All Chapters of The Alpha’s Shadow Luna: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

LeahHe kissed his way down my stomach, over my hip, along the inside of my thigh, and when he settled his shoulders between my legs and looked up the length of my body at me, silver eyes gone molten in the lamplight, I forgot every word I had ever known.Then his mouth was on me and I stopped trying to remember any of them.He took his time. He always did, but this was something else, slow and deliberate and merciless, and he held my hips down when I tried to move because he had decided the pace and he was not interested in my opinion about it. He knew exactly what he was doing. He’d learned me over months of loving me and he used every bit of it, building me higher and then easing off the second before I broke, again and again until I was shaking and pleading and pulling his hair hard enough to hurt.“Please. Darien, please.”He hummed against me, and that alone nearly finished it.“Say it properly.”“I need you. I need you, Darien—”He gave me what I wanted.I came apart with his n

KeanuI woke as the gray light started to spill through my window.For weeks I’d been waking like this, before dawn, my body trained by the druids to rise in the quiet. But this morning was different. This morning there was no training waiting for me, no fireproof targets, no Eldric staring at me like a disappointed tree. This morning I had another mission. I was going back to the forest.Leah was cured. I’d kept my promise. Her first, and now she was whole again. She was laughing and energetic like a normal person. Now I could focus on the ache behind my ears that I’d been shoving down for weeks. Finally, it was allowed to matter again.Tempest.The musk pulsed at the thought of her name, steady as a second heartbeat, the way it had every single day since the night she left me sleeping on that moss. The suppressants had kept it manageable through the training, but managed wasn’t gone. Nothing about her was gone. She was still out there, hiding from me, and I was done waiting.I dress

KeanuThe market kept moving around us like the world hadn’t just changed.Vendors shouting over each other. A cart rattling past on the cobblestones. Somewhere behind me a child begging his mother for sweets, and none of it reached me, because the only real thing in the entire city was the woman in front of me and the second heartbeat hidden inside her scent.“You’re pregnant.” The words came out in a rough growl. “You’re carrying my child.”“Yes.”No flinch. No denial. She said it the way she said everything, plain and level, and the calm of it knocked the air out of me harder than a lie would have.She turned to the gray-haired woman at the next stall, said something about watching her table, and then walked into the narrow side street between two buildings without checking whether I followed.Of course I followed. I would have followed her anywhere.The side street was cool and quiet, the market noise fading behind us, and she stopped beside a stack of empty crates and faced me wi

LeahTempest was a jittery person. She looked like she was always looking for the best ways to escape.I watched her do it from the moment we landed in the courtyard, her green eyes sweeping the walls, the gates, the guard rotations, taking in everything with the quick efficiency of a woman who had spent her whole life planning escapes. She carried one bag. She refused help with it. And when I showed her to the guest room beside the gardens, she stood in the doorway and looked it over the way a soldier looks at a cell she’d agreed to occupy.“The room is next to the garden,” I said. “I thought you’d want growing things nearby.”She turned and looked at me, and for just a moment, the wariness cracked and something surprised moved underneath it. She blinked, recovered, and gave me a short nod.“… Thank you.”Two words. But I’d seen the crack. Her fortress had a gate. It could be reached with small kindnesses, the sort she didn’t know how to defend against because no one had ever bothere

TempestThe room they gave me was a good room, and I distrusted it immediately.Two windows, one door, nine steps from the bed to the garden wall if it ever came to that. I counted them, because counting was how a hunted thing stayed alive, and I had been a hunted thing longer than I had been anything else.By the third day, I had the whole kingdom mapped. By the fourth, I had memorized the patrol schedule. By the fifth, I had learned something that unsettled me far more than any of it.This place refused to behave like a trap.I kept waiting for the catch. There was always a catch. Kindness was a currency, and currencies got collected, and somewhere beneath every warm welcome I had ever been offered, there had been a cage with my name on it. So, I watched them, this strange, loud family, waiting for the angle to show itself.The bear general threatened to remove someone’s head at least once a day, always someone he clearly loved, and the threats landed like embraces. The king command