Midnight Crown의 모든 챕터: 챕터 31 - 챕터 40

For a suspended moment, nothing moved.Not the air.Not the dust.Not even her heartbeat.Then the chamber exhaled.Slow.Ancient.Assessing.The pressure didn’t vanish.It changed—curling around her like chains deciding whether to tighten or become armor.A faint red glow pulsed within the shard at her feet.Fire waking inside stone.Above, Talia grabbed the railing. “She’s going to break—”“She won’t,” Domenik said, but the strain in his voice betrayed him.The Widow said nothing, gaze sharp as a blade.Eirwen stood trembling, teeth gritted, fingers curled hard enough around the Seal to bruise her palm.Then she saw it.Her shadow.Two shadows.One hers.One beside it—taller, broader, head tilted in a familiar, devastating angle.Lucianus.Domenik’s breath hitched audibly.“The Rift,” the Widow whispered. “Of course.”Heller swore. “What the hell is a Rift?”“The fourth sign,” she murmured. “The one wolves pretend is myth.”The Well wasn’t just choosing Eirwen.It was choosing the b

The Bone Well spat them out reborn.Eirwen’s hands still shook with the aftershock, the pulsing shard pressed to her chest where the Widow’s letter and the city’s oldest secrets throbbed like a second heartbeat. Domenik watched her with something raw and wild in his eyes—a need to claim, to worship, to destroy anything that thought it could touch what was his.They didn’t speak as they climbed. Not yet. The silence was thick with everything they’d become: not king and weapon, but equal and opposite, fulcrum and force, each marked by power no crown could tame.Rain hammered the hidden streets as they emerged. The city itself seemed to hold its breath. Somewhere in the alleys, the Várgr masks melted into the darkness, watching, waiting, knowing the balance of power had just shifted—and the wolves would not hunt her. Not now. Not ever.She felt his presence before she saw him move—Domenik, all violence wrapped in velvet, stalking her through the concrete maze beneath the Crown District.

CITY REACTION MONTAGE — INSERTThe city felt it before it named it.Civic ShadowIn a glassed-in command room three levels below Crown District, feeds stuttered—then corrected—then stuttered again. Analysts argued over false positives and sensor drift. A senior handler muted the room and stared at a single overlay blinking red across half the lower grid.“Power redistribution,” he said finally. “Localized. Non-catastrophic.”“Cause?”He hesitated. “Unknown.”They flagged it as a systems anomaly, downgraded response, and pulled patrols back to defensive arcs.Shadow did not hunt what it could not profile.That hesitation would cost them first.---VÁRGRDeep in the Warrens, bone masks were set aside.Not raised.Not shattered.Removed.An elder wolf pressed two fingers to the stone floor and felt the answer through his teeth. The pack did not howl. They did not advance.They stepped aside.“The Well has spoken,” one murmured.Another bared his teeth. “Then we wait.”They marked no targ

The city’s wolves had always moved as one—until tonight.In the old butcher’s district, they gathered in secret. Bone masks hung forgotten on the hooks. No single Alpha voice held. The air was sharp with arguments, hot with old loyalties breaking.Some insisted, “We follow the Code. Step aside. The old ways do not lie.”Others bared their teeth, hungry for blood. “She’s a curse. We end this before the city runs red.”A single wolf split from the shadows—not for the hunt, but for a challenge.“If the Code chose her,” he spat, “then blood will answer.”It wasn’t a hunt. Not yet. But it was a warning. The city braced for violence that wasn’t about territory, but about meaning.The first blow landed quietly.A Laev courier—a young woman, loyal and clever—never made it home. Her body was found before dawn, throat slashed, the old wolf sigil carved into her palm.The message was clear:You bend the Pack, or the city bleeds.Domenik found the body himself. He stood over her in the predawn, r

The city struck back before the sun rose.Rain battered the glass, drowning neon and siren both, but nothing could mute the alarms rolling across New Eidolon’s underbelly. All night, word spread: Laev was bleeding. Its queen had dared the world to look, and the world hadn’t blinked. Not this time.Domenik was already dressed, dark suit tailored to war, eyes flat and lethal as he checked the feed—one hand on the pistol at his side, the other flexing like he meant to break bone barehanded. Eirwen watched from the bed, still naked, last night’s touch lingering on her skin like a dare she couldn’t take back.She felt the city’s hunger. Every whisper in the comms was about them now—what they’d shown, who they’d lost, how far they’d fall.A soft ping on the encrypted line. Talia’s voice, hollow with shock:“They got Grigori. Shadow moved on the west dock—two SUVs, all silenced weapons. He never made it to his car. The message was clear.”Domenik didn’t curse, didn’t flinch. He was beyond th