All Chapters of Wanted By The Alpha And His Brothers: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Lana's POVTime is a strange thing when you stop trying to hold it still.I have stopped counting the days. Stopped marking their passage by the quality of light through my window or the rhythm of meals or the quiet shuffle of the guard rotation changing outside my door. Those structures belong to a version of me that needed external things to feel anchored. That version is gone. What replaced her does not need to count days because she can feel time moving inside her body, in the slow, inexorable expansion of something that has no interest in waiting for her to be ready.The power is stronger every morning.I feel it when I wake, a hum in my bones that was not there when I closed my eyes the night before, as if my body has been working through the dark hours on something I did not authorize. I feel it when I walk the east corridor, electricity moving along the surface of my skin, barely contained, politely waiting. I feel it when I am absolutely still, lying on my back in the early h

Lana's POVThe great hall of Red Creek has never felt so alive with held breath.I stand at the edge of the gathered pack, my back against the ancient stone, watching the confrontation arrange itself in the center of the room. I should not be here. This is not my pack, not my judgment to deliver, not my moment to claim. But when Bastien came to the east wing with that particular look on his face and said only it is time, I understood that some moments do not permit absence, that there are things you owe your own history.I am here because the truth that is about to be spoken in this room belongs to me as much as it belongs to anyone.Ronan stands at the center of everything. He is every inch the Alpha he was born to be, composed and absolute and carrying the kind of stillness that belongs to someone who has made peace with a very difficult decision. Through the bond, which has been healing slowly in the weeks since Thornwood, I feel what lives underneath the composure. Grief made clea

Lana's POVThe drums do not stop.They have been going for hours before I give up on sleep entirely and sit up in the dark, pressing my hand to my stomach, listening to the rhythm that vibrates through the stone of Red Creek's walls as if the building itself is feeling it. A relentless, patient pulse. Not frantic, not urgent, not the rhythm of something desperate. The rhythm of something that believes it has already won and is simply announcing the fact.Black Thorne and Night Fang.The names move through the manor in whispers by the time dawn begins to grey the windows. Two packs with centuries of history between them and between them and us, forced into alliance not by affection but by architecture. Gideon built this. Not in the weeks since his arrest, not in the months since things began unraveling. Over decades. Over the long, patient decades in which he cultivated relationships and positioned loyalties and created obligations that would survive his personal defeat because they we

Lana's POVMorwen's power presses against mine with the weight of centuries.Everything I have developed in the last months, the Fox fire, the lightning, the truth-sight, all of it has been mine in the sense of recent acquisition. I have been working with it for a year at most. Feeling my way into the edges of it, learning what it responds to, what it refuses, what it is capable of in its current incomplete state. It is strong and real and mine, and it is absolutely insufficient against what Morwen has spent her entire long life becoming.She is not attacking me with malice. That is what I understand as the suppression magic wraps around me in slow, systematic waves. She is containing a danger she genuinely believes in. She has spent centuries watching powerful things move through the world and understands, with the conviction of lived experience, what happens when power and truth combine without control. She is not my enemy in the way that Gideon is my enemy. She is something harder

Idris's POVThe descent is not something I will describe without flinching, even now.I have been through the tunnel once already, when I came up through it to find Ronan and the others, and the memory of the first time did not prepare me for the second. The darkness in it is complete, the kind of dark that does not adjust to, that presses against your eyes with physical weight. The tunnel narrows without warning and widens without pattern, and the sounds of the battle above fade within the first thirty seconds until there is nothing but the breathing of the wolves behind me and the sound of my own footsteps on ancient stone.I lead them. That is my job. That is what I went into the dark to do, to find what was hidden and bring back people who could do something about it.Behind me I hear Ronan, then Bastien, then Kaelia who must have reached the chasm in the last seconds before we descended, then Maison and a handful of Lancaster warriors who followed without knowing where they were