Accidentally Mated To Four Alphas

Chapter 303: _ Her Deliverance

~Lira’s Point Of View~

The first thing Lira feels is not pain. It is the impact and hell, it wasn’t the cinematic kind that comes with a scream and a flurry of hands. No. It is a dense, thunderous collision that begins at her shoulders and travels up through her skull like a bell being struck in a cathedral.

CRACK.

The stone stairs do not move. Her head does.

The courtyard tilts sideways. The night sky fractures into shards of moonlight and torchfire. Sound becomes a thick, underwater hum, as if someone has pressed her ears beneath a frozen lake.

She tastes her own blood.

Warmth spreads down the side of her temple, slick and immediate, threading into her hairline, slipping behind her ear. The silk of her dress tangles beneath her as she folds unnaturally against the steps. She blinks twice.

The world does not right itself.

Ah.

So this is what it feels like to be discarded.

But pain, for Lira, is not unfamiliar. Pain is an old tutor. It simply takes her back. Back to when she was ten. Back to the house with the long hallways that echo at night.

Back to the cousin.

He was not much older than she is now, but he carries himself as if he were already a man, and she is already something to appraise. Her father, generous to a fault, takes him in when the boy’s parents fall on hard times. "Family is family," he says, clapping the cousin on the back.

Family.

Lira learns very quickly that family can close doors softly.

He never does anything dramatic. Nothing that leaves bruises in obvious places. He is careful. That is what terrifies her most—the care. The way he waits until the house is empty. The way he leans in too close, breath sour with stolen fruit wine. The way his hand lingers on her waist as if testing the shape of something he plans to own.

He calls her pretty. He says she will be a heartbreaker. He asks if she knows how grown women behave. He touches her shoulder and lets his fingers slide too slowly down her arm.

When she freezes, he laughs.

When she looks frightened, he says, "Don’t be dramatic."

When she tries to pull away, he tightens his grip just enough to remind her that she is smaller.

And the worst part? He smiles afterward as if nothing happened.

Lira does not tell her father. She tries once. The words gather in her throat like wet paper, but when she sees the pride in her father’s eyes as he discusses pack alliances and property disputes, she swallows them.

She is ten. She understands politics already.

She understands that if she accuses the cousin and the cousin denies it, it will be her word against his. And if she is believed, her father will feel shame. If she is not believed, she will feel it.

So she does what children do when they are cornered and clever.

She waits.

And then one afternoon, her father takes her to the Alpha’s estate. The place is bigger than anything she has ever seen. The gates rise like ribs around a beast. The mansion glows under the sun.

She hates it immediately until she meets him.

Morgan Bellamy is not taller than she is. Not yet. He is all elbows and smirks and dark hair falling into eyes that look too knowing for a boy his age. He does not bow when she is introduced. He tilts his head instead, assessing.

"You look bored," he says to her, blunt and unafraid.

She blinks. No one has ever said that to her.

"I am not," she replies, stiff with Valcrest training.

"You are," he insists. "They’re talking about territory taxes."

He gestures vaguely to the adults droning on about trade routes and pack borders. She follows him outside because he doesn’t wait for permission.

They race along the hedges. They climb the old oak behind the eastern wing. They sit on a branch too high for comfort and kick their legs over open air.

And for the first time in weeks, Lira laughs. It slips out of her like something she had forgotten she owned. Morgan does not stare at her chest. He does not linger too close. When he bumps her shoulder, it is careless or calculated.

When she falls silent midway through a joke, something in her chest is tightening with memory, and he notices.

"You went somewhere," he points out.

She does not know why she tells him.

Perhaps it is the height. Perhaps it is the way he watches the world, as if he plans to dismantle it one day. Perhaps it is because he does not treat her like a fragile thing.

"There is someone in my house," she says quietly. "He touches me."

Morgan does not ask how. He does not tell her she misunderstood. He does not tell her to be quiet. His eyes go still.

"Who?"

She tells him.

There is a long silence. Then Morgan grins. "We can fix that."

They are ten and eleven. They do not understand the full weight of what they are doing, but they understand humiliation. They understand fear.

Morgan suggests small things first. Slipping itching powder into the cousin’s boots. Smearing honey along the inside of his drawers so ants find him at night. Lira laughs—delighted and cruel in a way that feels righteous.

But Morgan does not stop there. He orchestrates a scene.

They stage it carefully. Lira lures the cousin into the study under the pretense of showing him a drawing. Morgan waits behind the door with a bucket of rotten fish heads pilfered from the kitchen. When the cousin leans too close again, hand sliding where it should not, Morgan steps out.

He simply upends the bucket over the boy’s head and says, with a sweetness that will one day unnerve kings, "Touch her again and next time it won’t be fish."

The cousin leaves within the week. He claims the Valcrest estate smells terrible but Lira knows better. From that day on, she looks at Morgan like he is not a boy.

He is deliverance.