All Chapters of Bound To The Enemy Alpha : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

She's mine.I heard it again on the walk back to the cell. I heard it in the corridor, in the silence between my footsteps, in the space where I was trying very hard not to think.She doesn't belong here. She's mine.I pushed the cell door open harder than necessary and sat down on the edge of the cot with my hands pressed flat against my knees. Wren looked at me. I looked at the wall. She had the good sense not to speak first.Who did he think he was.That was the thing I kept circling back to, the question with teeth in it. Who did he think he was, standing there in that doorway with that expression on his face — controlled, certain, like he was collecting something that had always been his — saying those words in that voice. She's mine. As if the last thing he had said to me wasn't the opposite of that. As if he hadn't looked at me in front of everyone and made his position perfectly clear. Wolfless. Beneath consideration. Not enough.And now he was here. In foreign territory, in st

The healer — the real one, her name was Sable. She was the woman who had raised her stick and spoken the words, and up close she was smaller than she'd seemed in the moment, with deep-set eyes that held the particular quality of someone who had learned to look at things longer than was comfortable. I knew I had to talk to her.Wren was sitting on the low step outside the quarters we'd been given, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, watching the last of the crowd dissolve back into the ordinary movements of village life. She looked up when she heard me coming and the expression on her face — warm, private, the specific look she reserved for moments she'd decided were important — made something in me loosen."Set Heka," she said, soft and deliberate, tasting the sound of it."Don't.""I'm not teasing." She shifted to make room for me on the step, and I sat, and for a moment neither of us said anything. The evening was cooling, the long gold light of late afternoon stretch

The path back was kinder than the one that had brought me here.Wren had found a route that wound through the lower valley instead of over the ridge — longer by time but gentient by effort, the kind of trail that asked nothing dramatic of your body and gave you space to think instead. We walked mostly in silence, which was its own kind of conversation. The trees were different on this side, older and more widely spaced, light coming through in long clean columns that moved slowly across the ground as the morning advanced.I thought about my father's face. The version of it I carried in memory — strong, certain, the particular set of his jaw when he was about to say something he'd already decided. I tried not to think about what version might be waiting.Wren walked close enough that our arms occasionally touched. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.The village appeared through the trees the way home always does — familiar and slightly smaller than memory insists, the rooftops

Her mother came fast. She took one look at Elara and her expression did something complicated — not surprised, I noticed. She was not surprised. She moved with the efficiency of someone who had been expecting this, guiding Elara back to the bed with practiced hands, checking her pulse, her face, the particular diagnostic touch of a woman who knew exactly what she was looking for."She's not well," she said, to me. "She overexerted herself.""Ronan," I said.The word came out flat. Certain. Every piece of it clicking into place with the particular clarity of something I should have anticipated — Elara, in that compound, in Ronan's territory. The greyness of her. The weight she'd lost. He had done something to her. He had—"I need you to do something for me." Her mother's voice cut through it. Calm. Direct.I looked at her."Fireflies," she said. "As many as you can find. There's a hollow near the east creek, behind the mill — they gather there at dusk. Bring them back in something seal

I still had his jacket.That was the thing that made me go back — not sentiment, just the practical fact of it folded over my arm when I walked into my house and my mother gave it a look that I did not have the energy to explain. So I turned around.The pack house was louder than I expected for the time of day. Not celebration-loud or training-loud. The specific low urgent murmur of men who have been given bad news and are deciding what to do with it. I slowed at the entrance without meaning to.A boy came sprinting past me from the direction of the east fields, dirt on his knees, breathing hard. He didn't look at me. He had somewhere to be.I followed at a distance.The room they were in had its door half open.I recognized some of the voices before I saw the faces — the senior wolves, the ones who were always near Kael when something required more than one person's thinking. I had seen them in passing. I had never been in a room with them.I stopped in the corridor and listened.The