Lahat ng Kabanata ng Sixty Days Before the Flood: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 9

"Take it back."Cassian's voice cracked down the middle of the sentence.I could not answer. I was on my knees on the stone floor, and I did not remember falling. Pain ripped through my chest in long, burning strokes, as if someone had reached inside and pulled a rope out of my ribs hand over hand. My lungs would not work. My fingers dug into the cold flagstones until the nails bent."Liora. Take it back. Now."He crouched in front of me. Close. His hand closed around my jaw and forced my face up.I expected grief.I had spent six years imagining what Cassian would look like if he ever lost me. In my dreams, his eyes filled with tears. His voice broke. He begged.His eyes were black.Not sad. Not shocked. Black from rim to rim, the wolf swallowing the man, his lip curled back from his teeth. Rage rolled off him in waves, hot and suffocating."You do not get to leave me," he said, and spit flecked my cheek. "You are mine. You were born to be mine."I understood then, clear as a bell.H

"Swear it again, Madam Hale. Slowly, for the record."Elder Harlan Grey's voice creaked across the council chamber. Odalys lifted her chin, laid a trembling hand on the silver moon-disk, and smiled at the room like a woman who had already won."I swear by the Moon Goddess," she said, "that my stepdaughter Liora owns nothing. No land. No savings. No property. Everything she has ever eaten, worn, or slept on was paid for by my family and by the Rourke pack."I sat at the far end of the bench with my hands folded in my lap and my face perfectly blank.Keep going, I thought. Say more.A night and a morning had passed since the vault.I had slept on a cot in Moonhollow's servant quarters, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of cedar and dust. The crate had stayed in my palm all night, tiny as a grain of rice, humming against my skin. By dawn I had learned how to put it down and pick it up again. Not well. Each time, a dull ache pulsed behind my eyes. But it worked.The ledger had listed an e

"'They will call you mad,'" I read aloud. My voice shook. "'Build anyway.'"The words echoed in the little stone room and died.I stood very still. The candle flame leaned and straightened. Dust drifted through the light like slow snow. Snow. My stomach rolled, and I pressed my knuckles against my mouth until the nausea passed.Then I lifted the sheet of paper and turned it over.There was more.Page after page, written in tight, slanted script, the ink brown with age. I dragged the chair out from the desk and sat. The wood groaned. My hands would not stop trembling, so I flattened them against the stone and read.My dearest Liora,If you are holding this letter, then you have done the hardest thing a wolf can do. You have broken a bond with your own will. I am sorry for the pain. I am prouder than I can say.I will not insult you by hiding what I know. The moon is dying.I do not understand all of it. I am an old woman and a poor scholar. But I have watched the tides for sixty years,

"You'll come back, Liora. They always do."Cassian leaned against the grille of his black truck with a bouquet of red roses dangling from one hand, as casual as a man waiting for a bus. He had parked it across the road at the foot of the switchback. Sideways. Blocking my way up the mountain.It was barely light. Mist clung to the pines. My borrowed pickup sat loaded to the springs with tarps, rope, and four jerry cans of water, and I stood beside the open driver's door with my keys in my fist.Day fifty-five.I had slept four hours in a rented room above the bakery. Fear had woken me at three, and I had lain there counting the cracks in the ceiling until dawn."Move your truck," I said."We need to talk.""We talked. You called my rejection void. The elders said otherwise."His jaw tightened. He tugged his left cuff, then his right. "Elders are old men who like their tea warm. They do not understand what the Alpha needs.""The Alpha needs to move his truck."Something flickered across