All Chapters of THE ALPHA'S RELUCTANT BRIDE : Chapter 91 - Chapter 96

Chapter 91The hollow held them for the space of a single shared breath before the two approaching forces closed the distance. Damien kept Zara and the children inside the stone circle because the carved ring was the only ground that had ever answered the bloodline on its own terms. Elias and Liora pressed close, gold light flickering around their small bodies in restless sheets that brightened whenever the residual glow from the shaft or the many-faced presence from the trees drew nearer. The surface air smelled of smoke and pine and the chemical sting of whatever ordinance the governments had already spent on the surrounding forest. The war had not paused while they were underground. It had only widened. Yet the immediate threat was not the rotors in the distance. It was the claim that had followed them up through stone and water and dark and now stood on two sides of the same hollow, patient and unfinished.The residual gold that had climbed the shaft spilled out of the roots and b

Chapter 93The blade of gold light left Liora’s small hand before anyone in the broken family had time to finish the word that might have stopped it. Damien moved on the only instinct that had never required a wolf, putting his body between the radiance and his son even as Zara reached for Elias from the other side. The blade did not strike like a weapon made to kill. It struck like a claim made to finish. The light passed through Damien’s shoulder in a burn that stole the breath from his lungs and continued into Elias as if the father’s flesh had been only a delay and never a barrier. Elias’s gold eyes went wide. The fracture he had held open since the underground chamber flared once in desperate recognition and then began to close from the inside as his sister’s finished power poured into the places where his own remaining human self still lived.Zara caught him as his knees folded. The boy’s body arched against her with the same terrible stillness that had taken Liora in the first

Chapter 95The marksman’s shot cracked through the trees a half-second after Elias’s blade brightened toward Zara. Damien had already moved. He drove into her side and took both of them under the water as the round tore through the space where her head had been. The cold closed over them. Elias remained standing in the shallows above, the finished light in his palm still aimed at the place his mother had occupied, the listening that had kept him from firing the blade now stretched so thin it flickered like a dying filament. Liora watched from the bank with the same flat calm she had worn since the second circle. The residual presence from the shaft spread farther across the surface of the creek, its metallic scent thickening until it coated the back of the throat even under the water.They surfaced against the undercut bank again, gasping. Damien kept Zara pinned to the roots with his body while he checked the angle of the next likely shot. The marksman was repositioning. The vehicles