All Chapters of Her Three Alphas: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Lyra's POVThe northern coordinates came in that morning, and I read them twice before I even reached for my coffee. Nadia set the tablet on the breakfast table with that particular economy of motion she had when the news she was delivering required its own space to breathe, three glowing clusters of markers pulsing against the terrain north of Moonveil, quiet and insistent, the way distant fire looks when you have not yet decided whether to walk toward it or away. I looked at them and felt the familiar pull of the silver light inside me, not a surge, not a warning, just a quiet recognition. They were there. Sixty, seventy, possibly more people. And they had been surviving in the cold and the silence while the rest of the world went about its business of not looking for them."How many?" I said, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was a small mercy in a morning already crowded with things that required steadiness. Nadia gave me the numbers carefully, eight to twelve in t

Thorian's POVI had always understood, in the abstract, what it would mean to share a mate. The old texts spoke of it plainly enough, three brothers bound to one woman by the moon's will, a convergence so rare that most wolves went their entire lives without witnessing it. I had understood it in the way you understand things that have not yet happened to you: intellectually, with the part of your mind that processes facts and arranges them into frameworks. I had not understood it in the body. In the gut. In the specific and unmanageable territory of watching Soren hold her hand across the narrow path between their horses and feeling it land somewhere behind my sternum like a stone dropping into still water.The feeling was not simple. I had been expecting jealousy and received something that was jealousy and also its opposite simultaneously, a recognition, almost painful in its precision, that what passed between Soren and Lyra was real and true and deserved to be real and true, and t

Lyra's POVForty-three people emerged from the hollow in pieces, first two scouts who had the sharp, particular wariness of people who had been making decisions under pressure for long enough that the wariness had become the whole of their resting expression. Then a woman I took immediately for their leader: tall, iron-haired, the kind of person whose stillness conveyed authority the way other people's voices did. Then, in groups of two and three, the rest of them, coming forward with the slow deliberate movement of people who had learned to never move too quickly toward anything, even things that might be safe. I held the silver light steady and open and did not move toward them, letting them come to me at whatever pace their nervous systems required.Cole found her, the woman he knew from the old networks, in the middle of the group, thinner than he remembered and walking with a care that suggested a recent injury. I watched him cross the space between them and gather her into his a

Lyra's POVThe house was quiet by the time the last of the ninety-three people had been settled, fed, and given beds in the extended wing that Thorian had had prepared while we were still in the north, another thing he had done without fanfare, without waiting to be asked, simply because he had understood what would be needed and had moved to provide it before the need fully arrived. That was so entirely and specifically Thorian that I had stopped being surprised by it and had started being moved by it instead, which was a different and more dangerous condition. The move from surprise to moved had happened sometime in the past month, quietly, without announcement, in the same way all the significant things between us had happened.I found him in the study at the end of the hall, the one with the wide window that looked out over the dark garden, standing with a glass of water in his hand and his jacket off and his collar open, which was the version of him I had not been permitted to se

Lyra's POVVaelin was waiting for me in the garden at midday. I found him on the low stone wall that ran along the southern edge, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the middle distance with the look he wore when he thought no one was watching, less easy, less uncomplicated than his public face, something quieter moving through him. I had been learning the private Vaelin in pieces for months, collecting each glimpse the way you collect things you know are rare, and each piece confirmed what the pieces before it had suggested: that his ease was real but it was also a kind of generosity, a choice he made to be the warmth in a room so that others did not have to find their own. And that the choosing sometimes cost him things he didn't talk about.He heard me coming and rearranged himself, not completely, not dishonestly, just the small natural shift of a person who is used to being the lightest presence in a room and has not yet fully decided whether to stop. I sat besid