Her Second Chance Alpha のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 91 - チャプター 100

ETHANMy mother was three miles away, hidden in an old cabin near the western ridge, and I didn't wait for backup."Ethan." Orin's voice came through my earpiece, sounding really urgent. "Let me send a team with you first. Just ten minutes.""There’s no time," I said, already moving. "Every minute she's out there alone is a minute too long.""You don't even know what's waiting for you out there.""Neither do you," I said. "That's exactly the problem."Freya insisted on coming, and I didn't have the strength left in me to argue with her, not after everything we'd just been through. She grabbed a jacket off the back of a chair without even slowing down, already halfway to the door before I'd finished pulling my boots on."You're not talking me out of this," she said like she could read the argument forming in my head before I even said it out loud."I wasn't going to try," I said. "I know better by now."That earned me a small smile, gone almost as fast as it appeared, swallowed up agai

ETHANWe got my mother stable at the pack hospital, though the doctor wouldn't promise me anything more than that she'd survive the night. Every hour after that felt like its own separate war.I paced the hallway first, going back and forth in front of her door, until one of the nurses gently told me to either sit down or leave, because I was making the other patients nervous. So I sat. I placed my back against the cold wall, my hands still shaking from everything that had happened, dried blood dark and flaking on my sleeve where the shadow had caught my arm just hours ago.I didn't move even when my legs went numb underneath me. I couldn't make myself walk away from that door, not after everything, not after finally hearing something close to the truth after months of chasing leads that always slipped away right before they could actually mean something. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her face, pale and broken against that cabin wall, saying words I still couldn't fully make sense

FREYAOrin's evidence was worse than I'd braced for, and I'd braced for a lot in the last few days.He laid it all out on the table in his small office, hands steady even though his eyes weren't. Payments sent quietly over months to an account under a name I recognized instantly because I'd heard it a hundred times growing up.Annie's mother."She's been sick," Orin said. "Two years now. Some kind of wasting sickness that eats through the body.”"I didn't know that," I said, hating how small my voice sounded."Annie never talked about her," Orin said gently. "And you never asked."That got to me a lot. He wasn't wrong. Annie had asked me about my father a hundred times over the years, sat with me through every anniversary of my brother's death, and shown up at my door with wine more times than I could count. And I never once asked her a single real question about her own family, not once in ten years."Where is she now?" I asked."Freya," Orin said, "I don't think that's the question

FREYAMy grandmother had been dead for years. I could still remember how small and quiet the funeral had been, my father standing stiffly in his best suit while they lowered an empty casket into the ground. That was what they told us, anyway, that there'd been nothing left to bury after the accident, and closing the casket empty was the kindest thing they could do for a grieving family. I never once questioned it. Why would I wonder about a lie nobody ever gave me a reason to suspect?And now Ethan was standing in our room holding a letter with her name attached to it like she'd sent it herself."Open it," Ethan said quietly.My hands wouldn't stop shaking as I ripped the paper open. It tore apart easily, and inside was a single folded page, the ink faded to a soft brown, the paper thin in a way that told me it had been carefully kept somewhere for a very long time.The handwriting hit me before the words did. It was achingly familiar, even after all these years, pulling at something

FREYANobody moved for a second. Not me, Ethan, or even the wind through the trees around us, and I remember thinking it was strange that a place this old could go so completely still."What does that mean," I asked. "Born at all? You're saying I was born because of a seal under the mines?"Selene folded her hands in her lap unhurriedly, like she had all the time in the world to explain something that had taken me years to find out."Keepers aren't born by accident," she said. "The Moon Goddess chooses one in every generation. Not by blood alone, though blood carries it. She chooses, and then she waits for that soul to be born into the right family at the right time. Your grandmother was one. You are the next.""Whether I want to be or not," I said, and it wasn't really a question."The Goddess doesn't ask," Selene said simply. "She gives you the gift, and the world decides what you do with it."I sat back on my heels, trying to think about the fact that throughout my whole life, ever