CHOSEN BY ALPHA のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 10

POV: NORA ASHThe white dress was not supposed to get dirty tonight.I had spent three months saving up for it. Sixty-two dollars from the dinner tips I stuffed into a cracked mug behind my bed. The dress was simple ,cotton, lace at the collar and a little too big on my waist because I kept forgetting to eat. But it was mine, and tonight of all nights, it had to be perfect.Tonight is the Moon Ceremony.Every wolf in the Silver Creek Pack had dressed up and gathered at the Stone Clearing to honor the full moon. Couples danced,alphas gave speeches,and real, confirmed mates pressed their palms together under the moonlight and let the bond glow gold between their fingers.Damon had promised me we would be one of those couples this year.I walked fast through the pine trees, my heels clicking on the dirt path. The music was already playing. It was of drums and strings. Laughter floating above the treetops like smoke. I was late because my cousin Sienna had borrowed my only mirror and taken

POV: NORA ASHI woke up to the smell of coffee…..And for three seconds, lying on that hard cabin cot with a folded blanket under my head, I forgot everything. I forgot the Moon Ceremony. I forgot Damon's hand flat against the bark. I forgot the way Sienna's fingers had curled into his shirt like she owned him. I forgot that I had run barefoot across a border in my nightclothes and fallen asleep in a stranger's cabin.Then I opened my eyes and saw the wooden ceiling, and all of it came back.I sat up slowly. My feet ached. The gauze had held through the night, and the cuts were already less angry-looking ,I had always healed fast, one of the only wolf-like things my body did without a wolf to explain it.Cole Vance stood at a small stove in the corner of the cabin. He was wearing a black shirt and the same dark trousers from the night before. His back was turned to me as he poured coffee into a single mug and he did it the way he seemed to do everything ,with no wasted movement and no

POV: NORA ASHThirty-one days.That was how long it took for Creston to start feeling like mine.Not home ,I was careful with that word now, just the same way you were careful with a bruise. Mae's diner smelled different at 5 AM than at 5 PM ,it was quieter, older, like the building was resting. The sound the sticky window made when you yanked it open, always on the third try and with your whole arm.I knew the regulars by name. Freddie, who came in at 7 am sharp every morning and ordered black coffee and said "same as yesterday" even though Mae never wrote it down and never forgot. Old Pat, who ate dinner alone every Tuesday and always left a five-dollar tip on a four-dollar order and never made eye contact. The college girl, Bria, who studied at the corner table on Thursdays and always ordered something with extra cheese and always looked like she had not slept.I liked them…everyone of them. I liked that they came in and ate and left, and that for the forty minutes they sat in the

POV: Nora AshThe napkin is still on the counter when I pick it up.It was Small,white and folded once, like whoever left it wanted it to look like nothing. The number is written in careful, unhurried handwriting.Someone who had time. Someone who was not afraid of being seen. And underneath the number, one word pressed into the paper in the same steady hand:Soon.I did not move as i stood behind Mae's counter with the napkin between two fingers and I let the word sit in my chest the way cold water sits spreading slowly, finding every corner. The diner is almost empty now. Freddie's stool is vacant. The grill is quiet. Outside, through the fogged glass, Creston's evening traffic moves past in yellow headlights, indifferent and ordinary, and nothing about the street tells me which direction the word came from.I turned the napkin over with nothing on the back.My hands are still steady. That is the part that surprises me twice in one night.Mae appears in the kitchen doorway with a dis

POV: Nora Ash…..Until something in my chest locked up tight, like a fist closing around my lungs. Cole already moved the phone back to his ear, two steps toward the back door with his whole body shifting into that mode I have seen once before, the night he found me bleeding in his forest. He was deliberate and every inch of him pointed at the problem.Mae stood off her stool before I could speak."Black Ridge. Your pack."He stopped,turned and looked at me over his shoulder with those pale silver eyes, and what is in them is not panic. It was one with calculation,the kind that happens fast and lands clean."Jared has it." "Six wolves, Cole…" It wasn't a question,although it sounded like one …I instead just wanted to be sure of the significance of having six wolves on the territory. "Jared has sixty-three wolves" he responded while moving his eyes in a calculative manner as though he was trying to prove the number with his eyes.He stepped outside to finish the call and the back doo