’s voice dwelled, came hers. Soft and sweet and so familiar.

“Promise me anyway, even if it’s a lie.”

I knew those words.

I didn’t know how I knew them, but I did. And for a moment, I didn’t question it. I just… felt it. That pull I’d been feeling since she came through the portal, the one I’d been dismissing and explaining away for days, was so strong now it was sucking everything else out of the atmosphere.

“Stop listening to her.”

My Lord’s voice came in hard and fast, like a sledgehammer falling down and shattering a delicate robin’s egg. I felt the familiar fog return, that cold fury that seemed to permeate every fiber of my being.

“she’s doing this on purpose. It’s a trick. You know it’s a trick.”

I looked at the ring.

A willow tree. The moon. My brother’s back pressed to mine. Two weddings in one moment. A promise made the morning after. A promise that I knew I shouldn’t make, but I did anyway.

“I promise.”

“It isn’t real.”

Then the vision hit me like the sledgehammer had arced toward my head now, splitting my skull. For the first time in years, I saw him incarnate–dark horns curving above an angry brow. Wings spread out against a flickering red sky.

Piles upon piles of bodies forming mountains, rivers of blood gushing down.

At the top, Natalia, the twins, and Hope.

Dead.

Below, I saw the castle, the camps, the army assembled in the Ashfields, rows and rows of soldiers stretching to the horizon. I saw what it would become. What we would do with it.

“This is yours,” he said. “You built this. You bled for this. And she wants to take it from you.”

The image shifted. I saw her, not as she was now but as a threat–an intruder, someone sent here to destroy everything. I saw the knife she’d almost driven into my chest. I saw my own blood on the platform floor.

“She will burn everything you’ve built. Let me finish it.”

I almost did.

The weight of the command was heavy and suffocating. For a moment I was right back where I always was–behind the fog, looking out at the world through glass, operating on instructions I’d stopped questioning so long ago I’d forgotten I ever had a

choice.

But then a sound came through the vision that had no business being there. Not her voice, not this time. Something else. Something small.

A child, laughing.

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I didn’t see anything. There was no image attached to it, just the sound, bright and completely out of place in the dark space my Lord had built

The fag shifted.

“Ignore it,” my Lord snapped. For the first time since I could recall, he sounded… panicked. Like he was afraid of losing his grip

on me

I followed the laughter.

My Lord–was he mine?-bellowed something harsh, something cruel. I felt something snap across my awareness like a whip wrapping around my neck. He yanked me back, and I choked.

But I kept moving. Kept letting that laughter pull me closer. Into a warm house that smelled like clean laundry and dinner. Toward the sound of voices coming from a room with yellow light that spilled out into the hallway.

I moved closer still, even though his fingers were choking me, trying desperately to drag me away. I took another step, then another, and then I stepped into the light. The warmth.

I spread my arms wide and dropped to my knees and let my children run into my embrace. 1

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