All Chapters of claimed by my alpha step brother: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The first morning I woke as Luna of Blackridge, the light did not look different.That was the part that undid me.I had expected the world to announce itself—some shift in the air, some weight in the silence, some visible seam between the life we had fought for and the life we had finally been allowed to keep. Instead there was only pale spring sun across the floorboards, the distant sound of the kitchens starting, and Tristan’s arm heavy over my waist as if the title had not changed the way he reached for me in sleep.I lay still and breathed through the ordinary miracle of it.Alpha. Luna. Words that had once lived on the far side of blood and winter and rooms designed to break us. Now they sat in the quiet like furniture that had always belonged to the house.Tristan’s breathing changed. The bond warmed a second before his mouth found the claim mark at the back of my neck, soft and unthinking, the same way he had found it through every harder season.“You’re awake,” he murmure

The quiet had been real long enough that my body stopped treating it like a trick.That was the only explanation I had for why I noticed the small things at all. In the years of silver and siege and corridors that burned, the body had been an instrument first and a home second. Hunger was fuel status. Exhaustion was a tactical condition. The monthly rhythms of my own blood had been filed under logistics and ignored unless they interfered with a fight. Peace, as it turned out, returned the body to itself with a kind of shy insistence. One morning I woke with a taste in my mouth like metal and rain. The next, the scent of the morning fires turned my stomach in a way that had nothing to do with bad wood. By the end of the week I had begun counting days with a different kind of attention, and the counting made my hands go cold against the washbasin while Tristan slept on in the pale light behind me.I did not tell him immediately.Not out of secrecy. Out of the need to stand inside the po

There was a morning when I woke and the secret no longer fit behind my teeth.Not because anyone had forced it. Because my body had begun speaking in a dialect the house was eventually going to understand whether I translated for it or not. The nausea arrived earlier. The fatigue had opinions about staircases. My formal coats, the ones cut for a Luna who spent her days in motion, had started to feel like borrowed architecture across the chest and under the ribs. Nothing the world could point at yet. Everything I could feel when I stood alone at the washbasin and looked at myself the way the medic looked at a chart.Tristan noticed the same hour I did.Of course he did. The bond had become a continuous low reporting system for things I had not said. He came up behind me in the pale light, set his hands at my hips, and rested his mouth against the claim mark without asking a question he already had the answer to.“It is changing,” he said into my skin.“Yes.”“How long before the house

Knowing changed the air in every corridor.Not dramatically. Not with banners or continuous formal visits. More like a low change in pressure—the way the house, the yards, the administrative rooms all acquired an extra awareness whenever I passed through them. Eyes landed and left more carefully. Conversations paused a half-beat and resumed with adjusted content. Someone always seemed to appear with a chair I had not asked for. Someone else always seemed to discover a reason to shorten a meeting that would once have run until the lamps were lit.I hated some of it.I needed some of it.Both things were true at once, and the bond carried that contradiction straight into Tristan’s chest every time I swallowed irritation for the sake of practicality.“You are projecting storm,” he said on the third morning after the hall, setting a cup of the only tea that still tasted like itself into my hands before I had fully sat down.“I am projecting the desire to walk into one room without being t

The fourth month did not ask permission before it rearranged my sense of my own edges.One day I was still negotiating coats and calling the child a secret the public had only been told about. The next, there was no negotiation left in the cloth or in the way strangers’ eyes dropped and lifted when I entered a room. I was not only Luna. I was Luna clearly, undeniably carrying the Alpha’s heir, and the territory adjusted around that fact with a mixture of tenderness, greed, superstition, and the practical caution of people who understood that my body had become a kind of second banner whether I consented to the symbolism or not.I consented to the child.I did not consent to every pair of eyes that tried to own the sight of me.Tristan knew the difference. He tracked it through the bond the way he tracked weather over the eastern fringe—continuously, with a tension he tried and often failed to hide. On the morning the medic measured the growth and said, with careful neutrality, that we