THE ALPHA'S FORBIDDEN LUNA의 모든 챕터: 챕터 161 - 챕터 170

POV: Lyra Thorne"Do not touch that robe, Briar. If I put it on, I stop being the girl who scrubs floors, and I do not know who is waiting underneath. I might not like her.""Lyra, it is a gray robe. It is not a crown.""It is a crown made of wool."Briar snorted and dropped the folded cloth back on the cot. We were in the healers' tent at the edge of the hollow, with a lantern hissing and the first thin gray of dawn leaking under the canvas flap. Rhea slept on the next cot, breathing in small, shallow pulls. Nell Hale sat in the corner with a blanket around her shoulders, eating bread as if someone might take it away."You are scared," Briar said."I am not scared.""Your hands are shaking."I looked down. They were. I pressed them between my knees. "Everybody wants something from me now. Wynne wants a Voice. The council wants a vote. The pack wants a miracle. Last night I was a servant, and this morning old men are bowing to me. How am I supposed to hold that?""The same way you hel

POV: Lyra Thorne"Your mother wrote to me the week before the Thornes burned, Lyra. She begged me to take you. She did not ask Ashwood for protection. She asked me."Titus Crane laid the letter on the table between us, smoothing it with two fingers, as gentle as if it could bruise. The tent smelled of pine smoke and warm wax. A single chair sat across from his. I did not take it. I stood with my arms folded and my heart pounding against my ribs."I do not believe you.""Then read it."I did not want to. Reading it meant touching it, and touching it meant it might be true. But I stepped forward and picked it up, and the paper trembled in my hand.The handwriting was my mother's. It was her slanted, hurried way of writing, the way she signed grocery lists. My eyes blurred. For one terrible second I was a child on her lap, watching her write by the fire.Titus, I would not ask if I had another door. Damon is coming. I feel it in the wind. Keep my daughter safe, my Lyra, who is eight and

POV: Lyra Thorne"Girl, I slapped you once for dropping a ladle. Now they tell me I must kneel. I do not know where to put my hands, or my eyes, or the shame."Mrs. Fenn stood in the doorway of the pack house kitchen with her apron twisted into a rope. She was a broad, red armed woman who had ruled that room for thirty years. For nine of them she had ruled me. I stood by the long table in my gray robe, with flour on my sleeve, because I had needed to be somewhere that smelled like bread."Please do not kneel," I said."The Elder said...""The Elder is wrong." I walked around the table. My voice came out thin. "Mrs. Fenn, I do not want you on your knees. I have been on mine. It does not feel like respect. It feels like being very small."Her eyes went wet. She was not a woman who cried easily, and I could see it costing her."I thought you were sullen," she said. "You never looked up. I thought you were proud, or lazy, or stupid. I never once thought you were terrified.""I was.""I sh

POV: Lyra Thorne"Lyra, I did not mean to kneel. My legs just did it. You said one word, and my whole body obeyed you like a dog. Like I was nothing."Briar was on her knees in the snow behind the barracks, with her hands braced flat and her whole body shaking. Her face was gray. I stood over her with my palms open and my mouth dry, because I could still taste the word.It had happened so fast. Rhea had asked me to try. She said that when the ring opened, the binding my mother laid on my wolf had begun to unravel, and my Voice would wake whether I wanted it or not. So we had gone out behind the barracks, where nobody could see, and Rhea had stood three paces away and told me to say a single word to the empty yard.I had said "Stop."Thirty wolves across the training ground had gone rigid, mid stride. Swords hung in the air. A boy carrying a bucket froze with one foot lifted. And Briar, standing beside me with her arms crossed, had dropped to the snow like a puppet with its strings cut

POV: Lyra Thorne"Let them go, Titus. You wanted the Voice, and she walked here alone. Now you are going to find out what nine years on her knees taught her."The hollow was blue. It had been blue since the moment I stepped between the standing stones, a deep, humming, living blue that crawled across the snow and lit the underside of every cloud. The Stone itself rose from the center of the clearing, tall as a house and old as grief, with a notch carved in its face at the height of my heart.Titus stood in front of it, hands folded, still smiling. Beside him, tied to the roots of a pine, sat Briar and Nell with cloth in their mouths. Briar's eyes found mine, enormous and furious. Behind them stood thirty Crimson Fang wolves in a half ring, with the scarred captain at the end.Every one of them had lowered their blades. I had only asked them to.On the ridge road, while I was walking past, I had looked at that captain and said, quietly, Do you want to be here? And something in his face