TABOO (A DEAL WITH THE SHADOW ALPHA) のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 81 - チャプター 90

AXEL“ Just Tell me the truth. Maybe I would spare you ‘Uncle’ Why the fuck did you do all of this?” Silas laughed.Not the laugh I remembered from childhood. Not the low, measured sound that had always meant approval, or the quiet exhale he'd give when I said something that caught him off guard in a good way. This was something I had never heard from him before. Harsh and short and completely unguarded, like something that had been locked behind a door for decades had finally gotten out.It was the most honest sound he had ever made in my presence.And it was the sound of a man who had decided he was done pretending."You want the truth," he said. It wasn't a question. He was already moving past it, already stepping into something he'd been carrying so long that saying it out loud seemed almost like relief. "Fine. Yes. All of it. Every piece of it."I didn't move. Didn't speak. I just looked at him and waited, because I had spent fourteen hours on a plane and thirty five years of my

AXELI let the shift begin.Not the desperate half shift, the one that had cost me Addison and made her scared of me. Not emotion driving it. This was something else. This was standing at the edge of every single thing I was and choosing, deliberately and completely, to stop holding it back.I felt it rise from somewhere beneath my ribs, that power, that thing that had no clean name — the demon, the Kage, the part of me that the pack had been afraid of since before I could walk. It came up slowly, deliberately, like something that understood it finally had permission. My spine straightened. My frame broadened. The world sharpened at every edge until I could hear Silas's heartbeat accelerating, could smell the shift in his scent that meant his body understood what was happening even if he was working to keep his expression composed.The claws came first, black and long, the nails of my hands darkening and extending until they were something no human hand had ever produced. My eyes bur

AXELAt first I didn't see her. Just the empty pavement, a parked truck, the distant red of a traffic light, I turned in a slow circle, using everything I had, sight, scent, sound, looking for anything, any possible sign of her. And then I heard it.Footsteps. Uneven. The specific rhythm of something–no someone—- Addison, they were her footsteps.I turned left.She was half a block down. Moving along the edge of the pavement in the same clothes she'd been wearing for two days, no jacket, her arms wrapped around herself in the way people hold themselves together when they're so cold their body has stopped having any other ideas. Her hair was loose and tangled. She was moving with her head down, not watching where she was going, not watching anything.She stepped off the curb.I didn't see the cab until it was already in motion — coming fast around the corner, headlights sweeping across the street, the driver not expecting anyone to be there at four in the morning on a block with nothi

AXELI couldn't explain it in any way that would have satisfied a reasonable person. I just couldn't make myself go. Every time I got close to standing up and finding my jacket and walking out the door, something in me pulled tight and refused, the same way a rope pulls tight when something on the other end of it is anchored to something immovable. I kept telling myself it was just making sure she was okay. Just confirming she was safe. Just waiting until her breathing evened out and the shaking stopped and Jules had everything under control.But that had been true an hour and a half ago and I was still here.The bedroom had gone quiet. Jules's voice had dropped lower and lower as Addison's responses had gotten slower, sleep pulling her under despite everything, and at some point the talking had stopped altogether and there had been just silence and the small ordinary sounds of the apartment settling around me. The refrigerator hum. The distant noise of the city outside. The specific

ADDISON.Axel. Standing in the middle of my living room with his jacket in his hand like he had been on his way out. Like he had decided to go and I had stopped him and now we were here, in this specific suspended moment, looking at each other across the length of my apartment.He looked terrible.I noticed that before I could stop myself from noticing it. He looked like someone who had not slept in longer than I had, which was saying something. There was dried blood on his knuckles. His jaw was set in that way it got when he was holding something very carefully contained, and his eyes, green, just green now, normal, the same eyes I had looked into a hundred times — were watching me with an expression I didn't have a clean name for. Too many things in it. Too many layers.I also noticed, before I could stop that either, that the fear was still there.It was sitting in my chest, Because this was Axel. This was the man I knew. The man who had made me coffee without being asked and remem