Rejected By My Brother’s Alpha Best Friends のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 77

TRISTAN'S POV"Is she hurt?"Axel was down the porch steps before I'd even cut the engine. Reyes followed a pace behind him, arms folded, face like stone.I climbed out of the car. "She's fine.""Then why did your father's head of security walk into my board meeting and tell me I had ten minutes to be in a car?" Axel's voice was low and tight, his eyes already sliding past me to the back seat. "Tristan, what happened?"The rear door opened before I could answer. Brielle stepped out first, then turned and held her hand out to our father.He didn't take it. He gripped the top of the door frame and hauled himself upright on his own, jaw locked, while Brielle hovered close enough to catch him.I watched Axel take it in. The gray tinge to my father's skin. The careful way he set each foot down on the gravel, like the ground might shift under him.Axel's shoulders went rigid."Alpha Prescott," he murmured, straightening on instinct."Inside," my father ordered, without breaking stride. "We'

DARIUS'S POV"Ninety seconds."Brielle stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked at me like I'd spoken in another language. "What?""That's all I want." I kept my hands at my sides where she could see them. "Ninety seconds, then I'll get out of your way and you can go home to the girls."She was grey with exhaustion. Her sleeve still had her father's blood dried stiff on the cuff, the same as mine."Darius, I can't do this now.""I know you can't." My throat was tight around every word. "That's why I'm not asking you to do anything."She let out a long breath. Then she leaned her shoulder against the wall, which was as close to permission as I was going to get.I'd had two weeks to work out how to say this. I still didn't have it right."I've been standing at the edge of your life since the day you came back," I began. "Your father called it hovering. He wasn't wrong.""Darius—""Let me finish, or I'll lose my nerve." My heart was slamming. "I don't know how a man apologises fo

ELENA'S POV"Give it to me."Tristan stopped on the hall steps with the folder held against his chest like he could keep the thing inside it from getting out."Elena—""You're standing there working out how to say it gently." I held my hand out flat. "Don't. Give it to me."He gave it to me.One page. A petition timestamped two minutes past four in the morning, and my brother's signature sitting at the bottom of it in that looping, confident hand our father drilled into us both before we were ten.The wind came up the steps and pushed my hair across my face. I didn't move to fix it."I'm sorry," I whispered."Don't do that.""He's my brother.""You've said six words to him in nine years, and four of them were in an elevator." Tristan took the folder back out of my hands. "You don't get to carry this."Except I did carry it, all the way down the steps and into the car, sitting in my lap like a stone.We got three streets before it turned into a fight."How much do you actually know abo

BRIELLE'S POV"There's a compound in his blood that shouldn't be there."Maren said it the moment the door clicked shut behind us. She didn't soften it. She didn't lead up to it. She just held the envelope against her chest and let the words land in the corridor.I heard them. I didn't understand them."A what?" Tristan's voice came out rough."The human lab found traces of it on the first pass. They couldn't identify it." Her jaw tightened. "They couldn't identify it because it wasn't made for humans. It's built to work on a wolf's body. On a wolf's healing."The floor went soft under my feet. Tristan's hand shot out and caught my elbow."Poison," I breathed."I don't like that word until I know more." Maren pulled out a sheet of paper covered in columns I couldn't read. "But yes. It's layered. Small amounts, given over time, each one sitting on top of the last. Someone has been dosing your father for weeks.""Three weeks," Tristan rasped."Three weeks." She nodded. "It explains ever