Lahat ng Kabanata ng Whispers of Loyalty: Kabanata 171 - Kabanata 179

ZACH The sun barely crested the horizon when Alana and I left the war room and headed back toward our suite. The air in the estate felt thin—like every breath we took softened the walls instead of strengthening them. She stayed at my side, close enough that our arms brushed every few steps. I could feel her exhaustion, feel the weight of everything pressing down on her chest the same way it pressed on mine. And yet she walked like a leader—chin high, shoulders squared, steps steady. My woman. My equal. My fear. I hated that last part, but nothing I did could shake it. When we reached the room, she sat on the edge of the bed and exhaled like she’d been holding her breath for hours. She looked small for a moment—small but unbroken. I knelt in front of her, taking her knees in my hands and lifting my eyes to hers. “You don’t have to pretend you’re okay,” I said quietly. She stroked my jaw, her thumb brushing the corner of my mouth. “If I fall apart, you will too.” She wasn’t

ZACHDawn didn’t rise so much as bleed.A low red haze pushed across the horizon, staining the sky with a color too close to warning. I’d barely slept—two hours at most—but the lack of rest didn’t slow me. It sharpened everything. My senses. My instincts. The threat crawling underneath my skin.L was moving.The prophecy was tightening.And Alana…She was walking straight into the crosshairs with me.I didn’t know how to breathe around that.I stood in the hallway outside our room, leaning against the wall, hands braced on my hips, head down, trying to calm the storm building in my chest. But nothing settled. Nothing eased.The door behind me opened.Her.Alana stepped into the hall, hair tied back, dressed in tactical black. Beautiful and lethal in the same breath. Her eyes found mine instantly, searching me the way she always did—like she knew when something in me was breaking.And something was.Not for me.For her.“You didn’t sleep,” she said softly.“Neither did you.”She came c

ZACHThe engine hummed beneath my hands, but it did nothing to ground me.Nothing could—not when the image of L standing in that chamber replayed behind my eyes like a sickness I couldn’t shake.Alana’s breathing beside me was the only steady thing in the world.Soft. Controlled.Too controlled.She stared out the window as we drove, her fingers tangled together in her lap. Not nervous. Not frightened.Thinking.And that terrified me more than anything L had said.She didn’t look shattered.She looked sharpened.Like the prophecy wasn’t crushing her—it was sculpting her. Into what, I didn’t fucking know. But every time she went quiet like this, I felt something slipping just out of my reach.“You’re too silent,” I muttered finally.She blinked out of her thoughts and glanced at me. “You want me to scream instead?”“I want you to talk to me.”“I am.”“No,” I growled, gripping the wheel tighter. “You’re talking around me. Skirting. Editing.”Her lips pressed into a thin line. She turned

ZACHThe storm rolled in fast.Not the kind that rattled windows or scattered branches across the lawn.The other kind—the quiet storm, the wrong storm, the one where everything goes too still before it breaks.We knew he was coming.Gia had felt it.Niko had sensed it.I’d felt it in Alana’s pulse, in the way her breaths had turned shallow as the night deepened, in the way she kept looking over her shoulder like someone was whispering her name from the dark.But when it happened, it was still too fast.Too sudden.Too goddamn inevitable.We were in the old courtyard, moving between dead ivy and broken stone, heading toward the west wing where our intel said L had funneled his men. Alana was ahead of me, steps sharp, shoulders drawn tight beneath her coat. She moved like she knew where he would be. Like she’d been here before—maybe in a dream, maybe in a nightmare, maybe in a destiny she never asked for.“Alana, slow down,” I murmured.She didn’t.She couldn’t.Her hand brushed the st