Semua Bab The Alpha's Rare Omega Heir : Bab 151 - Bab 160

Kael Voss PovTomorrow the estate would learn that the storm-born heir was dead.We left the ridge at first light. The teams moved in silence. No one asked for the order to be repeated. The pack of remains rode against Elias’s chest as if it were the last living thing we had left of our son. The tiny wooden bead with the bloody fingerprint was wrapped separately and kept in my inner pocket. I could feel its shape when I walked.The journey down from the high ground took most of the day. We did not hunt. We did not spread the teams to search side paths. We followed the same broken routes we had used to climb, only now the direction was home. Every hour of descent felt longer than the days of pursuit that had come before it.Elias walked beside me and said almost nothing. The bond between us was tight with grief and exhaustion. The empty place where Rowan should have been no longer felt like a mystery. It felt like a fact. I reached for our son more than once on the way down and found

Kael Voss PovThey were still watching the house where we now mourned our son.The clean bead sat on the table between us long after Riven left the room. Next to it lay the scrap of paper. *One was for the ending. This is for the parents who came home.* The first bead had carried Rowan’s blood and print. This one carried nothing except the fact that someone had walked to our outer marker in the dark and left it there after we had already named our son dead.Elias had not touched it again. He sat on the edge of the bed, eyes on the small wooden shape as if it might change if he looked long enough. The bond between us was raw and quiet. The empty place where Rowan belonged felt larger in the closed suite than it had on the ridge.“They waited until we were inside the walls,” Elias said. “Until the pack had heard us say it. Until the mourning had started.”“Yes.” I stood over the table and did not pick the bead up. “The first one was meant to end the hunt. This one is meant to tell us t

Kael Voss PovThe scent on it was faint, It was Rowan’s.I held the short length of twine under the lamp and did not pass it on until I had looked at it twice. One dark hair, caught in the knot as if it had pulled free when someone leaned in to cut the south marker. Not placed. Not arranged like the remains. This one looked accidental.Elias stood across the table, both hands flat on the wood. The command room was otherwise empty. The estate beyond the walls was still in formal mourning. That cover was the only reason we could examine this without turning the house inside out.“It isn’t part of the finished remains,” Elias said. “Those were clean, chosen, wrapped. This came off a person who was close enough to the post to leave hair behind.”“Yes.” I set the twine down. “And that person was here after we came home. After we named him dead.”The implication sat between us without needing more words. Either someone had carried a lock of his hair to the marker and lost it, or Rowan him

Kael Voss PovJust beyond our south marker, the earth held a step that did not belong to the story we had told the pack.I crouched over the print with a lamp shielded low. The heel was short. The weight was light. It had been set down once and lifted. Someone had brushed the leaves around it and missed the one place the ground was soft enough to hold the shape.Elias knelt opposite me neither of us spoke until Riven had finished marking the edges.“It is not a pack child’s print,” Riven said. “Wrong size for the creche, and no creche child has been outside the inner wall since the rites began. The brushing is adult work. The step is not.”I stood. “Cast it. Cover the ground so it stays. No one else on this path tonight.”We did not take the print into the hall. The estate was still in mourning, and a single small step was not yet a living child in our hands. It was a fact that broke the story we had announced. That was enough to change the next hours. It was not enough to change the

Kael Voss PovWe would leave the estate in the opposite direction from every trail we had been taught to trust.The southwest fold sat on the private map like a place we should have checked weeks ago. Low hills. Old drainage. No prepared-point marks from the high hunt. It had been empty on every report because we had never given it weight. All the staged signs had pointed the other way.Elias stood across the table, the rag from the pine scrape still in its dish. The cast print. The pulled hair. The time mark that ended at last light. Together they made a circle around our own border that the long chase had taught us to ignore.“We can’t take the full pack,” he said. “If we empty the estate, the watchers will know the mourning is finished.”“We don’t empty it.” I drew the line again. “Seraphina holds the hall and the rites. Riven takes the outer watch and keeps the triangle quiet. You and I take thirty. Enough to hit a holding place. Not enough to look like a war band leaving a griev