Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Alpha Who Buried His Luna: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I woke up to the sound of wheels on gravel.For a moment I did not know anything. Not where I was. Not what had happened. Not why my neck felt like something had been driven into it with force. I just existed in that half-conscious space where your body knows something is wrong before your mind catches up.Then my mind caught up.My wrists were bound. Something cold and heavy was locked around both of them and when I tried to move my arms the chain between them pulled taut and bit into my skin. My mouth tasted like metal. My head was pounding so hard behind my eyes that I could barely keep them open.I was in the back of a vehicle. A truck maybe. The floor beneath me was bare metal and every time we hit a rough patch in the road I felt it in my whole body. No padding. No consideration. I had been dropped here like cargo.Because that was exactly what I was to whoever had taken me.I lay still and kept my breathing slow and even. Every instinct I had was screaming at me to move, to fig

The camp was somewhere in the mountains.That was all I knew for the first few days. They had moved me after the fall, which meant someone had found me at the bottom of that slope before I found my own way out. I had fragments of memory from that, rough hands, something bitter forced between my lips, the jolting movement of being carried. When I came back to full consciousness I was in a small stone structure with a dirt floor and a single door reinforced with iron bolts on the outside.My shoulder had been set. Badly, but set. My ribs had been wrapped in something. They had fixed me up just enough to keep me functional, which told me the same thing the conversation in the truck had told me. I had value to someone. Live value specifically.I tested the door on the first day. The hinges, the bolts, the gap at the bottom, the way the frame sat in the stone. I looked for weaknesses the way Damon had trained me to look for weaknesses. There were not many. Whoever had built this place had

I read the document four times before I let myself believe what it said.The first time I read it fast, the way you read something when your eyes are moving quicker than your brain is willing to follow. The words landed but did not settle. I folded it back up and sat against the wall and told myself I had misread the name. That it was similar to his name but not his name. That my mind was doing what minds do under prolonged stress, finding familiar shapes in random information, building meaning out of nothing because meaning feels safer than chaos.The second time I read it slowly.It still said Marcus Holt.The third time I was looking for anything that could give me an alternative explanation. A different Marcus. A forged signature on the payment document itself, the whole thing a layer deeper than I had understood, someone framing Marcus the way Marcus had framed me. I held the paper at an angle to catch the dim light coming through the gap near the roof and I studied the signature

Brock did not move toward me.That was the first thing I noticed. He stayed exactly where he was at the edge of the tree line with the rain coming down between his hands and us open at his sides where I could see them. A man making himself readable on purpose. Showing me he understood that the next move was mine and that he was not going to take it from me.I kept the knife where it was."You have about four minutes," he said. "Before Cort does his check and finds your door.""Then say what you came to say in four minutes."He looked at the knife briefly then back at my face. "I am not here to take you back.""Then what are you here for?"He was quiet for a second. Not hesitating exactly. More like a man choosing the most efficient version of something complicated. The rain was loud around us and somewhere back in the camp a door banged against its frame in the wind and we both went still until it settled."I have been inside this camp for eleven weeks," he said. "I am not a rogue."I

Five years is long enough to build a life.Not the life you planned. Not the one you imagined when you were young and certain about the shape of your future. But a real life with weight to it, with daily rhythms and small joys and the particular kind of strength that only comes from having no other choice but to keep going.Ashveil became home the way places become home when you stop waiting to leave them. Slowly and without announcement. One morning I woke up and knew which floorboard creaked outside Eli's room without having to think about it. I knew that the baker two streets over put out fresh bread at six in the morning and that if you arrived at six fifteen it was already half gone. I knew which of Clara's patients needed a firm hand and which needed a quiet voice and I knew the difference between the two kinds of rain that came off the mountains, the short sharp kind that was over before you finished putting on a jacket and the long grey kind that settled in for days.I knew wh