All Chapters of The Alpha's Hidden Bond : Chapter 71 - Chapter 78

Diane's POV"You buried me," Cole repeated softly, and for a long moment he didn't deny it, and the whole clearing hung on that silence like a rope about to snap. Then his shoulders sagged, and the fight went out of him, and he said the thing that broke my heart all over again. "You buried a coffin, old mother. Not a boy." He looked at me, and his eyes begged me to understand. "Our father sold me, Diane. When I was nine. To Victor, to settle a debt. And he told the whole world I'd died of fever, and he put dirt on an empty box so no one would ask questions." His voice cracked. "That's why you thought I fell on the road five years ago. You never knew I'd been gone since we were children. The brother you remember skipping stones — that was the last summer before he took me." The grandmother's hand had frozen over her mouth. And I stood there while my whole childhood rearranged itself in the cold — every story about my dead brother a lie, every year of my life shadowed by a grave that ne

Diane's POVThe lodge became a nightmare of smoke and firelight and screaming, and I lost sight of everything for three terrible heartbeats — and in those three heartbeats, the shape of Victor's whole lie became clear. Because they didn't come through only the front doors. They came through the walls. They came up through the old root cellar and down from the smoke-hole in the roof and in from the sleeping-quarters where the pups had been sent for safety — and I understood, with a sick lurch, that Victor had not done this alone. No lone pack knew our lodge this well. No stranger knew where the pups slept. Through the smoke I saw them — wolves I half-recognized, wolves wearing the gray of a neighboring pack, Silver Creek, the pack that shared our western border, the pack Zev had traded with and trusted for twenty years. They had opened the walls for Victor from the inside. And behind them poured Victor's rogues, the wild hungry ones with no pack and no law, and the two forces crashed i

Diane's POV We came down on Victor's people at the frozen creek bed, where the valley narrowed and the water had turned to black glass under the moon, and I want you to understand what it is to hunt the man who has your child — every sense screaming, the cold forgotten, your whole body one drawn arrow. Zev hit them from the high side, a black storm out of the pines, and I came low along the creek where the shadows hid me, and for the first few heartbeats it was chaos, torches spinning, wolves turning, shouts cutting the freezing air. But Victor's people were tired. They'd climbed the mountain, they'd fought at the lodge, they'd run the slope carrying a struggling child — and we were fresh with fury. Zev tore through the rear guard while I slipped between the fighting bodies toward the center, toward the one place they were all trying to protect, toward the tall calm figure who stood on the black ice with my daughter clutched against him. And Luna saw me first. Of course she did. She

Diane's POVHe's standing right behind your new family. I did not turn to look. I could not. Because if I turned and saw my father's face in that crowd — the face I had grieved, the face I had prayed to, the face I had told my daughter stories about on dark motel nights — I would break into so many pieces that no one could ever put me back together, and I could not afford that, not with Luna watching, not yet. So I stayed exactly where I was, kneeling on the black ice, staring into the pale eyes of the man who had just told me my mother was murdered. And something happened inside me that I have no gentle words for. All night I had been a mother — fierce, controlled, choosing mercy, choosing not to teach my daughter the wrong lesson. But the woman who died when I was small, the woman whose face I could barely remember, the woman who had tried to save me and been handed over like a debt — she rose up inside me now, and the mother stepped aside, and what was left was the little girl who