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Home / Werewolf / Luna's Reckoning / Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

Lahat ng Kabanata ng Luna's Reckoning : Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

90 Kabanata

Chapter 81

Aria's POVMarcus rode through the northern gate twenty minutes after Creek disappeared into the trees and the first thing he did when he cleared the gate was look for me.Not Garrett. Not Elena. Me.His eyes found me standing in the middle of the compound and something in his expression shifted from the controlled urgency of a man who had been riding hard through dark forest into something quieter and more personal and he crossed the distance between us without stopping to speak to anyone else first."You went out to meet him," he said."Yes," I said.He looked at my face for a long moment doing that thing he did where he checked that I was still in one piece and then he looked at Elena and Garrett behind me and back at me and said, "Tell me everything."We went inside and I told him everything.I did not tell him what Creek had said as he walked away. I held that piece back the way you held a splinter you were not ready to look at yet and I watched Marcus's face while I told him eve

Chapter 82

Aria's POVThe scent stopped me cold.I stood in the middle of the main hall with my hand still pressed against my chest and my wolf locked forward and my entire body doing that thing it did now when something important was happening, going very still and very focused while everything else fell away.Moonridge.The scent was from Moonridge. Faint and recent and coming from the direction of the northern wall where Creek had stood forty minutes ago and spoken his parting words and walked back into the dark.I moved fast through the main hall and out into the compound and crossed to the northern wall and pressed my hands against the stone and opened my wolf senses completely the way I had learned to do since the clearing. Let everything in. Every scent separated from every other scent the way individual threads separated when you pulled them from a knot.Pine. Cold stone. The wolves on rotation. Garrett moving along the eastern wall. Elena somewhere behind me.And underneath all of it, f

Chapter 83

Aria's POVMy father was gone and the northern tree line was dark and Creek was somewhere out there and my wolf was still doing that quiet broken sound inside my chest that I had never heard from her before and I needed to move."I am going after him," I said.Elena stepped in front of me. Not blocking. Just present. "Not alone.""Then come with me," I said.She did not argue. That was the thing about Elena. She never argued about the decision once it was made. She argued before it if she thought it was wrong and then she came with you anyway because that was what she was. The kind of person who showed up regardless.Garrett was already organizing. Four wolves on the eastern rotation pulled to cover the northern approach. Two more on the gate. He looked at me with those steady eyes and said "be careful" in the specific tone that meant he knew careful was probably not going to be possible tonight but he was saying it anyway because some things needed to be said.Marcus was still inside

Chapter 84

Aria's POVThe two wolves were enormous.Not just large the way trained fighters were large. Something beyond that. The kind of size that made the clearing feel smaller the moment they shifted, like the space itself had to reorganize around them. Dark coats. Low stances. Eyes that caught the moonlight and held it in the specific way that said these wolves had done this before and were not nervous about doing it again.Elder Croft stood behind them with his hands clasped and his careful smile completely undisturbed.My father took one step toward me and one of the wolves swung its massive head in his direction and he stopped.Elena moved to my left without being asked, putting herself between my father and the closer wolf with the automatic precision of someone whose body had been trained to do exactly this for years. Her hand was on her weapon but she had not drawn it yet because drawing it changed the nature of what was happening and neither of us wanted to change the nature of what

Chapter 85

Aria's POVThe sentence on my journal cover was written in handwriting I did not recognize.Small and precise and slanting slightly to the left, the kind of handwriting that belonged to someone who had learned to write carefully because careless writing had once cost them something. I stood in my doorway and stared at it and felt my wolf go completely still inside my chest.It said: The True Luna does not need a trial. She needs to shift.I turned the journal over in my hands. No signature. No indication of who had been in my room. Just that one sentence and underneath it a small symbol pressed into the cover in what looked like wax. A circle with a line through it that I had never seen before but that my wolf responded to immediately with a recognition that bypassed my brain entirely and landed somewhere older and deeper.Marcus appeared behind me.He looked at the journal and then at my face and came fully into the room and closed the door."What does it mean," he said."I do not kn

