جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 30

The cavern ceiling split with a crack like thunder.Stone rained down. Dust burst into the air in choking, blinding sheets. Ronan grabbed Kiera and pulled her beneath an outcrop of rock as boulders slammed onto the floor where she’d been sitting seconds before.The ground heaved again—one violent shudder—and then stilled.Silence followed. Too heavy. Too deliberate.Ronan held Kiera against him, one arm braced above her as if he could shield her from the whole mountain.“Are you hurt?” he whispered, his voice roughened by dust and fear.Kiera shook her head, trembling so violently he could feel it through his ribs. Her face was buried against his shoulder, breaths sharp and silent, eyes squeezed shut.Mira coughed somewhere nearby. “The tunnel… it’s collapsing. We need to move deeper before the upper shaft drops fully.”Ronan kept Kiera pressed against him for one more heartbeat—not out of instinct, but because she clung to him with white‑knuckled desperation, fingers twisting into hi

Darkness rushed in first.Not the comforting kind—thick forest night, moon‑lit shadows, breath of pine—but the kind that swallowed sound and space and the edges of memory. The kind that felt constructed, humming with a wrongness she remembered too well.Kiera drifted in it, weightless.Or buried.She couldn’t tell which.Somewhere far above, she heard Ronan’s voice—raw, panicked—a sound she had never imagined could come from him.“Kiera—!”Then stone.A crack.Pain.And everything fell away.She woke on cold metal.A ringing sound pulsed in the edges of her skull—steady, mechanical, like a heartbeat forced through wires.No. No, no, no— She wasn’t here again. She couldn’t be here again.Her fingers curled against the floor, expecting moss, soil, the rough grit of cave stone.Instead—Smooth metal. Familiar. Sterile. Wrong.Her throat closed.This isn’t real. This isn’t real. Her mind whispered it, but something inside her—something buried by needles and commands—rose like an ech

The mountain groaned overhead, a sound like ancient bones grinding in the dark. Dust drifted down in thick curtains. The cavern walls trembled.Ronan didn’t feel any of it.He felt one thing.Only one.Kiera slipping from his grasp.“KIERA!” His voice cracked the way the ceiling did—raw, violent, unrestrained. The kind of panic that ripped out of an Alpha only once in a lifetime.He tore free from the fallen slab pinning his shoulder. Stone split beneath his hands as he shoved upward, muscles straining, claws sparking against rock. The hostile tremor underfoot felt like a heartbeat counting down.Not hers. Not his. The island’s.It wanted them out. Or it wanted them buried. He didn’t care which.He only cared that Kiera had vanished into the dark.Below, he could still feel her. But faintly. Too faint.The bond flickered like a dying ember—the warmth there, the terror, the echo of her breath—but muted. As if something swallowed the link and left him scraps.Ronan staggered forward

Thorn arrived before Ronan could stop him.The cave entrance was still cracked from Kiera’s earlier psychic surge, stone dust floating in the air like drifting ash. The fire Mira had tended flickered low, shadows dancing over the rough walls and over Kiera—small, trembling, curled in on herself near the far corner.Ronan knelt beside her, still in half‑shift, shoulders heaving with leftover adrenaline and fury. His claws were only mostly retracted, golden eyes still too bright.The bond between them pulsed faintly. Weak. Unsteady. But alive.Thorn’s heavy footsteps cut through the silence like an accusation.Ronan didn’t turn. He didn’t need to.He felt Thorn’s judgment like a blade pressed between his shoulders.“She did this,” Thorn growled, voice low and dangerous. “Didn’t she?”Kiera flinched.Ronan rose slowly to his feet.“Watch your tone.”Thorn’s eyes flicked to the shattered cave mouth, the scorched stone, the gouges from Ronan’s claws—and finally, to Kiera. She didn’t meet

The Hunters didn’t advance.Not immediately.They stood in the treeline like a row of living shadows, masks lit white beneath moonlight, guns raised but not yet firing. They were waiting—for orders, for backup, for her to break again. Waiting was their favorite weapon.Ronan didn’t give them the chance.He surged forward in a blur of muscle and fury, claws carving the earth as he charged. Bullets cracked through the air, some sparking against stone, others thudding into the shifting ground where he’d been a heartbeat earlier.Kiera felt every movement through the bond—every burst of adrenaline, every flare of protective rage, every pain-filled jolt when a round grazed him. It flooded her mind like she was living inside him, making her breath lock in her throat.Stop—please—please stop—He didn’t hear the words.He only felt her fear and pushed harder.Two Hunters broke rank to flank him. The bear roared, barreling into one with enough force to snap a tree in half. Kai, pale and shaki