Semua Bab The Alpha's Hidden Bond : Bab 21 - Bab 30

Diane's POVI stopped sleeping the night she left. That's not a figure of speech — I mean I stopped, the way a clock stops, the hands frozen on the last good hour. I held that little carved wolf in my ruined office until dawn came gray through the broken window, and then I got up off my knees and I started to look for her, and I did not stop looking for eleven weeks. I want you to understand what that was. I am the Alpha of the north. I have crossed borders no wolf crosses without blood. I sat across tables from men who'd wanted my throat since before my father died, and I put my pride on the floor between us and I asked — *asked,* me — have you seen a girl, this tall, dark hair, gold in her eyes when she's afraid. I let them see how much I needed the answer. I let them see the weakness, because every hour I spent guarding my face was an hour she was farther gone. And every single one of them looked at me with something worse than triumph. They looked at me with pity. And they said no

Diane's POVI saw him for the third day in a row and my whole body went cold. Corner booth, back to the wall, the way *we* sit — the way our kind sits when we're watching a room. Coffee he never drank. Eyes that came up off the table every time the bell over the door jingled. I was five months along now, big enough that the apron didn't hide it, big enough that I couldn't run the way I used to, and I stood behind the counter with the coffee pot shaking in my hand and I thought, *they've found us.* My wolf came up so fast I had to grip the edge of the counter to stay standing. Every dawn for five months I'd held her down with my four-count breathing, alone, in that little room — but fear does something to a pregnant woman's wolf that no breathing fixes, and I felt her rise snarling toward the man in the booth, felt the gold pour into my eyes right there over the pie case at eight in the morning. Rhonda saw. She always saw. "Diane," she said low. "Go in the back." But I couldn't move. I

Diane's POVThe pain woke me before dawn, and I knew, the way you know your own name, that it was time. I was alone in the little room above the hardware store, snow pressed white against the window, the coffee can heavy under the floorboard with everything I'd saved, and the first wave took me so hard I bit down on the blanket to keep from crying out. Orla had told me it would come like this — slow, then all at once, the body doing a thing far older than fear. She'd been driving three days across three borders in a rusted truck to reach me, an eighty-year-old woman with hands like creek stones, and I lay in the dark counting the space between the pains and praying to no one that she'd make it. Then boots on the stairs. A knock, two-and-one, the way she'd said she'd knock. And when I dragged the door open there she stood, small and white-haired and soaked with melting snow, her sharp old eyes finding my face and then my belly and then, softening, my face again. "Well, child," she said

Diane's POVMy mother stayed. That was the first thing that changed after the night she took my face in her hands in the yard. She unpacked her bag into my father's old room and she started putting food in front of me and standing there until I ate it, and slowly, one plate at a time, I came back into my own body. But she wouldn't finish the thing she'd started saying that morning — that look that had crossed her eyes when I said Diane was carrying my child, the *recognition.* Every time I circled back to it she went still and said, "Eat first. Get strong. There are things you'll need your strength to hear." So I ate, and I got strong, and I kept searching, because a mother's warning couldn't touch the thing that pulled me south every waking hour.By then the search had grown past me. I hadn't meant it to. But an Alpha who spends a year turning over every stone across half a country becomes a story, and the story traveled pack to pack the way stories do — the mountain wolf whose mate

Diane's POVTwo years is a long time in the life of a small girl and a hunted woman. Luna turned three, then four, and somewhere in the folding of those seasons I stopped only running and started, without quite meaning to, to *live.* We settled at last — really settled — in a town called Cedar Hollow, tucked in a green fold of hills far from any road that mattered, and for the first time since the mountains I let myself put down something that felt like roots. Marge had a cousin there who ran a diner, and the cousin needed a steady woman, and steady I had become. I rented a real house — small, white, a crooked porch, a yard where the grass hissed in the evening wind — and I painted Luna's room yellow because she said it felt like the pie light in Marge's, and I understood that my daughter measured the whole world in feelings the way other children measured it in colors. We were, God help me, almost happy. And I had learned not to trust *almost.*Luna could pass now. That was the great