Alpha’s Forbidden Mate のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 80

Xander had never expected to return to sleep so quickly, not after the old nightmares reasserted themselves like the city’s own aftershock, but with Carolina breathing against his chest, each time he woke to the dark all he found was her. Sometimes her fingers were already searching for the seam of his skin to metal, making circuits where broken nerves should be.Mornings thrummed with ordinary urgency. He would wake first, wrap himself in threadbare linen, and go about the early rituals—liquidating the sour grounds from the coffee pot, checking the urchin-roosted perimeter, untangling Lyra from whichever chair she’d commandeered during her half-night watch. Wyn would drift in soon after, feet bare, hair stuck out like a bird’s nest, and help herself to Carolina’s hidden stash of poppyseed rolls. They were a family, Xander sometimes thought, in the sense that a squid and a sparkplug might be called a family if you locked them in a cupboard long enough.He watched Carolina move through

The morning passed in a knot of chores: the perimeter check—mostly ceremonial these days, since even the gangs seemed to have agreed on a mutual pause—then fixing the small leak in the western window, scavenging breakfast from half-stale bread and a tomato not yet mutant. Wyn crept through, eyes raked with insomnia, gave Carolina a silent salute, and vanished into her corner with a drone-guts puzzle. Lyra called up the stairwell for Xander, insisting with a sardonic edge that she needed his “delicate, surgeon’s hands” to unkink a jammed lock on the outer balcony.Carolina let herself be still, for once, letting the last of sleep ripple off her while the windmill canted shadows across the floor. She cradled her notebook on her thighs and made a list: Mustard greens. Potato eyes. They’d need more soap by Thursday and Morgan’s painkillers were running criminally low. She noted Xander’s shoulder, too, an asterisk with a prescription to run diagnostics on the new joint. It was, she reckone

She led him back inside, through the hush-dark rooms and over the spongy slats of the old pine floor. There was a scent in the air, clinging: the salt of sweat, the last spurt of rain from a gutter, the quiet decay of hot compost behind the kitchen door. They moved together not in a rush, but in growing increments, their hands brushing, colliding, tethered as if a silken cord passed wrist to wrist.Xander followed her into the sleeping loft, where the sheets—washed just last week—already smelled like both of them. The wind outside had picked up, rattling somewhere on the far side of the city, but here it was all hush. He watched her, the slow deliberate way she undressed, peeling her shirt with one hand, never breaking his gaze. The cicatrix of white just under her ribs caught the morning light, a pale worm twist from some bullet years ago. Above it, a small tattoo he'd never noticed before—a crooked star, inked in the shake of someone's left hand.She caught him looking and flopped o

The city had shifted in the storm. Rain softened its edges, blurring the graffiti and trash, lending a new hush to the morning. Xander and Carolina moved together under the too-small tarp, their feet sloshing through pooled water and broken glass. Her free hand clutched a jar—last season’s dried beans, for barter or for comfort.At the tunnel, the world funneled would-be refugees and the desperate into a seamed line, heads down, faces set. Curfew or not, everyone seemed to know something was coming. The checkpoint was a pair of bulkhead doors humming with scanners and chipped paint. Just beyond, two guards in patched plastisteel watched the line, boots sunk in mud.Jensen was easy to spot—wiry, hollowed by hunger but still hinting at old muscle, a telltale shock of blond twisting from his hood. He didn’t wave, just jerked his chin toward the queue, then turned and walked through, trusting Xander to follow.Carolina slipped her fingers into Xander's, the motion fierce and covert. “If t

For a while, there was only morning. The hard-won quiet of far fields, the distant shin of wind-turbines and the acrid memory of smoke carried by a gentler wind. The seed bundles were stashed against the threat of wet, the children asleep in a fort built of scavenged polycarbonate, and all around them the ground exhaled a new green.Carolina propped a boot against the low wall, methodically scraping the mud from treads. She watched Xander work with a kind of detached satisfaction, as if she were the mother of all problem children and their messy fates, herself included, and had finally, at last, gotten the joke.He was coaxing the first sprouts from the germ chamber, taping up a plastic hood to keep in the warmth. Lido and Sisko circled like half-tamed dogs, eager to claim the first bite of anything edible. Xander caught their hunger and let it spark a ghost of pride. He wanted to say something lasting, but the day was too golden for speeches.“Don’t just stare,” Carolina said, flicki