EVEN ALPHAS KNEEL: The Rejected Mightiest Luna 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 101 - 챕터 110

Chapter One Hundred and One POV: Reuel AshtonI had been thinking about laughing for three days.Not obsessively. Not in the way that desperate men thought about things, circling and returning and unable to move past them. But in the specific way I thought about things that mattered, methodically and with genuine attention, because the almost laugh was information and I had always been very good at knowing what to do with information.What it told me was that the wall was not a wall anymore. It was a door and it was not locked and it was not open but it was a door and doors responded to the right kind of pressure applied at the right moment in the right way and I had been applying the wrong kind of pressure since the ceremony because I had been applying strategy and strategy was not the right instrument for this particular situation.I had understood that at the ridge. What I had not yet understood was what the right instrument actually was.I am beginning to understand it now.I w

Chapter One Hundred and ThreePOV: Kael DravonThe marker stone came into view before the smell did, and the smell arrived before either of us was ready for it, something faintly sweet underneath a layer of scorched earth, the exact combination I remembered from the northern border the night the tears first opened.I stopped Sera with a hand at her waist before she reached the stone itself."Let me look first," I said."I am the Veilborn," she said. "This is exactly the part that is mine to look at.""I know what you are," I said. "I am not telling you to stand back because I doubt what you can do. I am telling you because I want one set of eyes on the ground before either of us touches anything, and mine are the eyes that have done this before."She held my gaze for a moment and then stepped back, which cost her something, I could see it cost her something, and I filed that away as one more piece of evidence that whatever we had built over

Chapter One Hundred and FivePOV: Kael DravonThe tracks near the marker stone told two stories, and only one of them made sense.One set belonged to our patrol member. He had confirmed it himself, standing in front of me with his arms crossed and his eyes steady, explaining exactly when he checked the stone and exactly which path he took to reach it. Nothing about his account wavered.The other two sets did not belong to anyone who had reported being there.I crouched at the edge of the clearing, studying the ground Zara had marked the night before. The prints were shallow, careful, placed with the kind of restraint that came from someone who understood how easily a trail could betray its owner. Whoever left them had known we would search this ground.I had walked this border more times than I could count, in every season, under every kind of weather the mountains could throw at us. I knew which roots caught a boot at the wrong angle. I knew which patches of soil held a print for day

Chapter One Hundred and SevenPOV: Reuel AshtonSera's questions carried more weight than she let on.I noticed it the moment she stepped through my door, the tightness in her shoulders, the way her eyes moved across the room before settling on me, cataloguing rather than simply seeing. I had known her long enough to read the difference between a visit born of comfort and one born of purpose. This was the second kind.It was not the first time I had watched her carry a question she was not yet ready to ask directly. Sera had always circled her fears before facing them, testing the ground with smaller questions before she trusted herself to ask the one that mattered most. I recognized the pattern because I had taught myself to do the same thing, years before she was ever born into this pack's troubles.I let her ask about the vision. I let her describe the markings, the woman with white hair, the words she could feel but never hear. Every

Chapter One Hundred and Nine POV: Sera Ashwood I left the settlement before the sun was fully up, while Kael was still asleep and the household was quiet enough that no one thought to question why the Veilborn was walking toward the north gate with a cloak pulled over her shoulders and nothing else. I knew what I was doing. I knew the council had not yet formalized anything, which meant I was not technically breaking a rule that existed, only the spirit of one that was about to, and I told myself that distinction mattered more than it probably did as I passed through the gate and into the tree line beyond it. The walk to the marker stone felt different alone. Every sound in the forest seemed louder, every shadow longer, and by the time the clearing came into view I understood exactly why Kael had insisted on an escort the first time, because standing at the edge of something ancient with no one else there to catch you left you exposed in a way company never quite fixed, only dulled