Lahat ng Kabanata ng Alpha's Regret: The Forsaken Luna: Kabanata 131 - Kabanata 140

Darius's POVFive years after the Bloodletter attack, Crescent Moon held a remembrance.Not a performance of grief — we'd been careful about that distinction from the beginning. A remembrance: names spoken, a space made for the people who were still carrying the cost of what had happened, and then a meal together in the great hall that moved from quiet to warm over the course of an evening.Twenty-seven dead. The number hadn't changed. It never would.But the pack around it had.I stood at the eastern border that morning in the early light, the place where the pack had gathered all night waiting for Rhiannon to return with Soren. The frost was still on the grass. In the low light the yard looked exactly as it had then — same trees, same border markers, same line between our territory and the dark.Different weight.Cade came to stand beside me.He did this sometimes — found me in the early morning at the places that mattered and stood beside me without requiring conversation. Twenty y

Rhiannon's POVHe found me at the river on a Tuesday morning.This was its own category of information — Marcus found people when he had decided to find them, and the river was a place I went when I needed to think without the packhouse's ambient attention. That he knew this and came there anyway meant he'd decided whatever he had to say was worth the interruption.I was watching the water. He sat on the bank beside me."Ten years," he said."Approximately," I said."Since the Forbidden Zone contract. The one that went wrong." He was quiet for a moment. "The one where I took the blade meant for you."The one where Soren had cried for hours watching his breathing. The one where I'd told Soren: it's okay to be sad. Sadness means you care."Yes," I said."I've been thinking about it," he said. "Not the blade. The after." He looked at the river. "The way you ran the Silver Claws. The way you built it from nothing." He paused. "I've been with you from the beginning. Before Soren. Before th

Rhiannon's POVThe middle seal spoke to me for the first time when the twins were nine.I'd been doing the regular assessments — once a month, Sera monitoring, the Primordial layer in my blood touching the seal's architecture at a distance and confirming it was stable. This had been the routine since Lyra's warning, six years of maintenance checks that Sera called seal-listening and I called the monthly appointment with the oldest thing in the world.It had always been passive before. I reached. The seal was present. I confirmed its condition. I stepped back.This time, when I reached, it reached back.Not with language. Not with anything I'd call communication in the ordinary sense. With the particular quality of very old things acknowledging attention — the way a mountain doesn't respond to your presence but is unmistakably different when you're on it versus when you're not. The seal knew I was there, and it showed me something in return.The weakness.I saw it the way you see somet

Rhiannon's POVWe gathered in the records hall before dawn.Not just the household — the whole pack knew. Word had moved through Crescent Moon the way significant things moved, which was overnight and through every channel simultaneously and with the particular quality of information that people had been waiting years to receive. By the time the sun came up the hall was full and the yard beyond it was fuller still, wolves pressed at every window and door with the quiet of a community holding its breath.I stood at the front.Darius to my left, his hand in mine. Soren to my right — seventeen years old, healer-trained, and still carrying his practice sword on principle. Behind us: Marcus, Sera, Thorne, Cade, the whole architecture of what we'd built.The twins were in the centre.Lyra stood at the middle position — the seer's position, the one she'd understood was hers since she was old enough to understand positions. Her eyes were half-closed and I recognised the particular quality of

Rhiannon's POVShe gave it to me that evening.The hall had cleared by degrees — the pack celebrating first in the great room and then spilling outside, the particular warmth of an occasion that had been anticipated for so long that when it arrived it found everyone already ready to receive it. Soren had disappeared into the crowd at some point with the ease of someone who moved through large gatherings comfortably now, which was a thing I still occasionally needed to confirm was true about my eldest child.The twins were with Malachar.This had happened naturally, without orchestration — Kael and Lyra moving through the room and finding themselves alongside him, and none of the three appearing to find this surprising. Malachar was asking questions about the seal repair and Kael was answering them with the patient precision he brought to technical matters, and Lyra was drawing something in the small notebook she carried everywhere now, occasionally offering a correction.Caelum was wi