Semua Bab The Alpha's Hidden Bond : Bab 41 - Bab 50

Diane's POVThe trucker let us down at the foot of the mountain road where the pavement ended and the world turned to gravel and pine, and he looked at us one last time — a torn woman and a small silent girl standing at the edge of nowhere with a duffel bag and no car and nothing but a wall of blue mountain rising ahead — and he almost didn't drive away. "You sure about this, lady?" he called over the rumble of the engine. "Ain't nothing up that road but wilderness for forty mile." I looked up at the mountain. Storm Ridge. Bigger than I remembered, or maybe I'd just spent five years shrinking it in my mind, making it small enough to run from. Now it filled the whole sky, and my legs went weak under me. "I'm sure," I said, and I wasn't, I wasn't sure of anything, my heart was slamming so hard I could taste it. But the trucker nodded and pulled away, and the sound of his engine faded down the valley, and then there was nothing left but the wind in the high pines and the crunch of my own

Diane's POVThe howl came again, closer now, and it wasn't a wolf's voice anymore — it was a man's, ragged and human, tearing down through the trees, calling a name over and over that the wind kept ripping apart before it reached me. I stood frozen in the ring of bowed wolves with Luna clamped against my chest, and my whole body had turned to stone. Five years I had rehearsed this moment. Five years of lying awake in cheap motel beds imagining his face, building the speech, sanding down the words until they were smooth enough to say — I'm sorry, I was afraid, I was wrong, please, look, look what we made — and now the moment was crashing down the mountain toward me and every single word I'd saved had flown clean out of my head. The big gray wolf lifted his muzzle and howled back, answering, guiding, and the sound of it went straight through my bones. Luna's small heart was pounding against mine, fast as a bird's. "Mama, you're squeezing," she whispered, and I loosened my arms, but I co

Diane's POVWhy is he so sad? Out of the mouth of a five-year-old, the question landed in that clearing like a stone through ice. I felt Zev hear it — he was close enough — and I watched his face do something terrible, watched him try to hold it together for her sake and nearly lose. How do you explain grief to a child who caused none of it? How do you tell her that the sad man's whole sadness is her, the years of her he never got to hold? I brushed the dark hair out of Luna's eyes and I chose the truth, because I'd built five years of my life on lies and I was done. "He's sad, baby," I whispered back, loud enough that he could hear it too, "because he missed you for a very long time. Longer than you've been alive. And he didn't even know he was missing you. That's the saddest kind of missing there is." Luna's small brow furrowed. She turned this over. Then she looked back at the giant kneeling in the snow, and something in her softened — the way it does when she finds a bird with a h

Diane's POV*Is he the Papa from my dreams?* I couldn't answer her. My throat had sealed shut. Because how do you explain a thing you've never understood yourself — how a child could dream, night after night, the low voice and the strong shoulders of a father she'd never seen, never been shown, never once had described to her? I'd told her he was a good man. I'd never told her he was tall, or that his voice ran deep, or that he'd have carried her up under the stars. And yet there it was in her dream, exactly, for years. So I did the only honest thing. I knelt down beside them both, and I put my hand over Luna's little hand where it still rested on Zev's cheek, and I said, "I don't know how you dreamed him, baby. But yes. That's your Papa. That's really him." And Zev — Zev broke completely. He didn't try to hide it anymore. He bowed his head into the shelter of our two hands on his face and he wept, this enormous man, silently, his shoulders shaking, and Luna, instead of pulling away,

Diane's POV*They're here. I saw them.* Four words from a five-year-old, and the whole golden morning turned to glass I was afraid to breathe on. I gripped Luna's shoulders. "Which ones, baby? Show Mama with your eyes only — don't point, don't look scared. Just tell me." She'd learned this game from me on the road: the quiet game, the not-pointing game, the game that had kept us alive through three towns. She leaned into my ear again, calm as still water, and whispered: "The man with the gray coat by the tall tree. And the one who limps. They were at the gas station. The one where you bought me the orange soda and made us leave fast before I could drink it." My stomach dropped through the frozen ground. I remembered that gas station. Two states back. I'd felt watched and hadn't been able to prove it, had grabbed her and run and hated myself for scaring her over nothing. Not nothing. She'd clocked their faces and carried them silently for weeks, my watchful girl, waiting for a grown-up