The Alpha’s Shadow Luna의 모든 챕터: 챕터 131 - 챕터 140

LeahIt happened in the village square.I was walking through the market with Turk a few steps behind me, checking on the new vendor stalls that had opened along the eastern wall. The morning was warm, the cobblestones bright under the sun. People were out. Shopping. Talking. Children chasing each other between the market tables. A woman selling bread from a cart waved at me and I waved back, and for a moment, everything felt normal.Then, the ground tilted.Not gradually. Not the gentle sway I’d been managing for the past few days. The world tipped sideways like someone had grabbed the horizon and yanked it ninety degrees. My vision went white at the edges. My legs dissolved beneath me. I reached for the nearest stall and missed, my fingers grasping at air, and the cobblestones rushed up to meet me.I never hit the ground.Strong arms caught me. Keanu. He’d been walking beside me, talking about something, I couldn’t remember what, and he’d moved faster than my brain could process the

DarienI stared at my phone for a long time after the call ended.The hotel room was quiet. The vending machine hummed through the wall. Cain’s snoring had stopped, which meant he’d heard me talking and was awake, giving me the courtesy of silence while I processed what I’d just been told.A virus that was parasitic. Feeding on her magic. Weeks, maybe a month, before it got serious.She’d told me not to come. Made me promise to finish the visits. And I had promised, because in that moment her voice had been steady enough to convince me that steady was the same as safe.It wasn’t.I closed my eyes and pushed out through the bond. Reached for the thread that connected us across the distance, that thin golden line stretched taut between my ribs and hers. I’d been feeling the strangeness in it for days. The muted frequency. The dimmed warmth. I’d blamed distance. I’d blamed exhaustion. I’d blamed everything except the truth, because the truth would have pulled me home before I was ready t

LeahI heard him before I saw him.The sound of running on stone, fast, taking the stairs two at a time. The guards in the corridor snapping to attention. A door opening down the hall and someone calling “Your Majesty” before being cut off by footsteps that didn’t slow.Then our bedroom door swung open.Darien stood in the frame, windswept from being in a hurry, his jacket still on, his tie missing entirely, his silver eyes sweeping the room until they found me on the bed, where Keanu had confined me with strict orders not to move.He crossed the room in a few strides. His arms were around me before I could say a word, pulling me against his chest, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other wrapped around my waist so tight I could feel his heartbeat against my ribs. He buried his face in my hair and breathed in like he’d been holding his breath for days and this was the first air that counted.I held him back. Let myself sink into the warmth of him, the scent of him, the overwh

KeanuThe forest was old.The trees here were massive, their trunks wider than cars, their canopies so dense that the sunlight filtering through looked like it had been chewed up and spit out in thin, golden threads. The undergrowth was thick with ferns and moss that covered everything in a carpet of green so vivid it almost looked fake. The air smelled like wet soil and flowers and something underneath it, something ancient that had no name but made the hairs on my arms stand up.I’d been walking for hours.Cain’s maps were good. He’d marked the likely growth zones for the noctis bloom in red ink, with notes about terrain, water sources, and the “feral supernatural creatures” that populated the deeper part of the forest. His handwriting was surprisingly neat for a man who could crush a skull with one hand. I appreciated the effort. What I didn’t appreciate was the footnote at the bottom of the final map page: Don’t do anything stupid. — CainHelpful.I scratched the back of my ear. T

KeanuNight fell and the forest changed. Tempest said we can’t travel at night and will have to wait until daylight to leave.The canopy blocked most of the starlight, but what filtered through turned everything silver and shadow. The spring beside us caught the glow and held it, changing the water into a ribbon of liquid moonlight. The temperature dropped, the way it does in old forests where the trees hold the cold close to the ground, but I didn’t feel it. The heat beneath my skin was running hotter than it had all day.Tempest had built a small fire. Not with matches. She’d placed her palm against the kindling and it had caught, a flicker of heat that came from her hand like the most natural thing in the world. I’d watched her do it and said nothing. She’d told me to keep her secret and I would. I wondered what she was though.We sat on opposite sides of the fire, the prepared cure cooling in a sealed container between us. The noctis bloom paste had reduced properly. Dark, thick,