Semua Bab Against All Odds: Bab 31 - Bab 40

* Zeina *I woke slowly.Not with a start, not with the panic that had haunted the last three nights, but gently, like floating to the surface after sinking too long in dark waters. The kind of waking that feels less like returning and more like remembering, remembering you're still alive.The room was quiet, thick with the hush of pre-dawn. Shadows draped themselves along the stone walls like soft velvet. Outside, the first hints of light crept in, faint strokes of gold smudging the horizon, casting long, honeyed beams across the floor.I didn't feel cold. Not this time.A steady warmth pressed against my back, solid, quiet, unmoving. Cerberus.He hadn't left. Just like he said.His arm lay draped around my waist, not possessive, not tight, just there. Anchoring. His breath stirred the strands of my hair, steady and warm against the nape of my neck. I could feel his heartbeat, slow and unbothered, like some deep drum beneath the surface of the earth. His body radiated a quiet heat, c

* Cerberus *I never liked waiting.It makes men feel powerless, and I've spent too much of my life tearing that feeling out of my chest with my own hands. Powerlessness is a quiet poison, it doesn't scream as it kills you. It seeps in slow. Steady. Like rain crawling down a window. Like the hours I've stood here, alone in the Alpha house that doesn't feel like mine anymore without her, watching that rain bleed across the glass like slow blood.Waiting on a woman who wears storms like silk. Princess Zeina.The woman I dragged from the Western dungeons against her mate's orders, against half a council, against the kind of logic that makes cowards feel smart. The woman I once called a problem. My problem.That thought stuck in my throat like a thorn. I turned from the window, fists clenching at my sides. Just the image of her in that cursed Palace again, back among the smiling wolves and silk-laced threats, made my bones itch. Made something inside me snarl and coil like it wanted out.

* Zeina *Morning came gray and reluctant. The sky above the capital was a lid of iron, flat and unyielding, as though even the heavens were holding their breath. I watched it from my chamber window, fingers resting on the cold glass like I could push through it and reach the silence beyond. Cars whispered through narrow streets. Servants murmured in shadowed courtyards, their voices hushed by centuries of tradition. But here, in the upper wing of the Royal Palace, it was still. Too still.I fastened my jacket. Black leather, worn soft with time and fire. Heavier than memory had warned me. The scent of ash still clung to it, smoke, pine, the sharp tang of old battles. The scent of home, of ruin.Behind me, Donna waited. Ever silent, ever ready. She stood like a statue carved from resolve, a satchel slung across her back, and two cloaks, mine and hers, folded neatly in one hand. Her posture was taut, military, and though she looked like she hadn't slept, there was no weakness in her e

* Cerberus *The wind shifted that night, curling through the trees like a whisper of fate, laced with something ancient and ominous. It tugged at the branches like invisible fingers, stirring the leaves into a restless dance. I stood for a moment in front of my club tavern, locking the last deadbolt, when I felt it, that strange pull in the marrow of my bones, the whisper of something long buried clawing its way to the surface.I made my way back to the Alpha house under a sky heavy with clouds, the moon smothered behind layers of shadow. The path felt familiar, yet foreign, like retracing the steps of a life you no longer lived. When I reached the front door, I paused. My hand gripped the weathered doorframe, but I didn't push it open right away. The air itself felt charged, electric, thick with memory and unspoken truth. I could smell the change, feel the shift in the ether. Something, someone, was near. Her. Princess Zeina.The name pulsed in my mind like a heartbeat. The temporar

* Zeina *The cold bit through my cloak like the teeth of winter itself, gnawing at my skin beneath the thick fabric as I stepped through the veil of ancient trees. Branches overhead clawed at the sky, their skeletal fingers catching the pale light of dawn and weaving it into threads of fragile silver. The air hung still, the silence sacred, broken only by the crunch of my boots on frostbitten leaves.Each step I took toward the Hollow Stone was not just a journey, but a quiet surrender, an offering to something older than time, older than bloodlines, older even than the throne of the Alpha King and the myths of our kind.This wasn't just a ritual. It was reckoning.A clearing yawned open like a wound in the earth, ringed by jagged spires of obsidian rock and lined with sigils carved so deep into the soil they pulsed with a life of their own. And there, standing at the center like fate personified, was Alpha Cerberus. He was more shadow than man in that moment, his dark cloak billowin