《THE WRONG MATE (One month of lies)》全部章節：第 111 章 - 第 120 章

Celeste’s POV “AMBUSH!” The shout barely registered before Bellamy surged forward inside me. Danger. I dropped low again as another arrow shot past my head. The shaft missed my face by inches before disappearing into the darkness behind us. My pulse exploded. The forest around us suddenly came alive. They keep increasing. Some wore masks. Others openly displayed the markings of rogue packs. I couldn't let them have their way. So I joined in the fight. I didn't bother shifting into Bellamy. My sharp claw elongated, as I dashed into the fight. Two rogue wolves attacked me immediately, but I could sense them approaching even before seeing them. I fight them off, my claw dug out of their heart, while I scratched off the other rogue’s face. Lucian’s sword was already in his hand. “Protect the princess!” The command echoed across the road as several guards immediately formed a defensive circle around me. Steel kept clashing, someone screamed, and the scent of blood hit the air.

Celeste’s POV The news shattered the stillness of dawn, seeping into the capital like a dark foreboding mist. By the time breakfast arrived, the palace corridors buzzed with hushed whispers. By midday, those whispers had morphed into heavy, grim discussions, and by evening, the unsettling truth had gripped the entire kingdom: Stone Ridge had fallen. I found myself in the royal war room, my eyes fixed on the sprawling map that dominated the central table. Military commanders, advisors, and council members surrounded me, their voices rising and falling in panic. Red markers now dotted the northern territories, spreading like a contagion. Each one signified an attack, a shattered settlement, a severed supply line, or a village forced into hasty evacuation. For generations, Stone Ridge Fortress had stood as an unyielding guardian of our northern border. It had represented safety and resolve—a fierce promise that our enemies would never breach those mighty walls. Now, those once-im

Celeste Pov The refugee camps were worse than the reports had prepared me for. Rows of makeshift shelters sagged across frozen ground, crammed with families who had fled Stone Ridge with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever they could carry in their arms. Children sat in silent clusters near the healer tents, their faces carrying that particular vacancy — the hollowed-out stillness that comes from witnessing things no child's mind is built to hold. I moved through the camps for hours. Crouching beside elderly villagers who had been carried out of their homes on someone else's back. Sitting with mothers who couldn't stop watching the northern tree line like they expected the enemy to appear at any moment. Kneeling beside wounded soldiers who looked genuinely startled that a princess had bothered to come at all like they had already accepted that they'd been forgotten out here. I made sure they understood they hadn't been. Adrien stayed close throughout, never

Celeste's POV Three days had passed since the battle. Three days of the same routine, waking before dawn, checking the latest search reports before breakfast, sitting through briefings that ended the same way every time. No confirmed sightings. No new evidence. No answers. The capital had welcomed me back with the kind of careful, hushed sympathy that people reserved for grief they didn't know how to name. No one called it grief outright. No one said the word. Adrien wasn't confirmed dead, which meant the palace existed in a strange suspended state — not mourning, not celebrating, not anything. Just waiting, with that particular tension that comes from a question that refuses to resolve itself. I had thrown myself into Foundation work the way I always did when I didn't know what else to do with my hands. Aid distribution to the northern refugee camps. Coordinating healer rotations along the border. Writing letters to families of soldiers lost in the eastern ridge assault. Keepi

Celeste's POV Nobody knew the full extent of it. That was the part I was most careful about, the part I managed with deliberate precision every single day. The council knew I was monitoring search efforts. General Marcus knew I had requested updates on every confirmed sighting across the northern and eastern territories. The Foundation teams knew I cross-referenced intelligence reports as part of standard post-battle protocol. What none of them knew was that I was doing it alone at two in the morning, cold tea forgotten at my elbow, maps spread across every surface of my private study while the rest of the palace slept. A merchant traveling the outer territories who claimed he'd seen a large dark-haired man moving with a woman through abandoned settlements. A border scout reported a stranger matching Adrien's description near the collapsed ridge structures three miles inside enemy land. A letter from a village healer two territories east describing an injured man with no name