Lusting After the alpha queen 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 61 - 챕터 70

Nyx's POVThe stone attacked without warning.One moment I was going over supply route adjustments with Rylan, map spread on the desk, two cups of tea between us. The next the cold came — not building, not creeping. A wall of it, slamming through my chest all at once.I grabbed the edge of the desk. The tea went over."Alpha—""Get out," I said."You're—""*Out.*"He went. The door closed.I sat very still and breathed through it.The pain was different this time. Not the spread of something hardening — fractures. Sharp and fast, radiating from the stone in multiple directions at once, each one a burst of cold that went up through my throat and down through my stomach and made my hands shake.I pressed my back against the chair and worked on breathing.Through the bond, I felt Kayden in the training ground — and then I felt him stop. The particular stillness of someone whose attention has just gone from task to alert.*Stay there,* I thought at him. He didn't, of course. He never did.

Nyx's POVWe had four days.I put it on the board in the strategy room — a number, clean and specific — and let it sit there while the room filled with the people who needed to see it.Kayden. Ruric. Torben, who had the face he wore when he was about to argue and was trying to decide if it was worth it. Elder Mira, who had agreed to this meeting by messenger within the hour, which told me she'd been waiting for exactly this kind of specific threat to replace the ambient one.And Lyra, in the corner. Supervised. Nobody warm to her, nobody hostile. The room acknowledging her presence and filing it under *useful for now.*"Silas is planning a forced mate-bond severance," I said. "Dark moon ritual, seven days preparation, he's been at it for three. He needs to perform it within a mile of Kayden and me simultaneously. He needs a fixed structure with existing pack magic, running water within fifty yards." I looked at Kayden. "You said the shrine.""Northeast edge. Packmaster's shrine, pre-d

Nyx's POVWe moved at two in the morning.Six wolves. Me, Kayden, Ruric, and three of the guards Kayden had been training — the ones he trusted, the ones who'd shown they could hold a position under pressure without needing constant direction.No vehicles near the approach. We left them a mile back and went on foot through the tree line, down from the ridge rather than up from the road. Kayden had found this route three days ago and walked it twice. He led without looking back.The cold was good. Sharp and clean. The kind that strips everything down to the task.We hit the perimeter at three-seventeen.The guard rotation was exactly what Elara had described — four positions, fifteen-minute intervals, a gap in the northeast corner between the change. We went through the gap in pairs, twelve seconds each.Like smoke.The north building. I smelled it before we reached the door.Pack scent — layered and old, the way it builds when wolves are held close together for a long time. And undern

Nyx's POVThe fortress felt different when we came back through the gates.Not the stone. Not the towers or the layout or any physical thing. Something in the air — the pack-bond shifting, a collective exhale I could feel from every wolf on the property. Silas's hostages recovered. The leverage gone. The particular tension of *what if he uses them* lifting from the atmosphere.The guards at the gate bowed when I walked through.Not the bow I'd spent fifteen years cultivating. Not the bow of fear or political necessity or the careful deference of people managing a powerful person they didn't entirely trust. This was the other kind. The kind you give someone you've decided to follow because you've watched them do something real.I walked past it without comment.Senna fell into step beside me in the main corridor. She'd been quiet on the drive back — not shut down, just processing. She was a woman who processed in silence and then had very precise things to say on the other side of it.

Kayden's POVMy mother's name was Senna.I had known that. It was in the fragments — a warm, specific voice. But knowing a name as a memory fragment and knowing it as the name of the actual woman sitting beside you in a moving vehicle are two entirely different experiences. The first is a ghost. The second is a person with silver hair and dark eyes and a grip on your arm that says she is not letting go again.My father was Cade. Quieter than I'd expected, or maybe just careful — fifteen years of a locked room teaches you to ration expression. He sat near the window and watched the dark road with eyes that were the same shape as mine.My sister was Elara.Not a staged name, not a prop. The real one. Silas had taken it and used it for the planted girl in Nyx's throne room because that was the kind of cruelty he favored — precise, embedded, the kind you don't notice until you understand the whole picture.I kept looking back at them.I knew I was doing it. I couldn't stop.Senna caught m