บททั้งหมดของ The Alpha's Hidden Bond : บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

Diane's POVThe morning I walked Luna up the steps of the Cedar Hollow preschool, I told myself the same lie I'd been telling for five years — *this time it will be fine.* She wore a yellow dress because yellow was still her word for safe, and she held my hand the whole way, and her small fingers were warm and sure in mine. But I felt the tremble under her calm. I always could. Since the autumn evening on the porch, when she'd felt Kane's storm coming from two hundred miles off, something in my daughter had changed — grown, sharpened, woken up. She still asked about Papa every night. But now she asked with a new weight, like she'd touched something real about him and couldn't put it down. And that morning, kneeling on the worn steps with the wind pulling at her hair, I did our ritual one more time. Four in. Four out. "You keep it quiet, baby," I whispered. "You keep it all tucked inside, just for you and me." She nodded, so serious, so brave. And she walked in through the bright door

Diane's POVMy mother waited three weeks after the fight with Kane before she made her move, and she made it the way she'd made every hard thing my whole life — quietly, with her chin up, giving me no room to say no. She found me at dawn on the lookout stone, where I'd taken to sitting since James left, watching the mist burn off the valley and turning that photograph over and over in my hands until the edges had gone soft as cloth. She didn't ask what I was holding. She'd stopped asking. She just set a cup of black tea beside me on the cold rock and said, "There's a gathering at Highwater next month. The Northern packs. Every unmated she-wolf between three territories will be there." I said nothing. "You're going, Zev." I turned and looked at my mother — this small iron woman who'd buried a cruel husband and raised a son to be his opposite and watched that son become him anyway — and I saw that her hands were shaking around her own cup. "Your pack watched you nearly kill a boy," she

Diane's POVI moved like a woman who'd rehearsed this a thousand times, because I had. Not in drills — in nightmares. Every night for five years I'd run this exact drill in my sleep, and now my hands knew it without my mind: the go-bag from the top of the closet, always packed, always ready, a thing I'd never once let myself unpack even after two years of feeling almost safe. I set Luna on my bed and I filled the bag with the speed of long fear. The cash roll from behind the loose baseboard. The one folder of papers, real and fake. Luna's rabbit — never leave the rabbit, I'd learned that in the second town, the night she screamed for it on a bus and nearly gave us away. Two changes of clothes each. Her yellow dress, still warm from the day. I didn't turn on more lights. I worked by the one lamp and the blue dark, and the whole time the carved words on my own front door burned behind my eyes — *WE KNOW WHAT SHE IS* — and I did not let myself feel them yet. Feeling comes later. Feeling

Diane's POVWe landed in a town called Marrow Fall, tucked in a river valley where the fog sat low till noon, and I picked it for the same reason I'd picked all the others — because nobody would ever think to look there. Small. Poor. Forgettable. A place where a tired woman and her quiet daughter could rent a room over a laundromat and disappear into the gray. Luna hadn't spoken of Papa again since the filling station. She'd said her piece — *let's let Papa catch us* — and I'd held her hope in my two hands and then I'd done what I always did, what fear always made me do. I ran. Because hope is a beautiful thing and fear is a stronger one, and the mark on that door had put a cold in me that not even my daughter's shining face could thaw. *WE KNOW WHAT SHE IS.* I heard it in my sleep. And so I told myself Zev was a dream and Silver Creek was real, and I unpacked our two bags in a room that smelled of soap and old water, and I began, one more time, the terrible work of vanishing.The fir

Diane's POVI ran before the phones could steady. That's the only mercy of a shaking hand holding a camera in a gray dawn — the pictures come out as blurs, smears of fog and motion, a shape that could be anything. I snatched Luna up out of the doorway and I ran on my torn ankle past the frozen crowd, past their swinging lights and their open mouths, into the mist and down to the river where the scent breaks, and I ran the black water's edge until the town was gone behind us and there was nothing but fog and cold stones and my own ragged breathing. My body was mine again by then — the shift had drained back the way flood water drains, leaving me shaking and human and bleeding from a dozen places, my clothes torn, my new-cut hair matted with blood and river mud. But I could still feel it under my skin, the wolf, awake now, no longer buried. Five years I'd kept her down. One instant of a jaw reaching for my daughter had brought her roaring back, and I understood, stumbling along that col