All Chapters of THE ALPHA'S FORBIDDEN LUNA: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

POV: Lyra Thorne"You came alone, little wolf. Good. Your mother told you the half of the story that makes her a victim. Sit down, and I will tell you the half she is too ashamed to say. Not one word of it is kind."The hollow lay at the bottom of a ravine where the old Thorne border ran into the dark. Frost had silvered the stones in the ring. My breath rose in clouds. I had walked for six hours with Marcus's gray coat around my shoulders, and it smelled of cedar smoke and old boot leather, and every step I took felt like a step away from the only person who had ever looked at me as if I mattered.Titus Crane sat on a flat rock beside a small fire, a tall man with gray at his temples and silver burns across the backs of both hands. He wore no weapon. He did not stand. I had expected a monster. He looked like a tired schoolteacher."I will stand," I said."As you like." He poured something steaming from a flask into a tin cup and held it out. "Mint tea. It is not poisoned. If I wanted

POV: Lyra Thorne"Say the name, Titus. Do not stop. Do not make me wait. Whoever my father forgave in his last breath, I will hear it tonight, with my own ears, in front of this fire."Titus did not answer at once. The hollow had gone so quiet that I could hear the frost ticking on the stones. He bent and picked up my fallen tin cup, wiped it on his sleeve, and set it back on the rock between us as if the small ordinary task might steady him."Your father did not give me a name," he said at last. "That was not entirely honest of me.""You said...""I said he whispered one. He did, but not a name I could repeat." Titus lifted his burned hands to the fire. "He said, it was the lavender. Over and over. It was the lavender on the latch."I stared at him. A slow cold ran from the back of my neck to the base of my spine. "Lavender.""I have thought about it for nine years, and I could not make it mean anything. But I knew your mother's herb room. Everyone in the valley knew it. The smell fo

POV: Lyra Thorne"I did not bring them to fight you, Lyra. I brought them to stand behind you. Look at them. Every wolf on that ridge has lost something to the Ashwood name. Tonight you can choose to lead them."Titus took me to the top of the ravine before dawn, with the sky gray as a dead coal and the first birds not yet awake. We stood on a ledge of bare rock. Below us the land fell away into mist, and the mist was full of fires.Hundreds of them. Small orange pinpricks, stretching along the Ashwood border from the river to the pine woods. Each fire meant a pack of wolves sitting in the cold. I could hear them, a low murmur like surf. I could smell wet fur and smoke and iron.My legs went hollow. I had spent nine years in a kitchen. I had never once seen so many wolves in one place."Crimson Fang," I whispered."And the northern runners. And the border packs Damon starved out of their hunting grounds. Three seasons of work." Titus stood beside me, hands behind his back. "I will not

POV: Lyra Thorne"Mother, I am not here to hurt you. I am here because I have only ever had half of you. Tonight I need all of it, even the part that shames you."The northern lodge stood on a bald hill above the treeline, a low stone house with one narrow window facing the ridge where my pack had died. It was the place Marianne had described to me in the herb room. I had never imagined I would find it so easily. I had never imagined it would be so small.We had come at dusk. Briar had distracted the two guards on the porch with a story about a lost goat. Marcus had struck them down with the flat of his sword, quickly and cleanly, and laid them in the snow. I had gone in alone. I had asked them to let me.My mother sat at a plain wooden table beside the cold hearth, in her gray shawl, with her hands folded on the surface like a woman at prayer. She looked up. In her face I saw relief, and fear, and under both of them a deep, tired recognition."You found me," she said."Briar says you

POV: Lyra Thorne"Hold it to the light, Lyra. Both halves, edge to edge, and tell me what your father wrote. I have waited nine years to hear someone read it aloud."We stood on a bridge of fallen pine over the river, with the water roaring white and black beneath us and Damon's riders somewhere on the ridge behind. My lungs burned. I had run until my legs shook. Marcus held the bridge's far end with his sword drawn. Briar crouched behind a rock, breathing hard.Titus Crane stood on the bank, utterly calm, as if he had been waiting for me all along. He had stepped out of the trees a minute ago, with a dozen Crimson Fang wolves silent at his back."You said three days," I gasped."And I have kept my word. I am not here to take anything." He held out one burned hand. "I am here because the riders will cut you down before you reach the next ridge. Come over to my side. Let my wolves hold the bridge.""No.""Lyra.""I do not trust you, Titus. I told you so.""You do not have to trust me.