Chapter 447: Chapter 465

Chapter 0465 Hannah The doctor looked like he was about to be sick when he turned to face us. His skin had gone pale, his eyes wide as saucers, his face drawn as if he’d just seen a ghost.

“Kill us?” I sat up a little more with some effort, my arms trembling beneath my weight. Viona moved to support me, but I waved her away. “Who? Marcus?”

Doctor Patel looked back and forth between all of us. His mouth kept opening and closing like a fish out of water. There was clearly something he had to tell us, and yet it seemed he was genuinely torn between spilling it or making a run for the hills.

Most of all, there was fear in his eyes.

“If I tell you,” he said hesitantly, “you have to promise not to tell him.”

Noah and I looked at each other in astonishment. “What-”

“Promise me,” the aging doctor insisted, his cheeks trembling with the words. “Please.”

Noah, despite Drake’s resistance, stood on slightly shaking legs–the poison still weakened him, although not as much as me.

“Whatever you have to tell us, Doctor Patel, your secret is safe here.”

But that wasn’t good enough. Doctor Patel’s eyes flicked to the doors and windows, terror etching his features.

With a sigh, I nodded to Viona, who moved around the house quickly to secure the entrances. Once we were certain that everything was locked and the curtains were tightly shut, Doctor Patel seemed to deflate with some modicum of relief. He sank down onto an armchair and hung his head in his hands, wringing his hair with his fingers.

“Spit it out,” Noah finally said, growing impatient. “Whatever you have to say, now’s your chance.”

The doctor flinched, but nodded. “V–Very well. You see... Goddess, I shouldn’t even be saying this... He swore to kill. me if I told a soul...”

Noah, Drake, Viona and I all looked at each other with shock but remained silent, waiting for whatever it was he had to confess.

Finally, Doctor Patel continued his story. “It started about eight years ago... shortly after you two got married.” He glanced up at me and Noah. “Your father, Marcus, came to me with a proposition; he asked me to ensure that you two didn’t conceive. Told me that there was a horrible defect in your bloodline, Hannah, that he didn’t want to pass on to his grandchild.” (1)

He swallowed hard. “So I told Alpha Noah that you were too frail for intercourse. When Alpha Noah insisted that Nightcrest needed an heir, I gave him a false date for your ovulation. I told him to try and conceive right after your menstruation, when you are the least fertile. Since you had been starving yourself at that point and lost your period, you two were none the wiser.”

“So you lied to us,” Noah growled, folding his arms tightly across his chest.

The doctor shot Noah a wide–eyed look. “I wanted to tell you, truly. And I almost did. It never felt... right to do that to you, to try and take away your choice to conceive. But when I told Marcus that we should tell +25 BONUS Chapter 0465 you the truth, and that I didn’t believe that Hannah had any defects in her blood, he threatened to kill me. Not just me, but my family.”

Doctor Patel hung his head in his hands again. “After that, I’m not sure exactly what Marcus was doing to keep you from getting pregnant, Hannah. Occasionally, he would have me do strange things–like claim that you had a UTI or some other infection to keep you from sleeping together.”

I frowned as I recalled those days. There had been a period of about a year when things had been relatively good between me and Noah, and we’d been more attracted to one another. But we couldn’t have sex because the doctor kept claiming that I had infections and needed to rest.

But I hadn’t, apparently, It was all some sort of scheme of Marcus’s to keep me from getting pregnant. And it had worked, for a while at least.