บททั้งหมดของ Too Late To Claim Me: บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

He was about to speak when I heard it. A faint whistle, thin and quick, cutting through the trees like it didn't belong to the wind at all.Because it wasn't the wind."Get down!" Dorian's voice cracked across the clearing, sharper than I'd ever heard it, all the calm assessment gone from it in an instant.I didn't think. I dropped, hitting the ground hard as something split the air where my head had been a half second before, close enough that I felt the displacement against my cheek like a held breath released too fast.An arrow buried itself in the tree behind me, still quivering from the impact, the shaft trembling in a rhythm that matched my own pulse."Archers!" Dorian shouted. "Everyone, take cover!"Chaos broke loose around me. Dorian's team scattered into position, weapons drawn, eyes sweeping the treeline for movement that none of us could actually see through the dense cover of leaves and shadow. One of them shouted a position, another shouted back a correction, the two voic

"Caelum?" I stared at her, my heart hammering hard enough to hurt. "He's just a child. He doesn't understand any of this.""He's more than a child, Aria. He's the heir to the Silverwood bloodline, whether either of you wanted that or not, whether you'd chosen it for him or not." Mara squeezed my hand again, harder this time, like she needed the physical contact to make the words land properly. "Whatever the Order suppressed, whatever the Silverwood pack was protecting all those years ago, it lives in him now. In his blood, in whatever let him build that wall around you without a single lesson in how.""They want that bloodline destroyed. And you're the only one who can stop them."The weight of it settled over me, heavy and suffocating, pressing me flatter into the mattress than the wound in my shoulder ever managed to on its own. “The only one.” The only one who could protect my son. The only one who could find the truth. The only one who could break a cycle that had already claimed o

Mae perched carefully on the edge of the mattress, mindful of the tubes and the wince I couldn't quite hide. "Caelum, sweetheart, come help me with these. I am a genuine menace with flower arrangements, I always cram everything into the middle and it ends up looking like a floral explosion had a small explosion of its own."Caelum glanced up at me first, silently asking permission the way he'd been doing his whole life, and I nodded. He slid off the bed and trotted over, his earlier fear apparently forgotten in favor of sunflowers, already reaching for the tallest one with the single-minded focus only a five-year-old could bring to flower arranging."Not that one first," Mae told him, mock-serious. "You always start with the ugly ones. Hide them in the back.""Which ones are ugly?""None of them, technically. But some of them need more help than others."He considered this with the gravity of a much older child, and set to work sorting daisies from sunflowers with fierce concentration,

Caelum stirred on his cot behind us, rubbing his eyes with both fists before he'd even fully opened them. He sat up, blinking against the gray morning light, and his gaze found Dr. Nolan almost immediately, sharp and curious in a way that made my stomach tighten before I could say why."Who's he, Mummy?""This is Dr. Nolan, baby. He's the one who saved Mummy."His eyes went wide. He scrambled off the cot without hesitation, no hiding behind my legs, no burying his face against my side the way he did with every unfamiliar adult who'd walked through this room in the last week, and padded straight over, looking up at Dr. Nolan like he'd just met someone out of one of his picture books."Did you save my mummy?"Dr. Nolan crouched, bringing himself down to Caelum's height without being asked, and something about how naturally he did it needled at me. "Hey there, little man. I helped, yeah. But your mummy did most of the work herself. She's a very brave woman."Caelum's chest puffed up like

I must have dozed off, because when I opened my eyes again the light had shifted, the stripes stretching longer across the floor, dimmer now, edging toward afternoon. I blinked, disoriented, my body still heavy with sleep, and realized I wasn't alone anymore.Dr. Nolan was standing at the foot of my bed, perfectly still, watching me the way someone watches a sleeping animal they're not entirely sure they trust either, even after weeks of feeding it by hand.I jerked upright, pain tearing through my shoulder at the sudden movement, sharp enough to make me hiss through my teeth. "What the…""Easy." His voice stayed level, calm, the kind of calm that only made me more alert instead of less. "I didn't mean to startle you. I knocked. You were asleep, and I didn't want to wake you."I stared at him, heart hammering against my ribs, my free hand already moving before my mind caught up with it. Same as before, tall, lean, those pale blue eyes that seemed to look straight through whatever I tri