THE ALPHA'S RELUCTANT CLAIM のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 9

Nobody came to meet me at the door.The driver carried my single bag to the entrance, set it on the stone steps, and left without a word. I stood in the cold and watched the black car disappear back down the long driveway and told myself this was normal. This was how powerful households worked. There would be someone inside. There would be warmth inside.I picked up my own bag and pushed open the front door.The entrance hall of Ironveil pack house was the size of my entire home. Black marble floors, ceilings that climbed three storeys, a staircase that split at the landing and curved in two directions like arms opening or a trap closing. Everything was dark wood and iron and the particular kind of silence that comes not from emptiness but from people choosing not to speak.Wolves lined the walls.Not literally. But they stood along the edges of the hall, staff and ranked members both, and every single one of them looked at me the way you look at something that has wandered into the w

Isla didn't lie to me.That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward, she didn't lie. She sat on the edge of my bed with her hands twisted together in her lap and she told me the truth in the careful, measured way of someone releasing pressure from a wound. Not all at once. Just enough so I didn't break."Your father borrowed money," she said. "A significant amount. From Alpha Damien."I sat across from her in the chair by the window. Outside the grounds were dark. I could see the tree line and nothing past it. "How much?""I don't know the exact number.""Isla."She looked at her hands. "Enough that he couldn't pay it back. Enough that the Alpha could demand anything in return." She paused. "He came to your father three weeks ago to collect."Three weeks ago. The same week my father had sat me down at the kitchen table with his cold hands and his eyes that wouldn't meet mine and told me I had been chosen."He was going to give himself," I said slowly. "As a bodyguard. That was t

Lies always sound like love when a father tells them.I called him at six in the morning. Before the pack house woke, before Isla knocked, before the world I was trapped in had a chance to remind me of its rules. I sat on the cold floor with my back against the bed and my mother's photograph folded in my palm and I listened to the phone ring four times before he picked up."Hazel." His voice was thick with sleep and something else. Relief, maybe. Or guilt wearing relief's clothes. "I was going to call you today. How are you settling in? Is the house comfortable? Is he treating you well...""Who is Elena Carew?"Silence.Not the silence of a man who didn't know the name. The silence of a man who had been hoping he would never hear it."Your mother," he said carefully. "You know that.""I know she was born Elena Carew before she married you. I want to know what she is. What her bloodline is. What she was doing in a forest in 1998 with light coming out of her hands."The pause stretched

The dress they left on my bed was black.Not the soft, forgiving black of something chosen for comfort. Sharp black. Structured. The kind of dress that announces the person wearing it before they open their mouth.I stood over it for a long time, the note still folded in my palm."This is not a request."Neither was any of this. And yet here I was, turning a dress over in my hands that someone had chosen for me, for a dinner I had not agreed to, in a house I had never chosen to enter.I put it on. Not because I wanted to. Because Isla was watching me from the doorway with the particular expression of someone who knows exactly what happens when Alexander Ironveil's instructions are ignored and who does not want to watch it happen to me.The dining room he used for private meals was nothing like the east dining room I ate in alone every evening.Smaller. No long table. A round one instead, set for two, with candles that had already been lit and wine that had already been poured. A fire