Semua Bab Bound to the Alpha She Was Raised to Hate : Bab 71 - Bab 80

Odessa's POVThe council chamber filled faster than I ever saw it, every elder, every senior fighter, every voice with standing enough to matter crowded around the long table by the time Garrick called the meeting to order. Ronan stood beside him now, still moving carefully from the fight that morning, his new title settling over him with a weight I could see him carrying even through the exhaustion."Forty-eight hours," Garrick said, laying the declaration flat on the table for everyone to see. "That's what we've got before Corvin considers this an act of war."The murmurs that followed weren't panic exactly, but something close to it, a room full of people doing the same brutal math all at once."Can we win?" someone asked from further down the table, blunt, no softening around it."No," Garrick said, equally blunt. "Not alone. Not against the full weight of Vale forces, not with the numbers we've got, not with the resources they can bring to bear if this actually escalates that far

Odessa's POVGarrick's words followed me the rest of the night, and I told myself they settled the question. I told myself I understood the logic, understood that going back solved nothing, that the math he laid out was sound.I still couldn't sleep.I lay in the dark for hours, staring at the same cracked window that had never gotten fully repaired, running the whole argument back over and over. He's right, I kept telling myself. He's right, this doesn't end anything, going back just hands him what he wants without actually saving anyone.Except somewhere around three in the morning, a different thought started pushing back against that certainty, quiet and insistent, refusing to fully die down no matter how many times I tried to argue myself out of it.Maybe Garrick was wrong. Maybe, faced with the actual choice, with me actually standing in front of him rather than fighting from a distance, Corvin would take the win and leave Ironhollow alone. Maybe the forty-eight hour deadline wa

Odessa's POVWe walked back together, close and quiet, neither of us saying much on the way, though something had settled between us that hadn't been there when I first slipped out the door hours earlier. I still felt the guilt sitting heavy in my chest, but it no longer had a border and a note attached to it, driving me toward a decision made alone in the dark.Garrick met us in the front hallway, and one look at both our faces told him more than he probably needed asking questions for."She was heading for the border," Ronan said, before his father could ask.Garrick's expression went hard, then softened just as fast into something closer to weary relief. "But she's here now.""She's here now," Ronan confirmed.I braced myself for another version of last night's lecture, but Garrick just crossed the room and pulled me into a brief, firm hug instead, something I hadn't expected from him at all."Don't do that again," he

Odessa's POVWe crossed the border a little past midnight, moving through the same stretch of treeline where I first arrived weeks ago, except this time I wasn't stumbling into the unknown. I was the one leading the way."Stay close," I said, my voice barely above a whisper. "The Vale patrols this stretch differently than what you're used to. They rotate positions every few hours, but the pattern's predictable if you know where to look.""How do you know that?" Micah asked, close behind me, his footsteps careful and quiet despite his size."Grew up here," I said simply. "You learn things about the systems that control your life, even if nobody bothers to explain them to you."We moved fast through the outer stretches of territory I recognized in bits and pieces, memory filling in details that no map Ronan had managed to find could have captured. The shape of a particular hill. The way certain paths cut through denser brush that most patrols avoided simply because it was inconvenient t

Odessa's POVWe circled the building at a careful distance first, checking every angle we could reach without exposing ourselves fully to open sightlines, and eventually found what we were looking for at the back, a single guarded entrance that told us more than the building's blank exterior ever could.Two enforcers stood posted there, alert despite the late hour, weapons visible at their sides in a way that made my stomach twist tighter with every step closer we got."Two guards," Ronan whispered, crouched low beside me behind a low stone wall that gave us decent cover. "Manageable, if we move fast and quiet.""No shifting," I breathed. "If this goes loud, if word gets back to whoever runs this place that Ironhollow wolves breached the site, that hands Corvin everything he needs.""Understood," Briar said, already working through some plan of her own, her eyes tracking the guards' rotation, the small, predictable patterns even trained enforcers fell into after standing still too lon