Chapter 86

Aria's POVNobody slept.The compound moved through the hours before dawn with a quiet controlled energy that felt like a held breath. Extra wolves on every rotation. Garrett moving between positions checking and rechecking. Elena doing what Elena did when something was coming, sharpening things that were already sharp and moving through the compound with that loose ready walk that meant her body was already ahead of her mind.Marcus had called everyone in after Garrett confirmed the intelligence about Creek's dawn strike. Twelve trained wolves from three different territories moving toward Redwood through the southern forest. Not a march like Kael's fifteen. No noise. No announcement. These wolves were moving dark and silent and fast and they were maybe four hours out when the information reached us.Four hours.Marcus had deployed his own wolves to intercept positions along the southern approach, using the forest the way I had taught him to use it during the strategy sessions we ha

Chapter 87

Aria's POVMarcus's Alpha command went out before I finished my sentence.Not words. Something below words. A frequency that traveled through every wolf connected to Redwood territory simultaneously and hit them in the chest like a physical thing. I felt it move through me too even though I was not his pack wolf and the fact that I felt it at all told me something about what was happening between my True Luna ability and his Alpha authority that I did not have time to examine right now.Every wolf in the compound responded instantly.The casual rotation positions collapsed into combat formations in under thirty seconds. Garrett materialized at Marcus's left with eight wolves fanned behind him. Elena appeared at my right from somewhere I had not seen her standing and her weapon was already drawn and her eyes were doing that locked forward thing they did when she had identified every threat in a space and was prioritizing them in real time."Twelve wolves," I said to Marcus. "Split int

Chapter 88

Aria's POVOne hour.I read the message three times and felt the weight of the device in my hand and thought about my father and thought about forty years of Creek's crimes and felt my wolf go absolutely still inside my chest the way she went still when something required everything I had.Marcus read the message over my shoulder. I felt him go very still behind me."He has your father," he said."Yes," I said."Aria." His voice was very careful. "Whatever you are thinking right now I need you to talk to me before you decide anything."I looked at the device in my hand. Small and black and no bigger than my thumb and containing forty years of everything Creek had done to everyone he had ever used or destroyed or buried. Deron Vale. My mother. Sienna. Voss. Every name in his network. Every payment. Every order given in dark rooms to people who were afraid of him.Everything.And my father on the other side of it.I put the device in my pocket.Marcus watched me do it. "What are you do

Chapter 89

Aria's POVThe presences in the circle did not move.Seven of them arranged between the trees with a precision that felt less like coincidence and more like geometry, each one equidistant from the next, the space between them charged with something I could feel through my True Luna senses but could not name. Not hostile. Not welcoming either. Something older than both of those things that simply was, the way the forest simply was, patient and permanent and completely indifferent to urgency.Marcus's russet wolf pressed against my side.I felt his question without hearing it. His warmth against my flank asking without words whether we moved forward or back and I stood between the two large pines and breathed the cold forest air and let my senses work.My father was still northeast. Still moving. Still alive, I could feel the particular quality of his fear which was the fear of someone being held not the fear of someone being hurt, and that distinction mattered enough that I held onto

Chapter 90

Aria's POVEverything stopped.The six wolves in the camp below were still turned toward me waiting. My father was still on the ground with his hands bound looking up at the rise. Marcus was completely still with Rowan's blade against his throat and Rowan's hand was steady in the way hands were steady when fear had burned through everything else and left only a terrible calm behind.I did not look at the blade.I looked at Rowan.He looked different from the careful composed regional judge who had sat in council sessions with his pale gray eyes giving nothing away. Three days of running had stripped something from him the same way weeks in the forest had stripped something from Kael, but what it had stripped from Rowan was different. Kael had lost his polish and found something rawer underneath. Rowan had lost his composure and found something that looked uncomfortably close to a man who had run out of versions of himself to hide behind.His gray eyes were on me and they were desperat

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