Todos los capítulos de RECLAIMED BY THE ALPHA: THE ALPHA’S HIDDEN HEIR: Capítulo 111 - Capítulo 120

EMILYThe door opens and Mia runs through it.She hits me so hard the medical bed rocks. Her arms lock around my neck and she's shaking, shaking so hard her teeth chatter against my collarbone."Mama. Mama mama mama.""I'm here. Baby, I'm here."My wrists are still strapped. Her small ribs heave against my chest and her tears soak through my shirt and my arms are six inches from closing around her and the leather won't give."Alex. Take these off."He watches from the doorway with the same expression he wore whenever I burned dinner in our apartment. Mild disappointment. A little tired. Like I've inconvenienced him by existing.Then he crosses the room and unbuckles the left strap, then the right, and my arms close around Mia so fast she gasps. I curl my body around hers and press my face into her hair. Soap and tears and the fabric softener from Agnes's fur. Agnes is crushed in her fist between us."Are you hurt? Did anyone hurt you?""No. I watched cartoons. But I was scared, Mama."

NICKThe nurses change shifts at 7 AM and 7 PM. I know this because I've watched them do it six times.They come in and check Emily's vitals and adjust the IV and write things on her chart and look at me in the chair beside her bed. They don't ask me to leave anymore. The charge nurse tried on day one and I looked at her and she backed out of the room without finishing the sentence. The pack runs this facility. Every nurse on this floor answers to me before they answer to the hospital board, and they all know it.My clothes are the same ones I wore through the forest. Blood on the collar. Pine needles in the seams. The cut on my forearm from the lycan has closed but the scar is raised and pink, and my ribs ache when I breathe too deep. I haven't showered. I haven't eaten more than the crackers Sage brought me yesterday, still sitting on the windowsill in their wrapper.Emily's hand is in mine. It's been in mine for three days. Her fingers are warm and limp and her chest rises and fall

NICKThree weeks.I have been to Zurich and Singapore and a clinic in rural Finland where a woman who specializes in bond trauma looked at Emily's scans and shook her head. I have called every researcher, every neurologist, every shaman who ever published a paper on mate bonds. The answer is always the same. The severance is permanent. Alex built a wall, not a door. There is no known reversal.But I found one thing. One thread. A doctor in Oslo who specializes in memory reconsolidation told me that in rare cases, traumatic memory loss can be recovered through emotional triggering. Not the bond itself. The memories attached to it. If the patient is exposed to a powerful enough emotional stimulus connected to the lost memories, the brain can sometimes rebuild the pathways on its own.He said the odds were less than ten percent. He said the stimulus would need to be deeply personal, something the patient associated with the lost feelings at a visceral level. He said there was no guarante

EMILYI come back in pieces.The white fades to grey and the grey fades to fluorescent light and the fluorescent light is the hospital ceiling and I'm in a bed again. My hand is throbbing. I open my fist and the pendant is there, the broken wolf pressed into my palm so hard it left an imprint in my skin. Blood has dried around the edges where the metal cut in.My body feels like I lived something. Not remembered it. Lived it. My knees ache like I've been on a hard floor. My chest is tight like someone pressed me down with both hands. My throat is raw like I've been screaming.I was eighteen. I was in a green dress. I was on a marble floor.The memory isn't faded or distant the way old memories feel. It's sharp. Present tense. I can still feel the cold marble under my kneecaps. I can still hear the fabric of the dress tearing at the hem. I can still feel the pendant swinging from my neck and hitting the stone. I can still hear his voice filling the room with a word that flattened me.I

The punch is sweet and cold and I hate that it’s good. “Told you,” Nick says. “One drink doesn’t prove anything.” “Your face is proving everything right now.” “My face is NEUTRAL.” “You scrunched your nose when you tasted it. The same scrunch you make when Mia does something cute and you’re trying not to react. Your whole face contracts for half a second and then you flatten it out and pretend nothing happened.” “I don’t scrunch.” “You’re scrunching right now. Thinking about the scrunch is making you scrunch.” “I’m going to throw this punch at your head.” “That would be a waste of good punch.”I take another sip. He watches me take it with an expression I’m getting tired of seeing, the one where his grey eyes go soft and his mouth almost curves and he looks like a man watching a home video of something he lost. “Stop looking at me like that.” “Like what?” “Like I’m doing something remarkable. I’m drinking punch, Nick. It’s not a miracle.” “You called me Nick three times i