บททั้งหมดของ From Torment to Luna : บทที่ 11 - บทที่ 20

**POV: Caden**He had not expected her to still be awake.He came back through the mansion gates at half past midnight with Zane at his side and mud on his boots and the cold of the northern border still sitting in his bones. The Kael Draven situation had turned out to be a probe rather than a crossing, a single Shadowfang scout testing their response time, gone before the patrol could make contact. Clean. Calculated. The kind of move that was not about territory but about information.Kael was measuring them.That bothered him more than an actual crossing would have.He sent Zane to brief his father and crossed the mansion grounds alone and was passing the east wing corridor when he saw the light under her door.He stopped.He told himself he was just checking. Making sure she had followed his instruction to stay inside. He knocked once and the door opened almost immediately, as if she had been sitting close to it.She was fully dressed. Hair pulled back. The secure phone in her hand

**POV: Aria**Zane had laid everything across the long table in the study.Photographs. Printed messages. A hand-drawn map of the northern border road with three locations marked in red. He stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed and his expression carrying the particular weight of someone who had been sitting with difficult information and was relieved to finally put it down somewhere.Caden stood to his right. Aria and Mara took the two chairs across from the table. Nobody sat. The room had the energy of something that required standing."Start from the beginning," Caden said.Zane nodded. "The photograph Mara brought in this morning confirms what I have been piecing together for the past four days. Someone from inside this pack was in contact with Shadowfang territory before the ceremony. I traced the northern road sighting back through three other incidents over the past six weeks. Unexplained absences. A patrol report that was filed late with no explanation. A gate l

**POV: Aria**She did not tell Caden about the photograph.Not immediately. She sat with it through dinner and through the quiet hour afterward and through the long stretch of night that followed and she turned it over in her mind from every direction trying to decide what it meant and what to do with it and whether the cold feeling it left in her chest was fear or anger or something that had not decided yet which one it wanted to be.By the time the mansion went quiet around midnight, she had her answer.Both. It was both.She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat in the window seat and looked out at the dark forest and the moon sitting heavy and bright above the tree line and thought about someone standing outside the mansion grounds with a camera pointed at a moment she had not known was being watched.She thought about Luna Sera's warning.Be careful at the gathering tomorrow. Not afraid. Just careful.She was trying.The knock at her door was so quiet she almost missed i

**POV: Aria**The lights came back on in under a minute.Later Aria would learn it had been a tripped circuit on the eastern generator, an accident caused by one of the catering staff knocking against the main power box. The scream from the tree line turned out to be a young pack girl who had been startled by the sudden darkness while walking back from the edge of the grounds.No threat. No attack. Just darkness and a frightened child and sixty seconds of chaos.But those sixty seconds had done something.In the blind darkness with the crowd pressing and voices rising around her, Caden had pulled her against him instinctively, his arm around her, his body turned to put himself between her and whatever was coming. It lasted only until the lights returned. He had stepped back immediately, his expression giving nothing away, and the moment had dissolved back into the noise of the gathering as if it had never happened.She felt it for the rest of the evening.The warmth of those sixty sec

**POV: Aria**Alpha Ryker's office was the most intimidating room in the mansion.Aria had not been inside it before. It sat at the end of the main corridor on the ground floor behind a door that was always closed and always carried the particular weight of rooms where serious things happened. Caden had gone in alone and she had stood in the corridor with Zane and waited and listened to the silence beyond the door with her hands still at her sides.Zane had looked at the ceiling.She had looked at the floor.Twenty minutes later the door had opened and Caden had come out with an expression that gave nothing away and Alpha Ryker had appeared behind him and looked at Aria with those sharp measuring eyes and said simply that the formal request would be denied before it reached a full council hearing and that Selene Callum would be receiving a visit from the pack guard before the day was out.Then he went back inside and closed the door.That was this morning.It was now evening and the m