Lahat ng Kabanata ng SHADOWS OF THE ALPHA: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 28

Morning broke like a verdict. The air had that tightness it gets before a storm, except the storm was us—our tempers, our suspicion, our need for a name that would make fear manageable. The Holdfast had rebuilt just enough of its routines to remember what disruption felt like, which is why the sound in the yard landed like an axe.Two men dragged a third between them, his wrists bound, his lip split, his shirt ripped at the shoulder. His eyes were wild, not with guilt, but with disbelief at how fast loyalty had turned into spectacle. Jason walked behind them, rope coiled neat, jaw tight, fury braided into his spine like extra vertebrae.They threw the captive down in the ash-ring where the hall had burned. His knees hit hard enough that dust lifted and drifted like smoke. He spat blood into it. Someone’s cousin. A boy who had laughed too loud last festival. His crime was not yet named, but the crowd was already making him guilty with their eyes.Jason raised his voice, and it cracked

They took me through a forest that did not know my name.The path was not a path so much as a decision the rogues kept making with their boots. We moved in a file that swallowed noise. Nets hissed along branches and gathered back like patient spiders. The bone shackles sang under my skin, a cold hum that taught my wolf the shape of a cage. Every time she lunged, the hum tightened. Every time I breathed, it counted.The shard heir walked ahead as if the trees had been taught to part for him. His shoulders were straight in the way boys learn when someone corrects them with silence. He didn’t look back. Ronan didn’t need him to. The rogues flanking me smelled of cheap electricity and old river iron and a discipline I didn’t want to admire.We broke from pine into stone. The hollow was not a camp; it was a diagram. Torches stabbed the ground in a twelve-point ring, notched at each post with old symbols—wolf, river, blade, moon, home, debt. Between the posts, corded lines of sinew stretche

Dawn came like a held breath—thin, brittle, the sort of light that makes everyone look more guilty than they are. The Holdfast moved with an economy born of men who have practiced disaster and claim to be finally bored of it. We set traps not because we liked violence but because we understood that choice looks tasteless if you offer no consequence to those who choose wrong.Word ran like a rumor with good timing: Ronan’s forces were near, not a mass but an advance. Scouts had seen movement along the ridge. Cameras—some ruined, some repaired with cheaper lenses—blinked like injurious beetles in trees. The ash-eyes had been scraped and re-scraped; Thorn had stayed up all night with a soft knife and a grimmer patience. The ledger sat in the kitchen now like an accusation with pages, and people ate with the sort of neat hunger that has little time for dessert.Vivian convened the circle at the creek. The sky was hard and white. Packs from neighboring lines—neutral until the sight of bloo

The dawn before Court tasted like coins and pine sap. The Holdfast rose early without needing to be called. The air had that tense, clean feeling of a kitchen scrubbed after a long night—ready to be made messy again, but proud of the shine for a heartbeat. Children peered from doorways they were not supposed to leave; elders wrapped shawls around shoulders that remembered older trials with worse poetry; the creek put itself to the work of going, which is all water can be begged to do.Vivian stood on the porch step and tied Elara’s blue back on the beam with deliberate fingers, as if knotting it now would help it hold when hands were shaking later. Jason checked his lists with the intensity of a man who knows the difference between order and the appearance of it. Lyra tucked three knives into places where a court would pretend not to notice them. My mother pressed a heel of bread into my hand and said nothing because there are days when even mothers know words would be rude to the thr