บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha Who Lost the Moon: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

Kael's POVThe third night is different.Moonlight comes through the breaks in the stone like it has a purpose. It pools on the altar, catches the silver lines traced across the ruins floor, turns everything pale and luminous and strange. The kind of light that makes it hard to pretend you don't see things clearly.Nyra stands near the far wall, her silver hair loose around her shoulders. The lunar scars trace down her collarbone, picking up the light the way water picks up the sun. She isn't looking at me. She's looking up through a gap in the stone above us, watching the sky.She doesn't know I'm watching her.Or she does, and she's letting me. With Nyra, I can never be entirely sure."You're still awake," she says. Not turning around."So are you."She finally looks at me. Those silver eyes carry the moonlight the same way the ruins do . . . like they were made for it. "What are you thinking about?"You."Nothing specific.""Liar." No heat in it. Just a quiet observation from a wom

Nyra's POVThe kiss changes.I don't decide to deepen it. It just happens, the way a held breath eventually forces its own release. One moment it is soft and careful, and then Kael's hand slides into my hair, and something that has been wound too tight for too long simply lets go.Five years.Five years of carrying that cold thing in my chest, of keeping walls in place, of telling myself I had moved past this. And now his mouth is on mine and my hands are in his shirt and I am pulling him closer instead of pushing him away, and none of those walls feel like they matter anymore.Kael makes a sound low in his throat.That sound breaks whatever remained of his careful restraint.His hands find my waist. Warm through fabric. Steady and certain in that way he has, Kael Draven who makes every decision like he means it, who doesn't touch things he doesn't intend to keep.He lifts me.The stone is solid at my back, cool against the heat of him. I wrap myself around him instinctively, and the

Nyra's POVThe air changes first.Before I see him, before I hear the stone grind and give way at the far wall, I taste it. Copper and old power and something deliberately cold pressed against the natural warmth of the ruins.The kind of cold that isn't weather. The kind that comes from someone who has spent years studying exactly how to unmake things.Dorian Cross steps through the breach in the wall.He looks exactly as I remember. Refined, controlled, dressed like a man attending a formal meeting rather than forcing his way into forbidden ground.Thirty seconds into Shadowpine and he still manages to look like he owns it. That is the particular talent of Dorian Cross: making every room feel like he arrived exactly on time.He looks at Kael first. Then at me.Then he smiles.Not with surprise. With the particular satisfaction of a man whose prediction just came true."Together," he says. The word is almost fond. "Of course."Kael moves in front of me.The gesture is immediate, insti

Nyra's POVThe binding circle closes.And I stop existing the way I have learned to exist.Not dead. Not unconscious. Just... muffled. Like someone pressed a pillow over the part of me that has kept me alive for five years. My power is still there, I can feel it, but it is behind glass now. Pressed back. Held down by something old and deliberate and thorough.I have not felt this helpless since I was twenty-two years old, collapsing on cold stone while a crowd of wolves looked through me.I had promised myself I would never feel this way again.I breathe. Slow. Through my nose.Don't panic. Don't give them the satisfaction.The men holding my arms are not rough, which is somehow worse. Rough would mean they are afraid of me. This careful, practiced grip means they have done this before. They know exactly how much pressure to use. They have handled wolves like me and they are not impressed.Dorian stands to my left, watching.He does not touch me himself.Of course he doesn't."There s

Kael's POVEverything hurts.Not the clean hurt of a wound you can treat. The deep kind. The kind that lives in your bones and reminds you every time you breathe that you pushed past a limit that did not want to be pushed.I am sitting against a wall in the outer corridor of the ruins, the cold stone at my back the only thing keeping me upright. My shirt is gone. Someone wrapped cloth around my ribs, tight and functional. Mira, probably. She is the only person in my pack who treats injuries like problems to be solved rather than moments to be worried over.She is across from me now.One arm in a makeshift sling, fashioned from what looks like part of her own jacket. A cut above her left eyebrow, dried dark, that she has not once touched. Her jaw is set in that particular way she has, where the muscles go tight and she breathes through her nose and she waits.Mira Ashwood has never been afraid to wait.She is waiting now.There are six wolves left in this corridor with us. Six from a p