Todos os capítulos de Chained To The Alpha: Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 29

For a second, I think I'm wrong.The rain is heavy enough to blur shapes at that distance, and Sila is supposed to be back at the fortress with Vane, being looked at by healers and apologizing for a knife she never actually managed to use on me.She isn't supposed to be here.Walking down a ruined valley toward a pack that died before either of us was born.Like she's done this walk before.But as she gets closer, there's no mistaking her.The torn blue dress is gone, replaced with something plainer.Dark.Practical.Her hair is pulled back tightly instead of falling loose around her shoulders.And her face, when she finally stops a few feet from the creature, doesn't hold a trace of the fear or grief I watched break through her at the burning Ashveil camp."Sila."Kael's voice is quiet.Too quiet."Explain this. Now.""I told you I didn't know what my father was doing," Sila says. "That part was true. I never knew about the mill, the gate, any of it."She looks at the creature beside

The horn sounds a third time.Closer than the last.This time, I don't need Kael to tell me what it means.Every wolf along the ruined walls has gone rigid, red eyes turning together toward the tree line at the top of the ridge.Even the creature that's spent the last ten minutes talking about patience like it's something it perfected over decades now looks like it's forgotten how to be patient at all."Who are they?" Kael demands. "You said Ashveil wouldn't follow us here. You said nobody's foolish enough to attack Ember territory. So who is?"The creature's jaw tightens.For the first time, I see something that looks almost like fear move across its ancient face.It's quick.Buried almost immediately.But I see it."There was a fourth pack the night your grandfather burned this hall," it says. "One that didn't fight beside us and didn't fight against us either. One that watched the fire from the tree line and decided the safest place to stand was wherever the winning side happened t

The white light doesn't fade so much as it takes everything else with it first.I don't feel my knees in the mud anymore. I don't feel the rain, or Reyna's hand gripping my shoulder, or the creature's cold fingers resting over mine. There's just Kael, the shape of him burned into whatever part of me is still capable of seeing, and a pull so violent it feels like something is trying to turn me inside out through my own ribs.Give, the bond says. It isn't a word exactly. It's something older than words, some current running straight from my chest into his, and every instinct I've spent my whole life honing, the ones that kept me alive through a decade of running, all of them are screaming the opposite. Hold back. Protect yourself. Don't give away the only thing that's ever been fully yours.I ignore every one of them.I don't know how to do this. Nobody taught me. There's no manual for pouring yourself into a dying man through a bond that's barely a month old, still raw at the edges, st

For a moment nobody in the room says anything at all. The fire pops in the hearth, and somewhere out in the courtyard a horse whinnies, ordinary sounds that don't belong anywhere near the kind of silence that's just fallen over the three of us."Empty," Kael repeats, like saying the word again might make it mean something different the second time. "You're telling me a valley full of ruins that's stood there for twenty-six years, and dozens of wolves we fought beside four nights ago, just vanished.""I'm telling you what the scouts told me," Vane says. "No hall. No scorched stone. No sign anyone's set foot in that valley in decades, let alone four days ago." He hesitates, and I can see him weighing whether to say the rest of it. "One of the scouts said the ground didn't even look disturbed. No hoofprints, no blood, nothing from the fight. Like it healed itself over in a single night.""That's not possible," I say, but even as I say it I feel the cold, sinking certainty that very littl