Reclaimed By My Alpha (Natalia and Andrei) novel Chapter 579

Chapter 579

Natalia’s POV

He didn’t hesitate.

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The moment I swung the rod toward him, his hand shot out and closed around my wrist like a vise. My arm wrenched sideways, and I felt the bones grind together under his grip, and the rod fell. It clattered somewhere on the stone floor, rolling away into

the darkness.

“You bitch.”

Both of his hands found my throat.

I grabbed at his wrists, my fingers scrabbling against his skin, and tried to pull. My back hit the wall of the cell hard. His grip tightened. The air stopped coming.

“Andrei-”

It came out as nothing. Less than nothing. Just a shape my mouth made in the form of a man’s name who no longer existed.

His face was close to mine, his green eyes dark and flat. I watched them, even as the edges of my vision started to blur. I watched them because I was looking for something, the same thing I’d been looking for since the moment I first saw him standing outside my cell.

I was looking for any trace of the man who had sat up through two nights when Jane had a fever. Any trace of the man who had held Hope like she was made of glass, like the world might end if he put her down.

There was nothing.

My fingers were going numb. My lungs screamed. I stopped trying to pull his wrists away and instead pressed my palm flat against his chest, and I pushed as hard as I had any strength left to push.

It didn’t move him. But something shifted in his face. A twitch at the corner of his jaw. He blinked, and for a moment, his eyes cleared. His grip didn’t loosen, but it stopped tightening.

I stopped fighting. I went still.

The silence in the cell was deafening.

Then, slowly, his hands fell away.

I dropped to the floor, knees hitting the stone. I caught myself on my hands, coughing. I pressed one hand against the wall and dragged in breath after breath. Each one burned, like my throat had been turned inside out.

He stepped back.

I looked up at him. He was looking down at me, his chest rising and falling. The clarity in his eyes was gone, but he didn’t attack me again. He just… stood there. And stared.

Then, he turned away.

“Tomorrow morning.” He was addressing the guard now. “Public execution. She made an attenipt on my life.”

I stared at the back of his head.

“Hang her.”

He walked out without looking back.

The guard sneered at me as he locked the cell. He drew a finger across his neck, then cackled and walked off. I was alone after that, my mind racing.

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This wasn’t him, I kept telling myself.

The Andrei I knew would never do this.

The Andrei I’d carried in my head for five years like a photograph would never hurt me. I thought about the way he used to reach for me in the mornings before he was even fully awake, just automatically, like muscle memory. I thought about the particular way he’d say my name when he was annoyed with me, three syllables, clipped short, and how different it sounded from the way he said it when it was just the two of us at the end of a long day.

I thought about the man who had made me promises and kept every single one of them.

He was gone. He was really, genuinely gone.

I supposed I had known it since the moment I first looked into his eyes in that corridor and saw nothing looking back at me. But I’d held onto hope all this time, believing that I could snap him out of it. That I could save him.

That was not possible.

I pressed my forehead against my knees.

Tomorrow morning, they were going to hang me.

My children would never know what happened to me. Max was out there somewhere, alone, and if he survived this place and made it home, he would have to carry that with him for the rest of his life. Jane would know. She always knew. Hope was too young, too young to lose both parents in five years, too young to grow up without either of us, but she would have to.

I thought about Damon. He’d already lost his brother. Now he’d lose me, too. But at least I could rest easy knowing that he and Grace would care for my children.

I rubbed my eyes, unsurprised to find that there were no tears. I was too dry, too wrung out. There was just a hollow, awful feeling in my chest.

But I had the rod tucked under the cuff of my sleeve. I’d picked it back up off the floor when Andrei left, slipping it back against my forearm before the guard saw. Andrei had probably forgotten about it. Or assumed it was gone.

It was small. I wasn’t sure what I could do with it against a crowd, in shackles, with barely enough energy to walk upright. But I had it, and I was still breathing, and Max was alive and somewhere out there.

That was what I told myself, anyway. Over and over, until I finally stopped thinking and my body forced me under.

The next morning, if one could even call it that, the door crashed open and two guards came in. They grabbed me by the arms and hauled me upright before I was even fully awake.

I didn’t bother asking questions. I already knew.

They marched me up out of the cells and through the corridors of the castle, and then outside.

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