Semua Bab The Alpha's Messy Wolf : Bab 81 - Bab 90

Mona POVBy late afternoon Alessandro could barely stay upright.The cracked ribs, the cumulative blood loss, and the last fight had finally stacked too high. We moved in short, ugly stretches—ten minutes of walking, then a stop where he braced against a tree and breathed through the bond’s white edge of pain. My newly awakened power had settled into a low, restless hum under my skin, but it didn’t erase exhaustion. It only made the forest feel more aware of us.“We need walls,” he said after a stop that lasted too long. “And a place the patrol maps don’t prioritize.”I knew only one structure in these woods that fit.The old chapel sat in a shallow hollow where the redwoods thinned around broken stone. I had seen it in dreams more often than in waking life—the collapsed roof, the defaced altar, the way the light fell wrong through the empty windows. Finding it in the real world felt like stepping into a memory that had been waiting to become solid.Alessandro caught the same recognit

Mona POVAlessandro didn’t wait for the moon to clear the ridge.He stood in the center of the ruined chapel with his blood still dried in the creases of his hands and the bond burning steady between us, and he made the decision the witch had not even asked for.“She offered to buy us time by taking from you,” he said. “That is not a cost I accept. But there is a cost that belongs to me alone. One I should have paid cleanly the moment the council stripped the title.”I watched him from the fallen beam, arms wrapped around myself against the chapel’s cold. “What cost?”“The last legal and spiritual tether to your mother.” His eyes were gold in the dimness. “The mate bond between us is already broken in practice. She asked for formal dissolution. The council recorded it. But a remnant can linger—pack records, blood-oath residue, the kind of unfinished claim other wolves can still smell and use. I am going to finish it. Fully. Tonight.”My throat tightened. “Alessandro—”“It is not a rej

Mona POVThe news reached us on the wind and the bond at almost the same time.We had moved before first light, leaving the chapel for deeper cover along a ridge Alessandro said the regular patrol maps treated as low priority. His ribs were still a constant grind of pain, but he could move farther between stops now. The blood-bond cloth had been replaced with a cleaner wrap; the cuts on our palms were already sealing under the forced efficiency of wolf healing and whatever restless power still lived under my skin.It was midmorning when the Ironfang horns sounded in the far distance—three long notes, then a short, then three again.Alessandro stopped so abruptly I nearly walked into him. Through the bond his recognition was instant and grim.“That’s not a search pattern,” he said. “That’s a declaration.”We climbed a granite shelf to get the air and the direction. Faint but clear, carried on the cold current from the east, the formal sequence repeated. Between the horn calls came the

Mona POVI felt him before the rogues did.The bond, strained and muffled by whatever Dargrel had put in my blood, suddenly flared with a heat so violent it cut through the drug fog like a blade. Alessandro was close—closer than they expected—and he was no longer trying to be careful.The first warning the camp received was the sound of a body hitting the ground outside the tarp shelter hard enough to crack branches.Then the screaming started.Dargrel’s head snapped toward the entrance. “Positions—now—”Too late.Alessandro came through the outer watch like a wolf who had stopped caring about anything except the straight line to me. I couldn’t see all of it from where I was bound, but I felt every impact through the bond: the pure, lethal focus, the way his injured body was being forced past its limits by rage alone. Someone shifted and lunged. The contact ended almost instantly. Another rogue tried to flank and was dragged out of my line of sight with a sound that stopped halfway th

Mona POVWe didn’t stop running until the blood-scent of the ruined camp was far behind us and the Ironfang howls had thinned into uncertain distance.Alessandro found a high shelf of granite open to the sky and sheltered on three sides by old-growth fir. From there we could see anyone approaching long before they reached us. He finally let himself drop to one knee, one arm locked around his ribs, breath rough. The cut on his shoulder had stopped pouring but still painted dark streaks down his arm. My hands were still stained with what I had done to Dargrel.For a long time we only sat there, shoulder to shoulder, the bond carrying the aftershock of violence and the stunned quiet that follows a chase that has finally broken.Then Alessandro looked up at the sky.The moon was high and nearly full, white and merciless and clean. It poured over the shelf without obstruction. No pack. No council. No mother down the hall. No rogue waiting in the trees with a camera or a threat.Just us.“N