Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Hockey Alpha Deadly Secret : Kabanata 111 - Kabanata 120

Knox's POVShe looked at the blanket for a moment after she said it.Then she said, "I thought I was pregnant."I looked at her."At first," she said. "That was my first thought when the strangeness started. A few days after — after that night. The tiredness, the way certain smells were hitting differently, the feeling that something in my body had changed without my permission." She shook her head slightly. "That was the explanation I reached for because it was the most obvious one. The most human one.""And?" I said."And I took a test," she said simply. "Two of them. Both negative." She looked at her hands. "So that was not it. And I was relieved about that because the alternative would have been a very different conversation and a very different set of problems." She paused. "But the feelings did not stop. They kept coming and they kept building and they were nothing like anything I had a name for, so I filed it away and told myself it would resolve and kept going.""But it did no

Knox's POVShe was going to make a sound.I could see it building — the compressed shock finding the seams in her composure, looking for the exit. Her hand was still against her mouth but it was not going to be enough. The sound was coming and if it came the way it wanted to come the door was going to open and the nurse was going to be in the room before either of us could do anything about it.I moved.I closed the distance between the chair and the bed in two steps and I put my arms around her — carefully, the way you held someone who was fragile and also not fragile, someone who needed containing and also needed to feel that the containing was not a trap. I pulled her in and held on."Quiet," I said. Soft and close, near her ear. "Please. Stay quiet. I need you to stay quiet."She shook.Not crying — Ember did not cry easily and this was too large for crying. Just shaking. The specific physical response to information that was too significant for the body to process without some of

Ember's POVI heard him behind me.His footsteps — faster than mine, covering ground in the way Knox covered ground, the efficient purposeful pace of someone who did not need to hurry because their stride did the work.I ran faster.The campus path was mostly empty at this hour — the odd student crossing in the distance, the dining hall lights on across the quad, the ordinary early morning that did not know or care that I had just discharged myself from the clinic without signing anything and was currently running away from a conversation that had rearranged everything I understood about my own life."Ember."Close. Too close.I pushed harder. My legs were not at full capacity — last night had taken something significant from them and I had not eaten and I had not slept properly and the post-clinic unsteadiness was real. I was running on adrenaline and the specific momentum of someone who needed to move more than they needed a destination.His hand closed around my arm.Not rough — fi

Ember's POVHe walked me back to the clinic.Not holding my arm — just beside me, close enough that if I slowed he slowed, the quiet accompaniment of someone who had decided they were not leaving and had communicated that without making it a discussion.At the door he stopped."One more thing," he said.I turned."If you tell anyone what I told you," he said, "I will be in real danger." He said it without dramatics — plainly, the way he stated facts that were simply true. "Not abstract danger. Real, specific, immediate danger."I looked at him. "What kind of danger?""The kind I will explain tonight," he said. "Meet me outside the school gate at eleven-thirty. Just before midnight." He held my gaze. "Can you do that?"I thought about last night and the clinic and the monitor and all of it."Yes," I said.He nodded once.Then he walked away and I went back inside and dealt with the nurse and the doctor and the discharge paperwork and the careful, professional questions that I answered

Ember's POVKnox was quiet for a moment.Then he said, "I am going to show you."I looked at him. "Show me what.""My wolf form," he said. "I am going to shift in front of you so you can see it with your own eyes and you will know that nothing I have told you is a lie." He held my gaze. "That is what I am offering. Not more words. Not more explanation. The actual thing, right in front of you, and then you can decide what you believe."I looked at him for a long moment.He meant it. I could see that he meant it — the specific, unmanaged quality of his face when he had decided something and was not managing the presentation of it. Just the offer, placed there, waiting."Okay," I said.We walked.---The path he took left the road after about three minutes and went into a different kind of dark — the tree line on the edge of the campus boundary, the ground underfoot changing from pavement to something less certain, branches overhead, the sounds of the outside world replacing the campus s