Alle Kapitel von The Alpha's Prisoner : Kapitel 31 – Kapitel 40

Maya POV I woke in Shadowpeak's infirmary to the sound of Zara's voice, sharp and clinical, cutting through layers of exhaustion I didn't remember falling into."Her wolf is still loose in her chest," Zara was saying to someone I couldn't quite see yet. "The binding reversal is permanent — we confirmed that during the battle. But the integration process is going to be complicated. A wolf that's been suppressed for twelve years doesn't just suddenly know how to coexist peacefully with the human consciousness. There will be surges, periods of disorientation, possibly aggression she can't fully control."I tried to move and realized my whole body ached in ways I didn't have names for. Not injury-pain, exactly — Zara had clearly worked on me while I was unconscious — but the deep, bone-level exhaustion of a body that had shifted hard and fast without proper training or preparation."How long until she can control it?" Ryker's voice, steady and close. He was here. That realization settled

Leo POV I didn't sleep that night. After Zara sent me away from the infirmary, I tried. I went to the room they'd given me—a small, comfortable space in the warrior's wing that was mine for as long as I wanted to stay. But every time I closed my eyes, I was back in that garden, feeling the moment Marcus's trap had closed around us, realizing I'd been used even in my attempt to be honest. I'd wanted so badly to believe my sister saw me as family. And Marcus had weaponized that want so completely that I almost got her killed. Around dawn, I gave up on sleep and went to find Owen. I remembered him from the battle—one of Ryker's senior warriors, the one who'd intercepted me when I tried to leave the infirmar

Ryker POVThe detention cell was in the sublevel beneath the packhouse, reinforced with silver-lined walls that dampened a wolf's strength to something manageable. I hadn't been down here since the night we'd hauled two of Marcus's tranquilized guards out of the wreckage of that vehicle chase, and in the chaos of the following days — Maya's recovery, the shift training, Leo finding his footing — I'd let Kade handle the prisoner's basic processing while I focused on the people I actually cared about keeping alive.Three days was long enough to wait.Kade fell into step beside me as I descended the stairs, a manila folder tucked under his arm. "His name's Reyes. Low-ranking enforcer, been with Silvercrest about six years. Zara cleared him medically two days ago — no lasting effects from the tranquilizer. He's been cooperative with guards, uncooperative with questions.""Everyone's cooperative until they're asked something that matters," I said.The cell door was reinforced steel with

(Ryker POV) — "Sara arrived at Ember House at two in the morning, carried in on a gurney by two exhausted paramedics from the regional medical exchange, and I stood in the doorway of a building that wasn't even finished yet and watched my mate become someone I'd never seen her be before.Not the frightened girl I'd carried out of Silvercrest. Not even the wolf who'd broken a twelve-year binding to save her brother in a garden. Something new. Someone steady."Get her to the room we set up," Maya said, her voice calm and clear, cutting through the paramedics' clipped medical shorthand like she'd been doing this her whole life instead of for exactly six hours. "Zara, I need you to look at the burns on her wrists first—those look infected. Leo, blankets, the soft ones, not the wool. She'll be sensitive to rough fabric."I watched Leo move without hesitation, already halfway to the supply closet they'd stocked that afternoon. I watched Zara kneel beside the gurney with the gentle efficien

Maya POVI was seventeen again, and the basement door was locked.In the dream, I knew it was a dream the way you sometimes do—some small, rational corner of my mind standing off to the side, watching, saying *this already happened, you already survived this, none of it can touch you now.* But knowing didn't stop the cold from seeping into my skin, didn't stop the darkness from pressing in around me the way it always had, thick and total and endless.I was on my knees on the concrete floor. My hands were shaking too hard to hold the pen Marcus had given me. *Sign it,* he was saying, his voice coming from everywhere and nowhere, the way voices do in dreams. *Sign it and the pain stops. Sign it, Maya, or you'll stay down here until you rot.*Except this time, when I looked up, it wasn't Marcus standing over me.It was no one. An empty space where his face should have been, his voice pouring out of nothing, out of the dark itself, and somehow that was worse—because at least when I could