Semua Bab The Alpha King's Hidden Luna: Bab 21 - Bab 30

Ruth's POVWe found Mara in a place where hope went to die.The rogue settlement sat three miles outside Greywater's borders—a collection of rotting shacks and makeshift shelters where wolves without packs scraped together whatever existence they could. No running water. No heat. No protection from the elements or from each other. The kind of place where the desperate ended up when every other option had been exhausted.Our guards had tracked her here using the scent trail from her abandoned vehicle. She hadn't gotten far. Hadn't even tried to hide properly. It was as if she had run out of everything—money, allies, plans—and simply stopped moving when her body gave out.The shack was barely standing. Wooden planks nailed together with more rust than iron, gaps in the walls stuffed with rags and newspaper. The door hung crooked on one hinge, letting in the cold autumn wind that cut through everything.I stood in that doorway, Luna warm and healthy in my carrier, and looked at what Mara

Ruth's POVThey came for Luna first.We had split the convoy deliberately—Mara and Kieran in the lead vehicle with four guards, Luna and I in the second with Langmore and two more. The theory was simple: anyone tracking Mara would follow the first car. The second would slip through unnoticed.The theory was wrong.The Ashfall bridge sat at the narrowest point of the eastern road, spanning a gorge so deep the river below looked like a silver thread. One way in. One way out. The perfect place for an ambush if you knew which vehicle to hit.They knew.The first arrow took our driver through the throat. I didn't see it happen—just heard the wet sound, saw the spray of red across the windshield, felt the carriage lurch sideways as dead hands lost the reins. Langmore grabbed me before I could scream, shoving me down into the footwell, his body curving over mine and Luna like a shield."Stay down." His voice was iron. "Whatever happens, stay down."Then he was gone.The door wrenched open. C

Ruth's POVChen had no explanation.I watched her examine Langmore's shoulder three times, her instruments probing flesh that should have been raw and wounded, her expression growing more troubled with each pass. She took samples. Ran tests. Consulted texts she pulled from her medical bag with increasingly frantic energy.Nothing made sense."The tissue regeneration is complete," she said finally, her voice carefully neutral in the way physicians become when they're hiding their fear. "Not accelerated healing. Complete. As if the injury never occurred.""That's not possible.""No." Chen's eyes met mine. "It isn't."Luna slept peacefully in her carrier, oblivious to the impossibility unfolding around her. Langmore remained unconscious, his fever broken sometime in the night, his breathing even and untroubled. He looked better than he had any right to look—color returned to his cheeks, the lines of pain smoothed from his face.He looked like a man who hadn't nearly died twelve hours ago

Ruth's POVThree people walked with a limp on the left.I made the list with Marcus in his private study, the door locked, the windows shuttered, our voices barely above whispers. Paranoia had become a living thing between us—every creak of the floorboards, every shadow in the corridor, every servant who lingered too long outside a door.Someone in this house had helped destroy my life. Someone I had known since childhood. Someone who smiled at me over breakfast and plotted my ruin in the shadows.The names were innocuous. Familiar. That was the worst part.Edith, the head cook who had made my birthday cakes for twenty years. She had twisted her ankle in a kitchen accident when I was twelve, and the limp had never fully healed. Corwin, a senior guard who had trained both Marcus and me in basic defense. His left leg had been injured in the border conflicts before I was born. And Helena, my father's personal attendant—the woman who had cared for him since my mother's death, who had brai

Ruth's POVThe secret lasted exactly six days.I never learned who talked. It could have been anyone—a servant who overheard too much, a guard who sold information for coin, one of the dozens of people who had seen Luna in the weeks since my return. The conspiracy had eyes everywhere. All it took was one whisper in the right ear, and the careful silence my father had maintained for months shattered like glass on stone.The ravens started arriving on the seventh day.First from the eastern territories, then the south, then packs so distant I had only seen their names on maps. Each message carried some variation of the same shock: The Alpha King has a hidden daughter. She has a child. She is unmated.By the tenth day, every pack on the continent knew my name.The Council's summons arrived at dawn, delivered by a messenger in formal robes who would not meet my eyes. The seal was unmistakable—the interlocked crescents of the High Council, pressed into wax that smelled of old authority.I