Semua Bab Our Little Secret: In Love With My Professor : Bab 91 - Bab 100

AlbertThe line was still open. Cecil hadn’t hung up. He waited for me, patient as ever, and I hated how that patience undid me.“My dad misses you, Al.”The words rang in my head like a drumbeat I couldn’t escape. I could hear them in Cecil’s voice, but behind them I felt Edward’s eyes… those piercing, quiet eyes that always saw through me. The weight of the bond pulsed in my chest, hot and demanding, as if his absence itself had claws.I bit my lip until it hurt, curling tighter on the edge of the bed in my little hut. “Don’t say that, Cess,” I whispered. “Don’t… don’t make this harder than it already is.”“I’m not trying to make it hard,” he said softly. “I’m just telling you the truth.”The truth. How simple it sounded when he said it. How impossible it felt for me.I pressed my hand against my stomach. The swell wasn’t visible yet, not to anyone but me, but I felt it. Every hour of nausea, every bout of fever, every dizzy spell reminded me of the life growing inside me. The bond’

EdwardThe morning air smelled of ash and damp earth, remnants of the fire we had extinguished last night when another of the abandoned cottages collapsed. I stood at the edge of what used to be our training grounds, boots sinking into the mud, and felt the full weight of the Still Waters Pack pressing on my shoulders.“Spread the logs evenly,” I called, watching a group of young wolves drag fallen timber to rebuild the arena fences. “Reinforce with stone at the base, we won’t have this crumbling at the first storm.”They nodded quickly, scrambling to obey.Around me, the pack house loomed, grand once, now scarred by neglect. Roof tiles missing, windows cracked, ivy crawling up stone that should have gleamed with pride. To the north, makeshift tents dotted the land, housing widows and orphans who had nowhere else to go. Their faces lingered in my mind longer than the ruins: eyes hollow, cheeks sunken, but still they looked to me as if I could shoulder their pain.And perhaps I could.

AlbertThe village was quieter now. The echoes of the raid lingered like smoke clinging to clothes, but life was slowly returning to its rhythm. Children peeked from behind their mothers’ skirts, men set up barricades at the edge of the settlement, and women swept the dust as if wiping away fear itself.I sat by the firepit outside my hut, legs pulled close, a wool blanket wrapped tight around my shoulders. The smell of roasted maize and smoked goat filled the air, but my stomach was a storm. The nausea had dulled since the raid, but every so often a wave still hit me, leaving my throat dry and my body shaking.Cess sat across from me, staring at the flames. He hadn’t said much since we had eaten. His presence was steady, calm… so much like his father’s, and yet softer, gentler, without the weight of years on his shoulders.“You are quiet,” I said, breaking the silence.He looked up, his smile crooked, boyish. Like the young teen I first met that day so many years back.“You are one t

AlbertThe nights here are quiet, too quiet. The kind of quiet that doesn’t let me sleep, because when the world is still, my mind won’t stop screaming.I lie on my back in the little cot the villagers gave me, staring at the low wooden ceiling, listening to the distant hoot of an owl. My body aches with exhaustion, but my thoughts… they drag me down into places I don’t want to go.And tonight, one shadow finds me again.Emon.His name presses on me like a ghost at my throat. I try not to think about him, about the warmth of his smile when I first stumbled, broken and bleeding, into his life. He had been a safe place. A human with kind hands and a gentle heart who patched me together when I thought no one else would.And I repaid him with half-truths, with silence, with stolen moments that could never last.I roll onto my side, clutching my pillow tighter, trying to chase away the guilt that seeps into every corner of me. But it doesn’t work. It never does.Because Emon had believed i

AlbertThe roar of the helicopter blades was deafening, yet inside the cabin, I felt strangely cocooned, as though the world had shrunk to this rattling, vibrating space. Every shudder of the machine climbed into my bones. I pressed my feet harder into the floor, but the thin soles of the shoes the villagers had gifted me offered little buffer. My chest thudded as though my heart wanted to leap out and find freedom of its own.I sat wedged between Cess and the window. Cess was grinning, his face alight with excitement as though this were a grand adventure. For him, maybe it was. For me, it felt like a march toward judgment, toward a fate that I had tried again and again to outrun but I had failed to succeed.I pressed my palms against my knees until my knuckles went white. Out the small window, the desert stretched endlessly below… burnt earth and scattered brush, villages nothing more than fading pinpricks. The place I had called refuge was shrinking into the horizon, and with it, th