All Chapters of Too Late To Claim Me: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

AriaThe shadows moved.They detached from the mountainside like creatures born of darkness itself, there were wolves with eyes that burned like embers in the fading light. I counted dozens before I stopped counting. Then scores more.My brother's army.Beside me, Remus's breath caught. Marcus pressed closer, his warmth a fleeting comfort against the cold dread spreading through my chest. Behind us, our warriors readied their weapons, the whisper of steel against leather the only sound in that terrible silence.But I couldn't look away from him.Adrian.My brother.The name surfaced from somewhere deep, some ancestral memory I hadn't known I carried. It tasted like ash. Like something sacred twisted into something monstrous.He stood before the gates of his fortress, and in his face, I saw her. Our mother. The same arch of brow. The same stubborn set of jaw. The same silver eyes that had once held me with love.But where her eyes had been warm, his were winter."Adrian," I breathed.H

Aria"Aria... Aria, Mummy..."Someone was calling me. The voice was small and far away at first, then it was closer. Then two voices. One sounds broken, the other one tiny."Aria!"I tried to move, but I couldn't. The world was ash and fire. I foundmyself on my knees in a courtyard that doesn't really feel right, and my hands were covered in blood that refused to wash off no matter how hard I tried, and everywhere I looked, there were bodies of warriors I knew. Warriors that had pass me by in the Crestwood hall just a week ago. And in the middle of the courtyard, where the fountain used to be, Adrian stood.He wasn't smiling anymore. He was just holding him.My son. Caelum.My son was limp in his arms. His little were arms dangling. His silver-grey eyes closed. Too pale. Too still. And too quiet."No," I heard myself whisper, but my voice didn't sound like my own voice. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere else, as if it's coming from the bottom of a well. "No, no, no, Caelum,

AriaAdrian went down like the ground had opened up and swallowed him.His boots caught on a root and he hit the dirt hard, one hand slapping into the blood-soaked mud to catch himself. The other stayed pressed against his temple, like he could physically hold the pieces of his mind together. The knife lay in the leaves between us, forgotten, its edge catching the last of Caelum's fading silver light.I'd never watched a man come apart before.His shoulders heaved. His breath came in wet, ragged gasps... sobs he was trying to swallow whole. Around us, his frozen warriors stood like statues carved from shadow and ice, their ember eyes still glazed, still trapped in whatever horror the light had shown them. But Adrian? Adrian was drowning."You don't understand," he choked out. His voice wasn't the cold, commanding thing it had been at the gates. It was raw. Cracked open. The voice of a boy who'd been screaming into the dark for thirty years and only just now realized someone might hear

AriaDawn came grey and reluctant, like the sky itself didn't want to look at what we'd done.I walked through the camp and tried not to see the bodies.They'd laid them out in rows near the eastern treeline, covered in whatever cloth we could spare be they cloaks, blankets, torn banners. Eleven of them. Eleven wolves who'd followed me into that forest and hadn't come back out. I learned their names. And now I'd memorized them on the march home, repeating them like a prayer, like a penance.Jensen. Forty-three. Two kids. His wife was still in the medical tent, unconscious from a head wound, and no one had told her yet.Mira. Twenty-six. She'd joined the pack two years ago, fleeing an abusive mate. She'd been the first to volunteer for the advance team. She'd smiled at me before we left, told me she owed Crestwood her life.Darius. Nineteen. Nineteen years old. He'd barely been old enough to shift.I stopped walking. My legs simply refused to carry me further.The camp moved around me

Remus The girl was young. That was the first thing I noticed when I walked into the storage bunker. She couldn't have been more than seventeen, maybe eighteen at most. Dirty, her hair matted with blood and sweat, her clothes torn. Her wolf was close to the surface, I could see it in the way her eyes kept flickering, in the tension in her shoulders, in the way she watched me like she was waiting for the first blow to fall. She was afraid. Not of me. Not of what I might do to her. Of what the Order would do to her if she talked.