The Moon Witch Who Chose the Cursed Alpha의 모든 챕터: 챕터 1 - 챕터 10

**Chapter Two**He didn't mean to come this close.Ronan had told himself he was just walking the border, clearing his head, letting the cold do what meditation couldn't anymore. But somewhere in the last mile the wolf had taken more of the wheel than he'd meant to give it, and now he was standing at the edge of a clearing he didn't recognize, breathing hard, staring at a cottage with candlelight leaking gold through its shutters.*Turn around,* the last clear-headed part of him said.The wolf didn't want to turn around. The wolf wanted the light.He took one step into the clearing and the world went sideways — not in space but in *feeling*, like a hand closing around something inside his chest that had been clenched too long and finally, violently, let go. He staggered. Caught himself against a tree. His vision swam gold at the edges, wolf-gold, the change cresting up through him faster than it had any right to, moon or no moon—And then it stopped.Not faded. *Stopped.* Like a hand

**Chapter Four**Ronan didn't remember agreeing to come back. He only remembered that when the sky started to lighten, Lyra stood, brushed off her skirts, and said, "Next moon. Come back before it turns, not after. I'd rather test this while you're still yourself enough to tell me what it feels like.""Test it.""You don't think I'm doing this out of hospitality, do you?" A dry look, though something underneath it wasn't entirely unkind. "I want to know why my magic chose you. Until I know that, I don't sleep well. Consider it self-interest."He'd left before full light, before anyone in the pack could ask where their Alpha had spent the night, and made it back to the manor with the dawn still gray at the edges. It should have felt like nothing had changed. Instead the wolf sat unusually quiet under his skin the whole walk home, like it, too, was turning something over.Corwin was waiting in the front hall, which meant he hadn't slept either."You look," Corwin said carefully, "less l

**Chapter Six**They spread the books across her table — hers stacked beside the few pages he'd managed to smuggle out of his father's private study without anyone noticing — and worked through most of the night by candlelight, shoulders close enough that Lyra was aware of him in a way that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the low, steady warmth radiating off him like a hearth she hadn't asked to sit beside."Here." Ronan turned one of the older pages toward her, careful with the brittle paper. "This is the only reference to the original binding I've found. It doesn't name what was interrupted. Just that it was a joining — two lines, two powers, meant to bind together and never did.""Joining." Lyra read the passage twice, throat tight. "That's not a small word in the old tongue. That's not an alliance. That's—""A marriage," Ronan said. "Or as close as the old covens and packs ever got to one."The silence that followed had weight to it. Lyra sat back, putting a

**Chapter Eight**The morning after held a stillness Ronan hadn't felt in years — no ache behind his ribs, no low hum of the wolf testing the walls of its cage. He woke on the floor of Lyra's cottage, having fallen asleep sitting against the wall sometime near dawn, and for one disoriented moment simply lay there cataloguing everything that didn't hurt.Lyra was already awake, sitting at the table with one of the old texts open in front of her, dark circles under her eyes that told him she hadn't slept at all."You should rest," he said."I will. After I finish reading what happens next." She didn't look up, but her voice had an edge he was learning to recognize — not anger, exactly, more like fear dressed up as focus. "Last night confirmed the binding is real. It also confirmed it isn't finished. There's a second stage. The texts call it the Choosing.""Meaning.""Meaning last night, my magic recognized yours. That's instinct — neither of us had to agree to anything, it happened whet

**Chapter Ten**Lyra heard the news before Ronan reached her — not from him, but from a raven that dropped a folded scrap of parchment on her windowsill mid-afternoon, unsigned but unmistakably urgent in its handwriting. *Council knows. They're calling you a threat to sovereignty. Ronan is arguing your case but I'd advise caution until this settles.* No name, but she recognized the careful phrasing of someone protecting his Alpha by warning the witch his Alpha refused to give up.She sat with the note a long time before she let herself feel the fear underneath the anger.*A threat to sovereignty.* She'd heard variations of that phrase before — different words, same shape, the shape people used right before they decided the safest thing to do with a woman whose power didn't answer to anyone was to make sure she had nothing left to defend herself with. Her coven hadn't called her a threat to sovereignty. They'd called her *unclaimed* and *unregistered* and *dangerous*, and it had ended