CURSED TO THE TRIPLET ALPHAS のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 61 - チャプター 70

She didn’t wait for the council’s full approval. That was the part she’d never say out loud to Griffin, not fully aware that somewhere in the two days since the argument, patience had quietly lost to urgency, and she’d started looking for a way to make contact long before anyone had finished deciding whether it was wise.Ines was the obvious path. The defector had left under escort, but the escort wasn’t a prison, and before she’d crossed back toward the border region three days ago, Sloane had found a moment alone with her, brief and unwitnessed, long enough to press a folded scrap of parchment into her palm.If you find a safe way to reach him, give him this. Tell no one else yet. I need to know if there’s anything left worth trying before I ask three men I love to risk everything on the chance that there is.The reply came back five days later, smuggled through a trader who dealt in dried herbs and asked no questions, tucked inside a bundle Cassian had ironically ordered for the in

“Tell me what the ritual actually requires,” Sloane said. “All of it. I’m done accepting partial truths, even from you.”Silas nodded slowly, as if he’d expected exactly this demand and had already braced himself to meet it honestly. “The old texts call it a tethering rather than a true bond. Where the claiming you’ve already undergone with the Marlowe brothers draws fully on what you carry, your whole self, bound completely to theirs, a tethering draws only a fraction. A thread of the bond’s power, offered willingly, channeled into Ravenwood’s weakest bloodlines to slow what’s killing them.”“Slow. Not stop.”“Slow, possibly for a generation or more. Perhaps longer, if the old texts are accurate, which I can’t promise they are.” He held her gaze, unflinching despite the uncertainty in his own voice. “I won’t pretend this is guaranteed salvation, Sloane. I won’t lie to you again, not after everything silence has already cost us both. It might not work at all. The ritual hasn’t been pe

Ines returned two days later with more than Sloane had dared hope for, not a copy of the text itself, which remained locked in Ravenwood’s oldest archive under guard Silas no longer fully controlled, but her own memory of it, carefully transcribed from a reading she’d done as a much younger wolf, decades before anyone believed the ritual might ever matter again.Cassian spread her pages across the war table, cross-referencing them against Marlowe’s own older records with the same meticulous focus he brought to everything, while Griffin and Dax read over his shoulders, and Sloane waited, tense, for whatever verdict emerged.“It’s real,” Cassian said finally, some reluctant relief in his voice. “Or at least, it was genuinely practiced, historically. There’s a corresponding entry in our own archives referencing a tethering ritual performed between two allied packs nearly three hundred years ago, described almost exactly the way Ines remembers it.”“Did it work,” Griffin asked.“According

She asked for the meeting herself this time, through Ines, no hesitation, no secrecy with Griffin and Cassian both present at the tree line this time, visible, no longer concealed, a deliberate signal that whatever trust existed between her and Silas now, it existed in the open.Silas met her at the mill again, and the moment he saw her face, something in his posture braced.“Cassian found something,” Sloane said, without preamble. “In the old text. A line Ines’s memory didn’t include, buried deeper in our own archive’s cross-reference.”“Tell me.”“The tethering isn’t a one-time transfer,” she said. “The ‘safe’ version you described is the thread that fades once it’s done its work. That’s not how it worked three hundred years ago. According to our records, the vessel’s connection to the receiving bloodline didn’t fade at all. It deepened over time, the way any bond deepens. Which means the woman who performed it wasn’t offering a single night of pain in exchange for saving a pack. Sh

The attack came an hour before dawn, and it came nowhere near the wall.Sloane had gone to the small garden near the eastern edge of the compound because she was unable to sleep, restless with the weight of everything the past week had revealed, needing air and quiet before the full council convened at sunrise to discuss what Silas’s warning might mean. Dax had walked her there himself and taken up a position at the gate rather than crowding her solitude, close enough to reach her in seconds, or so they’d both believed.She never heard them coming. That was the detail that would haunt her afterward, no warning growl, no snap of brush underfoot, simply a hand clamped hard over her mouth and an arm locking around her ribs with enough force to drive the air from her lungs entirely.She fought. Every lesson Rowan had drilled into her for months came rushing forward, elbow driving back into a solid chest, heel stamping down hard enough to earn a grunt of pain, but there were too many of th