The Alpha Kings And Their Stripper Mate

Chapter 283: Chapter 283: The Throne Room

Eve’s POV

The throne room was at the heart of the Court.

Not the center of the building. The heart of it. The place everything else had been built around, corridors and chambers and formal halls all arranged with this room as the point they radiated from.

Raphael led them through corridors Eve recognized and corridors she didn’t. Deeper into the building than she’d been before. The stone getting older the further they went. The light changing, less of the artificial Court lighting, more of something else. Something that came from the walls themselves.

She felt it before she saw it.

The pull in her chest shifted.

Not stronger exactly. Just....different. Like a compass needle that had been spinning for weeks suddenly finding north and going completely still.

Raphael stopped in front of a set of doors.

Old. Dark wood. Iron handles worn smooth from centuries of hands.

He looked at Eve.

"Ready," he said.

She nodded.

He pushed them open.

She had expected something grand.

High ceilings. Gold. The kind of overwhelming visual statement that powerful things usually made about themselves.

It wasn’t like that.

The throne room was large but not enormous. Stone walls the same color as the oldest parts of the building. High windows that let in light that had a quality she couldn’t name, not quite natural, not quite artificial. Just present. Steady.

And at the far end.

The throne.

She stopped walking.

It was simpler than she’d imagined. Dark stone. High backed. No ornamentation. No gold or jewels or the decorative excess of something trying to look powerful.

It didn’t need to try.

She could feel it from across the room.

The pull was coming directly from it now. Warm and steady and entirely focused on her. Like it had been waiting for this moment for twenty years and was now simply....present. Attentive.

Waiting for her to come the rest of the way.

She didn’t move yet.

Just stood there and looked at it.

Her parents had stood in this room.

Had stood exactly where she was standing and looked at the same throne and felt the same pull. Had been working toward the moment she was standing in front of now.

Malachai had made sure they never lasted here.

She was here.

She was actually here.

"Eve," Damian said quietly beside her.

She realized she’d been still for a long time.

"I’m okay," she said.

She felt his hand at the small of her back. Not pushing. Just there.

She breathed out.

Looked at the throne.

Not today.

Not yet.

But soon.

Seraphine was waiting near the windows.

She looked at Eve when they came in and her expression did the thing it did when she was feeling something she wasn’t going to perform.

"You felt it move," she said.

"Last night," Eve said. "It touched me through the throne bond."

Seraphine nodded slowly. "I felt a disturbance in the Court wards. I didn’t understand what it was until your message arrived this morning." She paused. "It’s inside the outer boundary now. The wards are slowing it but they won’t hold it."

"How long," Damian said.

Seraphine looked at him.

"Two days," she said. "Maybe three." She paused. "The wards were built to keep things out. Varek has been watching them for twenty years. It knows where the weak points are."

"Then we have two days to prepare," Eve said.

"Yes," Seraphine said. "And we need to use them properly."

They spent an hour in the throne room.

Not touching anything. Just....earning the space. Raphael walked them through what would happen during the ascension. Where Eve would stand. Where her mates needed to be positioned. The specific sequence of the binding completion.

Eve listened to all of it carefully.

"The sixty second window," she said. "When the binding is open. What does Varek actually do during that window."

Raphael looked at Vessa.

Vessa answered.

"It pushes through," she said. "Like walking through a door. The binding opens to complete and Varek steps through with it. Once it’s through the window closes and it’s inside the binding permanently." She paused. "That’s what it wants. To be inside the binding. Inside the throne. Feeding on six hundred years of contained power forever."

"And if the binding completes before it gets through," Damon said.

"The door closes in its face," Vessa said. "It can’t force a closed binding. It would have to wait another twenty years for another heir." She paused. "Except there won’t be another twenty years. Eve is on the throne. The binding stays complete."

"So Varek is done," Damon said.

"Permanently," Vessa said.

Damon looked at Eve.

"Then we just need to make sure the binding completes fast enough," he said.

"Yes," Vessa said. "That’s all."

He nodded.

Like it was simple.

It wasn’t simple.

But the way he said it....flat, certain, completely without drama, made it feel like something they could actually do.

She loved him for that.

She was standing closest to the throne when she felt it.

Not the warm pull of Avara’s binding.

Something else.

Cold. Patient. The same thing that had touched her at three in the morning but closer now. Much closer.

She went still.

Silas was beside her immediately.

"You feel that," he said quietly.

"Yes," she said.

"It’s inside the Court walls," he said. "It followed us through the portal."

She looked at the throne.

Twenty feet away.

The warm pull still there. Steady. Responding to her presence in the room.

And underneath it....around it....the cold patience of something that had been waiting for twenty years circling the warmth like it was learning the shape of it.

Learning how to move around it.

Learning how to get through it.

"Raphael," she said.

He was already moving toward her.

"I feel it," he said.

"It’s here," she said. "Inside the Court."

The room went very still.

Seraphine moved to the windows.

Looked out at the Court grounds.

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she turned around and her face said everything before her words did.

"The outer ward just dropped," she said.

Nobody spoke.

"Two days," Damon said flatly. "You said two days."

"I was wrong," Seraphine said. Simply. Without apology. "It moved faster than the wards could track."

Damon looked at Eve.

Eve looked at the throne.

The cold thing was in the building now.

In the same walls as the throne it had been circling for twenty years.

The warm pull responded to it, she could feel it, the binding recognizing the threat, something ancient in it pulling harder toward her.

Come, it said.

Come now.

"How long do we actually have," Damian said. His voice was completely controlled. Just the facts. Just what they needed to know.

Seraphine looked at Raphael.

Raphael looked at the throne. fгeewebnovёl.com

"If it reaches the throne room before the ascension completes," he said. "It doesn’t need the window anymore." He paused. "It just needs to stop Eve from sitting down."

The room was completely quiet.

"So we don’t have two days," Silas said.

"No," Raphael said.

"How long," Damian said again.

Raphael looked at Eve.

Not at Damian.

At Eve.

"Hours," he said. "Not days. Hours."

Eve looked at the throne.

At the dark stone and the high back and the six hundred years of Avara’s work contained in it.

At the thing her parents had been stopped from reaching.

She felt the cold circling the edges of the room. Testing. Patient. Learning.

She felt the warm pull steady at the center of it.

Both of them.

Waiting for her to decide.

She turned to Damian.

"Clear the room," she said. "Everyone except the four of us and Raphael." She paused. "We’re not waiting."

Damian looked at her.

Read her face.

Nodded once.

"You heard her," he said to the room.