Luna of the Lost Alpha のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

Darren sat alone in the dark room, staring at his hands. They were trembling. He curled them into fists, trying to force the shaking to stop, but it only became worse. His breathing was uneven, his chest rising and falling as though he had just returned from a fight. Yet he had not moved from the chair for almost an hour. The room was silent except for the faint ticking of the clock on the wall. Darren closed his eyes. His wolf was restless. It had been restless since the moment Mariah had been exposed. At first, Darren had thought it was anger. Then he had thought it was betrayal. But now, sitting alone with nothing to distract him, he was beginning to understand that something was seriously wrong. His wolf did not simply hate what had happened. It hated him. Darren opened his eyes slowly. "Why are you doing this?" The voice inside his mind answered with a low growl. Because you keep doing the same thing. Darren's jaw tightened. "I don't understand." You blame eve

Kaira told herself it was exhaustion.That was the easiest explanation, the one she repeated to herself every time she caught her eyes lingering a second too long on Darren across the training grounds, or the war room, or the corridor outside his father's study. Exhaustion made people careless. Exhaustion made old feelings rise to the surface when there was no energy left to keep them buried.It had nothing to do with the way his voice had softened lately.It had nothing to do with the way he actually listened now, in meetings, instead of staring past everyone like the words weren't worth his attention.It had nothing to do with him at all.She told herself that every night, and every night it became a little harder to believe.---It hadn't always been complicated.There had been a summer, long before any of this, when Darren was simply the boy who waited for her outside the training hall because he liked walking home the long way, past the river, so he could throw stones and pretend

The days after his wolf's slip of the tongue passed differently for Darren, though nothing about his schedule had changed. He still trained with the warriors each morning, still sat through his father's meetings, still walked the same corridors of the pack house he had walked his entire life. But everything felt heavier now, weighted with a suspicion he couldn't shake and didn't know how to voice, and he found himself watching his own reactions the way a stranger might watch them, waiting to catch himself doing something he hadn't chosen to do.It had started small. A flash of irritation during a training exercise that felt sharper than the moment warranted, gone almost as quickly as it came, leaving behind only the uneasy sense that it hadn't fully belonged to him. A flicker of something cruel crossing his mind when one of the younger warriors stumbled through a drill, a thought so unlike anything he wanted to think that he'd flinched away from it before it could take shape into word

Lucas was exactly where he'd promised to be, seated on the low stone wall outside the library doors, patient in a way that made Darren's chest ache with something close to gratitude. He rose the moment Darren stepped out into the morning light, his eyes moving quickly over him, searching for whatever damage the library might have left behind."You're pale," he said."I found what I came for." Darren's voice came out rougher than he intended.Lucas studied him a moment longer, then simply nodded, and started walking, matching his pace to Darren's without asking him to explain himself before he was ready. They walked in silence through the overgrown path, the pack grounds slowly coming back into view beyond the trees, and Darren found himself grateful, again, that Lucas had never once been a man who demanded answers faster than they could be given."It's not my wolf," Darren said finally, when the silence had stretched long enough to feel safe. "Whatever's been living inside me since I

The horn sounded just after midnight.Not the pattern for a drill. Not the pattern for a routine border check. The long, unbroken note that every warrior in River Shine Pack had been trained since childhood to recognize and fear, the sound that meant the enemy was no longer waiting beyond the tree line.Kaira was moving before the second note finished echoing across the grounds.She had slept in her armor for three nights running, some instinct warning her the waiting was nearly over, and now she took the stairs to the western wall two at a time, warriors falling into formation around her as Alpha Farris's voice rang out across the pack, calling every fighter to their positions.The dead forest, usually a distant black smear against the horizon, had come alive with movement.---Darren reached the wall moments after she did, his father close behind him, and for one brief instant, before the chaos fully swallowed them, his eyes found hers across the torchlit dark.Neither of them said