Semua Bab The Alpha My Sister Wanted: Bab 31 - Bab 40

By morning, everyone knew.I felt it the moment I stepped into the dining hall, the particular hush that fell across a room when conversation has just been interrupted by someone's arrival. Wolves who had spoken easily with me over breakfast for the past week now glanced up and then quickly away, their expressions caught somewhere between curiosity and caution.Luca was already at the table, his usual easy posture replaced by something tighter."You heard," I said, sliding into the seat beside him."The whole pack heard." He kept his voice low. "Word travels fast when wolves from the eastern patrol start talking. By the time it reached the kitchens it had grown three new details and lost two true ones.""What are they saying?

He came to my room before dawn.No knock. Just the door opening, and Victor standing in the frame with the particular stillness of a man who had decided something during the night and arrived at my room as the conclusion of that decision.I was already awake. I had not slept properly since the pendant arrived in my hand and the letter arrived in the corridor and the meeting broke apart around Darius's quiet refusal to keep his silence any longer.I sat up.Victor closed the door behind him."We need to speak," he said. "Alone. Without Blackthorn in the corridor and without Luca Reed positioned at the end of the hall.""They are not in the corridor.""They were an hour ago."I said nothing to that.He crossed the room and stood near the window, his back partially to me, looking out at the pre-dawn dark the way he always positioned himself when he wanted to control how much of his expression was visible."I am going to tell you something," he said. "Not because I owe it to you. Because

The treeline did not move.Neither did Ezra.He stood between me and the dark edge of the clearing with his shoulders set and his wolf so close to the surface I could feel it pressing outward from him like heat from a fire, and for a long suspended moment the only sounds were the mist settling between the stones and my own breathing and the low certain awareness that something out there was measuring us.Then it was gone.Not dramatically. No sound of retreat, no crashing through undergrowth. Just the particular absence that follows a presence, the way a room feels different after someone has left it even before you consciously register they are no longer there.Ezra did not relax."Stay behind me," he said quietly."What was it.""I do not know yet."He moved toward the treeline slowly, the way wolves move when they are tracking something they do not want to startle, and I stayed close behind him even though every instinct I had said whatever had been there was already gone.He stopp

Victor had not appeared yet.That would not last.I understood that the way I understood most things about Victor now, not through evidence but through the particular certainty that had been building in me since the ridge, since the stone, since the pendant had warmed in my hand and my wolf had stopped pretending she did not know things my mind had not caught up to yet.He was in there somewhere, preparing.Which meant whatever time I had with Caelan before this became a managed situation was limited and shrinking.I steered him away from the main path, toward the east garden where the old stone benches sat between overgrown hedges that had not been properly tended since before I left. Nobody came here. It was the kind of place that existed in pack houses everywhere, quietly forgotten, which made it useful.Caelan followed without comment.He moved differently from the wolves I had grown up around. Quieter. More economical. Every step placed with the particular awareness of someone who

They put Caelan in the east wing.Third door from the end, the room with the narrow window that looked out over the old kitchen garden rather than the main grounds. I noticed that deliberateness immediately. Victor had chosen a room with a limited view on purpose, the same way he chose everything on purpose, managing information and sightlines the way other people managed conversations.Caelan had looked at the room without comment.That told me he had noticed too.The morning stretched into afternoon with the particular tension of a house holding its breath. Pack wolves who would normally move freely through the corridors slowed near the east wing and then corrected themselves and moved on, pretending they had not slowed at all. Conversations stopped when I entered room