Semua Bab The Trapped Heiress: Bab 151 - Bab 160

The entire council sat in stunned silence; no one moved. The healer in pale robes still held her trembling hand over the bracelet, and the faint curl of smoke had long since faded, but the dread it had left hung in the chamber like a held breath.It was the lean council member in gray who broke it first. He rose slowly, his voice stiff with shock.“Alpha Hamilton, Luna Louise, Miss Sherry.” He turned his cold gaze across the circle. “What do you have to say in your defense?”Sherry knelt on the black stone where the guards had left her, silent, her bare wrist bruised and red. She did not look up.It was Hamilton who answered. He lifted his head, and though his face was gray and slick with sweat, his voice came out hard.“It is all a lie,” he said. “Every word of it, I am the one who saved Alpha Noah; I found him with my own hands.”“We are being set up!” Luna Louise’s scream split the air, shrill and furious. She had torn free from her guards and stood with her fists clenched, her com

“I can pull them out of the trance.” Lula raised her wand. “It will take time for their memories to return, if they ever do. But I can wake them.” She closed her eyes. A soft, silver light swelled from the wand and washed over the beds, and one by one the chanting stopped. People blinked, gasped, and began to weep. A woman cried out a name that no one answered.“Take them somewhere safe,” Lula told the warriors. “Gently, do not frighten them.”They did, lifting the stunned, shaking people from the beds, wrapping them in blankets, and carrying them out as though they were made of glass.In the chamber, an old Alpha in the third row had covered his face with both hands.The recording moved on to a small office at the back of the lab. Files lay heaped across the desk, shelves bulged with ledgers, and a wall of monitors flickered with dead feeds. Lula swept through the papers, and Noah read over her shoulder, and the more they read, the darker their faces grew.“Twenty years,” Noah said,

Noah’s jaw trembled, he drew a long, shuddering breath, and the wolf in him whimpered and slowly, reluctantly, drew back. The fur receded, the gold in his eyes dimmed, and his hands unclenched.“All right,” he whispered. “All right.”Richard McKinley pushed forward through the crowd. He was breathing hard, one hand pressed against his bandaged ribs, and his face was twisted with the raw agony of a father whose only daughter had vanished into the dark. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he looked as though he wanted to tear the mountain apart with his bare hands.“Where is she?” he rasped. “My Laurel, where is my daughter?”“Richard,” Lula said gently.“She went out alone...” His voice cracked, he closed his eyes and swallowed, his fists trembling at his sides. When he opened them again, he looked at Lula, and something fierce and desperate had settled over his face. “Tell me what to do.”“We cannot act recklessly,” Lula said. “Not for Laurel’s sake, not for Kian’s.”For a long moment Richa

Louise caught him against her chest; he was wailing, thrashing, and reaching for his mother with both hands. Then Louise raised her wand and drew it in a slow circle around his small body, and a soft, silvery light settled over him like a net; his cries faltered. His fists went slack; in a heartbeat he lay quiet, his eyes half-closed, his lips trembling.“Stop,” Laurel whispered. “Stop it, please. Please, he is just a baby; take me, take my life, and let him go, please.”Nobody answered her.Louise carried the child to the fire. Its light danced over his face, over his soft dark curls, and over the curve of his small cheek. She lifted him high, and from her sleeve, slowly, she drew out a long, thin knife.It gleamed in the firelight.Laurel’s heart stopped.“No.” The word left her in a breath, and then a scream tore from her throat that she did not recognize as her own. “NO! Please! Please, don’t! Not my son! Not my baby! KIAN!”Blood, she realized, with a horror so vast it blotted ou

The next day, it was already noon when Laurel opened her eyes.Sunlight spilled across the bedroom, warm on the pale sheets and bright on the polished tiled floor. Somewhere beyond the open window, birds were singing as if nothing in the world had ever gone wrong. For a moment Laurel simply lay there, staring at the ceiling, her limbs heavy as stone, her head swimming in a soft, dreamy fog.She had slept like the dead, and yet the whole world felt different.It was the strangest sensation; the air seemed sharper, the colors brighter. She could hear the faint rustle of leaves on the far side of the garden, the distant clink of dishes in the kitchen, and even the quiet breathing of the house itself, as though a veil she had lived behind all her life had finally been lifted.Yesterday, she thought dazedly. Yesterday I...The memory flooded back all at once: the firelight, the ritual, the knife, Kian’s wail as he was torn from her arm, the light that had burst out of her chest, and the ro