All Chapters of THE ALPHA WHO SCENTED MY SECRET: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Wren's POVI'm already awake when Rhydian finds me, still standing at the window where I watched the wards fail, my whole body wound tight with the particular helpless dread of hearing a fight happen somewhere close by and having no way to know how it ends. I count every wolf that limps back through the gate below, telling myself I'm looking for Rhydian's shape among them, though some smaller, more honest part of me knows I'm looking for evidence that whatever's happening isn't as bad as it sounds.One look at his face tells me it's exactly as bad as it sounds."Tell me," I say, before he can find a gentler way into it."We caught one of them alive. Young, barely more than a boy." He says it carefully, watching my reaction the way you'd watch someone standing near a ledge. "Before he died, he said a name."I already know. I know from the way his jaw is set, from the careful distance he's keeping even now, like he's bracing for something to break."Callum," I say, and it isn't a questi

Rhydian's POVPiet's report reaches me within minutes of leaving Corwin's training room, and I've barely had time to process the shape of it, something drawn straight to her the moment her fire lit, before I'm called into a council chamber louder than I've heard it in years, half the senior members on their feet, voices overlapping in the particular chaos that happens when fear finds itself an audience.I take a moment at the door before entering, the way my father used to before difficult meetings, letting the noise inside settle into something I can actually parse instead of walking in already reacting to the loudest voice in the room. It's a habit that's served me well over six years. Tonight it barely holds."I'm not suggesting we abandon her," Adrian is saying, hands raised in a placating gesture that doesn't match the hard set of his jaw. "I'm suggesting we relocate her somewhere less central. A neutral territory, perhaps, under joint protection, until we understand what exactly

Rhydian's POVThe stars are fully out by the time either of us speaks again, the kind of clear, cold night that makes the whole valley feel suspended in glass, and I find myself more nervous standing next to her on this wall than I've felt facing down armed incursions or hostile councils in six years of holding this seat. It's a strange thing, discovering at twenty-six that the hardest conversation I've ever had to start isn't with an enemy or a council full of doubters, but with a woman who has every reason not to believe a single word I say.She doesn't answer right away, and I let the silence sit between us instead of filling it, because I've learned enough about her in the last month to know that pushing too fast only ever makes her retreat further behind that careful, practiced calm. Below us, the pack house glows warm against the dark, ordinary sounds drifting up faintly, laughter from somewhere in the kitchen, a door closing, the small, unremarkable noises of a household that h

Wren's POVPain doesn't begin to describe it. It's less like pain and more like something finally, violently remembering what it was built to hold back, five years of enforced sleep breaking apart all at once under the weight of a fear too large to be contained by any binding, however carefully made. Every nerve in my arm feels like it's being unwound from the inside, thread by thread, and somewhere underneath the agony of it there's something else too, a strange, terrible relief, like a held breath finally letting go after five years of not knowing it was even holding one."Wren." Rhydian's voice, weak but urgent, his hand finding my wrist even through the blood and the panic. "Wren, look at me."I can't. My whole vision has narrowed to the white-hot ring around my wrist, to the smell of smoke thickening around us, to the terrible certainty that I'm about to lose the first person in five years who ever looked at me like I was worth protecting rather than using.The binding shatters.

Wren's POVI wake sore in every muscle, my hands still faintly tender like I've held them too close to a real fire rather than summoned one from nothing, and I'm still working out how to stand without my legs shaking when Sable finds me to say Adrian's ready to talk, and Rhydian wants me there for it.They let me sit in on the interrogation, more out of Rhydian's insistence than any real protocol, and Adrian looks smaller somehow in the small stone room they've confined him to, stripped of the easy, careful confidence he's worn since the day I arrived. I almost feel sorry for him, sitting there with his hands bound and his composure cracking at the edges, before I remember exactly what that composure cost people last night.Rhydian sits across from him, still moving carefully from the wound that closed but hasn't fully healed, and I take the chair beside him, close enough to feel the tension radiating off both men before either of them says a word."I want to be clear," Adrian says, b