Semua Bab The Alpha's Abandoned Mate : Bab 121 - Bab 130

“Don’t come any closer,” Sienna said, her voice low, steady, and trembling all at once as Ryder stepped deeper into the throne hall, the flames from outside casting violent shadows across the stone pillars.He didn’t stop walking.He didn’t look away.He didn’t even blink.“Sienna,” he answered, and her name left his mouth like a wound he couldn’t hide. His voice was rough, scraped raw by smoke, rage, and everything he had been forced to swallow since the night she’d been taken from him. “Move.”Rowan stepped in front of her with his blade raised, jaw clenched tight. “If you want her, you go through me.” Ryder didn’t raise his sword; he didn’t need to. His presence alone shook Rowan where he stood. “Move,” he repeated, voice weighted with a command that wasn’t authority but something deeper, something old and feral and tied to her very bones.Sienna placed a hand on Rowan’s arm. “Stand down.”Rowan stared at her, confused, horrified. “He’s not himself.”“I know,” she whispered. “That’

“Don’t move,” Ryder said, his voice low enough that only she could hear it, yet sharp enough to slice through the smoke around them.Sienna didn’t obey. “If you think I’m letting you face anything alone again, you can forget it.”He shot her a look, half fury, half fear, all love, but he didn’t repeat the command. They stood shoulder to shoulder, blades raised, their breaths uneven as the shadow in the archway grew larger. The firelight stretched long across the stones, bending around the figure like it feared touching her.“Sienna…” Ryder’s voice faltered, and she heard something in it she’d never heard before, not hesitation, not rage, not even pain.Reverence.A cold wind swept through the broken courtyard. The flames bowed sideways, bending in worship or terror. Sienna’s blade trembled as the figure stepped through the fractured archway, her presence warping the air with every movement.“Do you greet me with weapons?” the woman asked, her voice echoing like a whisper inside a cath

“Ryder, look at me,” Sienna said, grabbing his face with both hands the instant the crack streaked across the sky like a wound. Her voice trembled, but her grip didn’t. “Stay with me. Do you hear me? Stay.”“I’m trying,” he rasped, but the curse reacted faster than his voice. It hit him with a force that bent his spine, dragged a guttural sound from his chest, and made the veins along his neck pulse silver beneath his skin. He shut his eyes tight, teeth gritted, shoulders shaking from the effort not to collapse.Sienna slid closer, water dripping from her hair, her breath coming fast. “Ryder, breathe. Breathe with me.”He tried, but the pain carved through him again, sharper this time, as if the crack in the moon had opened something inside him as well.“It’s inside my bones,” he whispered. “It’s… pulling. Sienna, it’s pulling something out of me.”“Fight it.”He forced his eyes open. They flickered between his normal amber and a cold, metallic silver as if someone else was looking ou

“Sienna, do you hear that?” Ryder’s voice cut through the dark as if it carried its own light, quiet but sharpened by instinct and the kind of fear only a hunted man could recognize. His words hung between them while the wind shifted around the ruins, bending the grass as though something heavy moved through it without choosing to be seen. Sienna turned, heart thudding once, hard enough to echo in her ears, her fingers curling around the hilt of the blade she had not yet sheathed. He stood half in shadow behind her, chest rising and falling too fast, as if his lungs fought air that refused to obey him. His eyes glowed faintly, warning her more clearly than anything he could have said. Something was coming. Something not born of earth.“What did you hear?” she asked, though the tremor in her throat already answered for her. Ryder stepped closer, his hand brushing her elbow, guiding her back toward the broken arch of the Moon Gate wall. His touch was warm, grounding, dangerously familia

“Ryder, tell me you hear that,” Sienna whispered, her voice barely strong enough to hold steady beneath the trembling breath that slipped out of her. She didn’t raise her head, didn’t dare look up at the sky again, because the sound was no longer just sound , it was pressure, ancient and deliberate, folding the air around them like invisible hands crushing the edges of their world.“I hear it,” Ryder answered, but the tremor running under his tone betrayed what he couldn’t say. He had lived through wars, curses, betrayals, and nightmares that wore the faces of everyone he ever loved , but this was different. This wasn’t a threat he could outrun or overpower. This was divine punishment given wings, and those wings were beating closer with a rhythm that made the forest floor pulse beneath their feet.They stood at the mouth of a ravine, too steep to descend without risking a fall, too open to cross without being seen. The moonlight above shifted again, flickering like the last heartbeat