All Chapters of The Alpha’s college Mate : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Lucan’s POV By half past midnight, the pack was awake and the lawn was full of wolves. I stood on the gravel in front of the great house with a map of the grounds pinned beneath my palms and a hundred and ten warriors waiting for me to speak. Lanterns hissed along the drive. Beyond the ring of silver blossoms, the old library burned in every window, and gray shapes moved behind the glass in slow, orderly lines. “They aren’t attacking,” Milo said at my shoulder. “That’s what I don’t like. They’re settling in.” “He’s making a point.” I traced the north wall with my thumb. “Every door on the east side of that building leads under the quad. He wants us to watch him take the stair.” “Then we don’t let him have the stair.” “We can’t hold it without going in, and if we go in, we hand him the fight on his own ground.” I looked up. “Sentries on every door, no engagement, no shifting unless I give the word. The pups and the Sterlings move to the north barracks tonight. Clara’s paren

Lucan’s POV The pull lasted forty seconds. I counted every one. Clara held the edge of my mother’s desk with her free hand, her jaw locked, her eyes fixed on a point beyond the window. The lamp flame lay flat. The cup rattled. Then, all at once, the tension went out of her arm like a rope cut at the far end, and she sagged into the chair. “It let go,” she said hoarsely. “For now.” My mother’s voice was gentle and merciless. “It will come back harder. Go and be a person for a few hours, both of you. That is the only advice I have left.” I took the red cord from the blotter this time. She held it out, and I didn’t argue. Our quarters were quiet in the way a house is quiet after a funeral. Clara went straight to the bathroom and ran the tap. I stood in the middle of the bedroom with the cord wound around my fingers and nowhere to put myself. The black notebook lay open on the desk where she’d left it, under the lamp. I hadn’t meant to read it. I only meant to close it, to t

Lucan’s POV I reached the east line at a dead run and found my pack standing in the gray. The border post sat dark behind me. Ahead, where the lawn gave way to the black reeds, two hundred of Adan’s men had drawn up in ranks, still as fence posts, their coats pale under the lanterns. And in front of them, in a ragged line, stood eleven of mine. Declan was among them, with his sidearm hanging from two fingers and his face turned up toward the stars like a boy listening for his name. “Declan.” I took the last ten feet at a walk, palms out. “Look at me.” He did. His eyes were wet and puzzled and perfectly kind. “Alpha. I’m sorry. I came out to hold the line. I just can’t remember which side of it I’m supposed to be on.” “Our side.” “Which one’s that?” My chest tightened. Behind him, a girl from the barracks had laid her pistol in the grass and was staring at her own open hand. A wolf I’d trained myself stood with his shoulder against a stranger’s, swaying slightly, as if th

Lucan’s POV I howled her name into the dark, and the dark answered with her voice. It was a single note, enormous and clear, rolling out of the library’s stone like a bell struck underground. Every hair on my body lifted. I knew it the way I knew my own pulse. I had held that wolf in my arms for a month and never once heard her sing. Where, I had called, in the oldest word we had. She hadn’t answered. She had only said goodbye. “Alpha.” Gail knelt in the wet grass beside me with her case open, her gloved hands already pressed to the long pale gash down Draven’s body. She wasn’t bleeding him back together. She was packing the wound with something that smelled of clove and cold iron, and her mouth had gone tight. “I can hold the edges. I can’t hold him. He’s not made of anything I can stitch.” “I’m made of enough,” Draven rasped. His face was gray as paper, his outline flickering like a candle in a draft. “Go, Vance. Go get her.” “You’re dying.” “I’m thinning. It isn’t t

Lucan’s POV The silver rope went slack around my throat, and I sucked in air that tasted of sugar and blood. The loom’s chord had loosened every vine in the chamber. Whatever Clara had done, the thing was awake, and it no longer cared about us. Milo coughed beside me, spitting silver pulp, and dragged a hand free of its coil. I tore the last rope from my wrist and rolled onto my knees. Across the floor, Clara stood with her palm an inch from the stone, light climbing her arm in veins of white. Her hair lifted around her face as if she were underwater. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking through the weave at something I couldn’t see. “Stop her!” Adan’s voice had lost every trace of cheer. It cracked across the cathedral like a dropped plate. “She’ll ruin it, she’ll ruin it, fifty years of” He didn’t finish. His rings went first. They burst off his fingers in a spray of gold and stone, pinging off the floor, as his hands swelled and darkened and the knuckles cracked ou