บททั้งหมดของ claimed by my alpha step brother: บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

The night after the claim felt unreal.I lay in Tristan’s bed with my head on his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart while the house slowly settled into silence around us. The events of the hall kept replaying in fragments—the weight of so many eyes, the cold challenge in that ranking wolf’s voice, the terrifying speed of Tristan’s fight, the moment the elder’s words made the claim law. Every time I closed my eyes I saw it again. Every time I opened them I found the same truth waiting: I was still here. He was still holding me. The pack had been forced to watch us stand together and had not broken us apart.Tristan’s fingers moved slowly through my hair. He had been quiet for a long time, but the bond told me he wasn’t calm so much as tightly controlled. The Alpha in him was still riding the edge of the evening’s violence and victory.“You’re thinking too loud,” he murmured.“I can’t stop.” I traced a small circle against his shirt with my fingertip. “It doesn’t feel lik

The second week of preparation settled over me like a second skin—unfamiliar at first, then gradually harder to imagine living without.Every morning I reported to Elder Mira for another dense, unforgiving session. Pack law. Bloodline histories. The political weight of even small public gestures. She corrected my posture, my phrasing, the way I held eye contact when speaking about the territory. Once, when I apologized for forgetting the name of a minor allied family, she fixed me with a look sharp enough to cut.“Do not apologize for learning,” she said. “Apologize only if you stop. Again.”I repeated the names until they stayed.Tristan met me after every session. Sometimes he waited in the car. Sometimes he leaned against the stone wall outside the administration building with his hands in his pockets and his eyes already finding mine through the glass doors. The bond made the moment of reconnection feel like surfacing after holding my breath. He never asked if I wanted to quit. He

Three weeks should not have felt both endless and too short at the same time.After the elders dismissed the final complaint, the territory exhaled. Not completely. Not permanently. But enough that the constant sensation of walking through a field of half-set traps began to ease. The stares at school softened into something closer to ordinary curiosity. The ranking families who had pushed for delay went quiet again, their private dissatisfaction reduced to cold politeness when paths crossed. Even the air in the Alpha house changed. The tension that had lived in the walls for weeks loosened its grip.For the first time since the bond had snapped into place, the future felt like something we were moving toward instead of something we were constantly defending.I filled the days with preparation.Elder Mira intensified the sessions—ceremony structure, the wording of the public vows, the precise expectations placed on a newly marked Luna during the first season after the claim. She made m

Time stopped meaning anything in the stone room.There was no window. No clock. Only the single bulb, the burn of silver at my wrists, and the distant, muffled thrum of the bond like a heartbeat heard through deep water. Sometimes it surged—Tristan’s rage flaring so violently that my own chest ached with it. Sometimes it went terrifyingly quiet, as if he had forced himself into a cold, controlled silence in order to function. Those stretches were worse. The silence made me invent horrors.I tested the ropes until my skin split and the silver sank deeper. I searched every inch of the room for a weakness and found none. The door was thick. The walls were solid. Whoever had designed this place had done it with wolves in mind.I was not getting out alone.The scarred man returned twice by my imperfect counting. The first time he only observed me, as if confirming I was still useful. The second time he brought a bottle of water and set it on the floor just far enough that I had to awkwardl

Morning did not soothe anything.I woke to the dull throb of my wrists and the heavier, invisible ache of a night that refused to stay in the past. Tristan was already awake. He lay on his side facing me, eyes open in the gray light, one hand resting lightly over the bandages as if even in stillness he needed the proof that I was solid and present. The gold had finally faded from his irises, but the intensity beneath them had not.“You didn’t sleep,” I whispered.“I slept enough.” His thumb traced a careful line just above the edge of the gauze. “How bad?”“Sore. Bearable.” I flexed my fingers slowly. The silver burns pulled tight, but the worst of the chemical fog had lifted from my head. “Better than the alternative.”Something dark moved through his expression. He leaned in and pressed a long, quiet kiss to my forehead, then another to my temple, then one to the corner of my mouth—as if reassembling me through contact alone.Downstairs, the house was already fully awake. The attack