Alpha’s Forbidden Mate のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 121 - チャプター 130

The season tipped, and with it came a pulse in the city’s pollen—something stronger, narcotic, as if bluebell had at last become tired with the subtleties of liqueur and lust and wanted to reach its fingers into every waking dream. No one in the market slept the same week; even the grandmothers with iron-hardened sleep-fists woke mid-morning with vines knotted around their necks and sap on their tongues. Children were found curled beneath root-lattices, faces stained aquamarine. Some mornings, the river stank of fermentation and flower, and the old market women would mutter at Carolina as if it were her fault alone.Maybe, in a way, it was. She and Mira spent more time in the garden, less at the rafts or councils. Mira walked barefoot even on glass or rust, her hair gone ragged and full of bees. Carolina’s skin stained blue at the knees and elbows; when she bent to weed the starter beds, the stain would creep, petal by petal, up her thighs. Her own hunger grew with the city’s, and the

It started with scavenging: Mira and the twins at the head of a misfit crew, prowling the disaster markets for salvage that still blinked or hummed or otherwise promised to outlast the century. Children zipped between the foragers, trailing wires and odd batteries, bringing rumors of whole server farms unearthed upriver or elevators restored in the bone-white ruins. The city’s edges, once deathly—”feral territory” the Council called it—were mapped with new care, recalibrated day by day as the wild twisted itself through the carcasses of malls and rail depots.Carolina’s part was stone. Her hands, always good for violence, found new grace in demolition and stacking. She and Xander broke the final barriers around the Old Bank and, for two weeks, worked shoulder-to-shoulder with market kids and ex-mercenaries, sorting gravel from brick, glass from mineral. On the third morning, Mira arrived with a sapling taller than herself and demanded a garden basin where the council’s treasury had on

By the time they reached home—if you could call a fourth-floor walkup stitched from war salvage and old council glass “home”—they’d slipped into a mood both giddy and exhausted, more kinetic than romantic, like two kids daring each other to leap off rooftops. Carolina’s hands still buzzed with energy from the parade, her scalp peppered with bluebell confetti that tinted her sweat an iridescent green. Xander fell against her in the stairwell, teeth grazing her collarbone, and she slapped him away, half-hearted, but never broke stride.Inside, the lights over their door flickered in broken code. Xander palmed the latch, swung her in, then shouldered it shut, pinning her to the cold, pitted surface. Carolina didn’t resist, not even when he took her mouth with a full, greedy bite. His arms caged her, hoisting her so her boots lost purchase on the floor, and for once she let herself go slack, her own hunger burning hotter with every second she denied it.She clawed his shirt open, popping

In the early weeks, the new thing inside her was loud. Not in sound, but in need. Salt smothered every craving; between bites of reclaimed toast she sucked bouillon cubes, drank brine from the olive vat, chased it with tongue-burning hot sauce when the world tasted flat. She loathed herself for the delicacy, but couldn’t smother it. The city in springtime went mad and drunk as always, but Carolina moved through it slowed, as if underwater, the bluebell haze making her scalp itch. The twins took to trailing her like personal security, out of a mix of loyalty and raw curiosity. They gleefully debated the genetic fate of her spawn over breakfast—Would it be pack or lone, wolf or “just stubborn as hell?”—and taught Carolina’s stomach how to flip with every deadpan declaration. Late at night, Mira came around, always with bags under her eyes and a file full of rumors to share. She never said “baby” or “pregnant,” as if naming it stole some of the weird magic from the air, but sometimes s

When Vale picked a fight at nine, it was against a Council boy four years his senior, a whisper-line aristocrat whose braces gleamed like gunmetal. The story hit the block before Carolina even heard about it. Unlike Valor, his father—who fought out of calculated necessity, a wolf with cold hands and colder eyes—Vale fought because nothing else in the city made sense. He didn’t fix the world with his fists; he punctuated it. He fought to prove the air was his and the day was made for running your opponent’s nose into the curb, even if you had to lose blood to get there.Carolina, chased down to the street by a panicked Mira (“I tried! I told him to count to ten, and he just growled!”), found the two boys tangled in gutter slush, limbs slippery and every punch direct. No biting: Vale’s one concession to her, though judging by the splatters, he’d considered it.By the time Carolina separated them, both kids were already swapping stories of their wounds, grinning through busted lips. Mira