All Chapters of The Alpha's Hidden Bond : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Diane's POVThere was no time for what Zev's words had opened in me. Silver Creek marching, Victor's banner, the traitor in our own walls — the war didn't care that my mate had just told me he'd kept faith with me for five years at the cost of everything. We broke apart in the alcove and threw ourselves into the work of surviving. But near the black middle of that long night, when the first wave of preparations had settled and the war council gathered around the great table to plan, the strangest thing steadied all of us: Luna would not sleep, would not be taken to bed, and so she sat in Zev's lap at the head of the war table while grim men argued over maps of the passes. She should have been terrified. Instead she was calm as still water, her small hand resting on her father's forearm, and her calm spread out over that table of frightened warriors like warmth off a hearth. She had decided, in her simple certain way, that as long as she was between her mother and her father, nothing b

Diane's POVThe note on the pillow changed everything and nothing. We swept Luna's room, doubled the guard on her door to four, and found no sign of how it had gotten there — which was the worst part, the same cold message as the empty cell and the signal fire: we come and go as we please, and there is someone among you who lets us. Zev wanted to cancel the courting, postpone it until we'd found the traitor. But I said no. I said it fierce and I said it certain, standing in Luna's swept and guarded room with that dry leaf crushed in my fist. "That's exactly what they want," I told him. "They want us small and scared and hiding behind bolts, jumping at every shadow, too frightened to live. I spent five years living like that, Zev. Every day. And it didn't keep her safe — it just meant we were already half-defeated before anyone ever raised a blade." I threw the crushed leaf into the fire and watched it curl and vanish. "So we're going on your courting. Tomorrow. Guarded, careful, not s

Diane's POV*Am I a monster?* My daughter's question hung in the cold air of our room all that long afternoon, and I could not fully answer it, because how do you tell a five-year-old the truth — that the world will always fear what it cannot understand, that her own strength was a gift and a wound both, that we'd run for five years not because she was a monster but because I'd been too afraid to teach her she wasn't? I held her and I rocked her and I said the only true thing I had. "You are not a monster, baby. A monster hurts and doesn't care. You hurt someone by accident and your first thought — your very first thought — was to kneel down and help him. That's not a monster, Luna. That's the bravest, kindest heart I've ever known." But she wouldn't be comforted, not really, and she fell asleep still hiccuping, her strong little hands curled under her chin, and I sat watching her breathe and I made a promise to the dark: *no more. No more will she be the secret. No more will she be t

Diane's POVI stood frozen in the middle of that clearing with my daughter in my arms and the whole pack still kneeling in the frozen dirt behind me, and I could not breathe, because the figure walking out of the pines toward us was a face I had buried five years deep. Cole. My brother. My older brother, who I had watched fall the night this pack was torn apart, who I had been told bled out on the mountain road, whose name I had whispered in a hundred dark motel rooms as the ghost of everything I'd lost. And here he was — thinner, gray at the temples, a long scar splitting one eyebrow — walking across the clearing as calm as a Sunday morning, alive, alive, and my knees nearly buckled and I heard myself make a small broken sound. "Cole?" His name came out cracked and small. He stopped ten feet away, and his eyes moved over me, over the blood on my lip, over the child clinging to my neck, and something flickered across his face — but it was not the joy I ached for. It was something care

Diane's POV*Those were his sons.* The roar of the pack faded around me into a dull ringing, and I stood there frozen while the snow drifted down between the pines, and I stared at my brother's white face, and the whole world tilted on its edge. Twelve men dead in a snowy pass. Twelve men I had killed one by one through a long black night with a baby hidden in a log. And they had not been rogues, not wandering nameless killers — they had been Victor's *sons.* That was why the note. That was the real reason Victor wanted me. Not for peace. Not for a broken bond. For *revenge.* He wanted my hand so he could take my life, slowly, for the twelve graves I had put in that mountain. I walked toward Cole on legs that didn't feel like mine, and the pack's cheering died as they saw my face, and I said, low, "You knew. All this time you knew, and you let me stand here—" "I only just understood," Cole whispered, and his eyes were wet. "The pass. The winter. I didn't know it was *you* until Luna s