All Chapters of The Alpha’s Shadow Luna: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

LeahTwo weeks had passed since Keanu and Tempest came home from the forest with matching marks on their necks, and the whole castle had adjusted around them without anyone saying a word.The kitchen started keeping her bitter mountain tea in stock. The gardeners gave up the entire eastern bed, dedicated to her. Someone moved a chair with a proper back into the solarium, because a pregnant woman needs somewhere decent to sit, and nobody ever admitted to doing it.And every morning I woke up with Darien’s arm across my waist and nothing hurting, nothing draining me, nothing left in my blood but me.“You’re doing it again,” he murmured into my hair.“Doing what?”“Grinning at the ceiling like an idiot.”“I’m well.” I rolled over to face him and found his eyes already open. “I’m allowed to grin at whatever I want.”“You are.” He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, and his thumb stayed against my cheek. “Grin away. I’m going to watch.”We stayed in bed longer than two people with a king

DarienTwo silences had been sitting over my map for weeks. One of them broke on a Tuesday.The reports came in with the morning couriers, three of them within an hour of each other, and by the time Cain spread them across the study table we both understood what we were looking at. The southern rogues were moving again. Not the scattered probing from the weeks before the silence. This was different. Two packs on opposite ends of the southern territories hit on the same night, within the same hour, by groups that struck the weakest point of each perimeter and withdrew before any response could form.“Same night,” Cain said, tapping the two reports. “Same hour. A hundred miles apart.”“Which means communication.”“Which means command.” He straightened, arms crossing over his chest. “Rogues don’t have runners, Darien. They don’t have signal lines or timetables. Somebody is moving these groups like pieces on a board, and they’ve stopped caring whether we notice.”I studied the map. The so

KeanuThe stranger was buying apples when I first noticed him.Tempest had sent me down to the village for sour plums, which she had been eating by the basket lately, and I was three stalls away with a paper bag in my hand when something at the edge of my attention snagged and held.He was nothing to look at. A traveling man of middling age in a good plain coat, road dust on his boots, choosing apples one at a time and turning each in his fingers before setting it in the scale. He paid the fruit seller exactly, to the coin. He thanked her. He said something that made her laugh, and she weighed his fruit with the easy shoulders of a woman talking to the least dangerous person she had met all week.And every scale on my body wanted to stand up.I stayed where I was and picked through plums I had already picked through, and I listened the way the druids taught me to listen, past the market noise, down the thin channel of one voice.“… beautiful country,” he was saying. “The light through

LeahThe quiet held for weeks, and we let ourselves live in it.The stranger turned out to be no one. Cain’s watchers traced him through the pass and down the far valleys to a river town, where he bought passage on a barge and floated out of our lives, a man passing through the world the way people do. The report got read aloud to all of us and the whole room breathed out. The last thing we needed was another enemy right now.Keanu didn’t stand the east wall down. Nobody argued with him about it, and nobody mentioned it either, and the doubled watch just quietly became the way the wall was.Everything else softened. Anton’s reports went boring, which is the finest thing reports can be. The rogues stayed silent, the roads stayed open, and the kingdom went about the ordinary business of feeding itself and raising its children and complaining about the weather, which was doing strange small things over the castle and had been for weeks.That last part had an explanation, and her name was

LeahThe reports went from boring to bad in the space of a week, and then Anton called, which he never did.It was past midnight. The phone lit the ceiling of our room before it made a sound, and I was awake and reaching for it before the first ring finished, because some part of me had been waiting for exactly this since the reports turned.“Leah.”Only my name. No queen graces me, no there she is. Just my name, in a voice that sounded like he had been shouting across a field for a week.“I’m here.” I was already sitting up. Beside me, Darien came awake, and his hand settled between my shoulder blades and stayed there. “Tell me.”“Six nights.” He didn’t waste breath on a greeting either. “Six nights in a row, different point on the perimeter every time, and they don’t run anymore. They hit and they hold and they make us pay to push them back off. We’re paying.”“How much?”“Seven wolves. Nine hurt badly enough that they’re out of it.” A pause I could hear him fighting through. “One o