جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 40

The world didn’t fall so much as give way.Metal screamed. Stone cracked. Air rushed past in a violent, choking torrent.Kiera wasn’t aware of the moment she let go of the fractured platform. She wasn’t aware of the moment her body began to fall. She wasn’t even aware of the scream tearing through her mind—RONAN—All she knew was darkness swallowing her whole.For a heartbeat — or maybe a hundred — she wasn’t falling through a tunnel.She was falling through memory.Cold metal walls blurred past her. The buzz of fluorescent lights pulsed above. A blindfold tightened around her eyes. Hands gripped her wrists and ankles. A voice whispered: “Down you go, Subject 3. You always fall.”Her breath fractured.The mountain wasn’t collapsing.The world was rewinding.She slammed into something solid.Pain exploded across her body.The impact knocked air from her lungs—but she wasn’t on the floor of the lab.She was curled on another ledge, twisted at an angle, her hand smacking stone.

The ledge didn’t fall all at once.It tore itself apart in staggered, wrenching lurches—stone splitting, metal screaming, dust exploding upward in choking waves—as if the mountain had decided to devour them piece by piece, savouring every moment.Kiera clung to the wall with bleeding fingers, breath shaking, heart pounding so loud it drowned out every other sound. The creature shrieked below her, scrabbling for purchase, but the collapsing rock tore loose its grip. It tumbled into the abyss with a wet crack of bone against metal.But Ronan—Ronan wasn’t falling.Not yet.He’d wedged his claws into the fractured wall, muscles quivering under the strain of holding the ledge together long enough to keep it from dropping her outright. Every inch of his body trembled with effort, blood streaming down his arm in dark rivulets.“Kiera,” he growled through clenched teeth, voice ragged. “Get—up.”She tried.Her hand slipped.Her knee buckled.Her body felt wrong—heavy, disconnected, like she w

The ravine was a jagged wound carved through the island—deep, narrow, and filled with the echo of rushing water far below. The kind of place where sound vanished, or came back wrong. The kind of place Kiera had avoided since the night she escaped the Hunters years ago.Tonight, she had no choice.Wolves lined the ridge on both sides. Shadows with too many teeth, too much hunger, and not enough fear of death. Ronan stood between them and the small clearing where Kiera crouched, back pressed against a broken pine trunk. His massive frame blocked her from view, claws extended, breath steaming in the cold night air.A storm was rolling in. You could smell it. Taste it. The island felt like it was holding its breath.Kiera—stay behind me. Ronan's voice pressed into her mind, urgent, iron‑steady.She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her throat was tight, every breath shallow, her fingers digging into moss and bark as she tried not to slip into the memories clawing up her spine.The Wolves’ Alp

The device flared white.For an instant, the world had edges so sharp they cut—rain in razored shafts, rock in planes of black glass, the river below flicked into a ribbon of light like metal drawn from a forge. The flare didn’t blind Kiera; it revealed, like someone had peeled the night back to show the frame beneath.Sound went thin.Pressure thickened.The mark at Kiera’s neck didn’t merely burn—it answered. A jolt tore through her nerves, precise as a command. Something old and engineered uncoiled inside her, reaching for the light the way roots reach water.No— she thought, but the refusal skidded on a surface smoothed by years of conditioning.Ronan launched.Hale lifted the device higher, tilting its needle toward the ravine like a conductor’s baton.The flare hit Kiera first.Not as pain.As instruction.Open.Yield.Transmit.Obey.The words weren’t words; they were doors in a hallway she knew too well. Her mind ran for the exits and found only those doors, aching to be used.

The forest had stopped shaking.That was the first thing Kiera noticed.The second was the absence of screaming—her own. The storms inside her mind had finally thinned into a trembling mist. Not gone. Never gone. But quiet enough that she could hear the world again.Rain pattered against the leaves above the cavern mouth, soft and uneven. It should’ve been calming. Should’ve soothed the way it always had on nights when thunderstorms washed the island clean.But Kiera’s breath still came in shivers.Her knees were drawn tight to her chest, hands knotted in the fabric of her torn shirt. Dirt streaked her arms. Blood—hers, Ronan’s, she didn’t know—dried in dark patches along her wrists. Every inch of her body felt brittle, as if one wrong movement would make her shatter into dust.The echo of her power lingered like smoke.It clung to her ribs. To her heartbeat. To the memory of collapsing the forest around her.She curled tighter, desperate to make herself small. Invisible. Gone.But