BOUND TO THE DYING HEIR のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

OdessaNobody moved for a long time.The fighting had stopped the second Draven vanished. His Alphas had either fled or been pinned to the ground by Sorrel wolves, and the whole courtyard had gone strange and quiet, the way a room goes quiet after someone drops a plate. Blood on the gravel. Torn banners. A dozen wolves panting in human skin with their clothes in ribbons.And my mother, on her knees beside a dead woman's robe, sobbing like someone had cut her open.I had never seen her cry. Not once, in twenty-three years. Not when Grandma died, not when Dad lost the company. Elaine Kade folded her grief up small and put it somewhere nobody could find it. So watching her come apart in front of the whole pack was like watching the sun go out."Mom."I was across the courtyard before I decided to move. My legs were still shaky, and the silver under my skin hummed with every step, but I dropped to my knees in the gravel and took her by the shoulders."Mom, look at me.""Don't." She shook

OdessaEvan's hand moved before he did.I felt it through the bond first, a sudden jerk, like someone yanking a fishing line. His fingers uncurled from mine. His shoulders squared. His chin lifted. Every muscle in his body shifted into a posture I had never seen on him, rigid and obedient, the stance of a puppet on a stage."Evan?"He didn't look at me. His eyes had gone flat and silver, the same frost-on-glass color as his uncle's."Evan, look at me.""I can't," he said.It was his voice, but it was coming from very far away. Underneath it, I could feel him screaming, a wild, caged thing slamming against the inside of his own skull. Odessa. I can't stop it. I can't stop it."Beautiful," Silas murmured. "Twenty-four years of preparation, and it works on the first pull.""Let him go!" Alpha Grayson lunged, and Silas flicked two fingers. My father-in-law dropped like his strings had been cut. Sorrel wolves surged forward, and Evan turned his head toward them with that terrible, empty gr

EvanDraven's second came in alone.That was the first thing I noticed. No escort, no banner, no blade at her hip. Just a woman in a long grey coat walking across the courtyard with her hands visible and her chin level, while a hundred Sorrel wolves tracked her every step like she was a lit match.She was young, maybe thirty, with close-cropped black hair and a jaw that looked like it had been set at birth. A thin white scar ran from her left ear to the corner of her mouth. I had seen her once before, at the border, standing behind Draven with the twelve Alphas. She hadn't looked at me then. She looked at me now.And then, a second later, she looked at the gold ring around my pupils and visibly swallowed."Alpha Sorrel," she said."Not yet," I said. "My father still holds the seat.""That isn't what the wolves in this courtyard seem to think."I didn't answer. Beside me, Odessa shifted her weight, and I felt her through the bond, coiled and watchful. She had made her entire body quiet

OdessaThe map was a hook.I understood it the moment the black cloth turned to ash in my hands. It was Silas's thread, dyed dark and woven so finely I never felt it. It had lain against my palm for two days, quietly learning the shape of me, and when the sandy-haired man spoke the word, it pulled.The silver in my chest turned around and went for my own throat.I remember the sky tilting. I remember my knees hitting stone. I remember Evan's roar, a sound with two voices in it, one human and one older than the quarry itself, and the burst of gold that threw every puppet on the cliffs backward like dolls in a gale.Then his arms were around me, and the world went white.I woke in a farmhouse kitchen with a quilt over my knees.Mia was asleep sitting up in a chair by the door, her sword across her lap and soup down the front of her shirt. Through the window, I could see the pale line of dawn, and Josh outside on the porch with Kessa, both of them silent, both of them watching the road.

Odessa The circle didn't pull me in. It opened, like a mouth. One moment I was standing in the farmhouse kitchen with Evan's arm locked around my waist. The next, the floor dropped out and the silver came up, and we were falling through a place with no walls, no ceiling, and no sound. Only light, thin and cold, and a thousand glittering threads stretched in every direction like the inside of a loom. I hit something soft. Grass, I thought. Silver grass, tall and pale, rippling in a wind I couldn't feel. "Evan?" No answer. I turned in a full circle. He was gone. The bond, which had been humming in my chest for days like a second pulse, had gone quiet. My heart started to pound. "He's not here," said a voice behind me. "It's only us." I spun. She stood ten feet away in the same grey coat, but the scar down her cheek had faded to a pale line, and the thin silver ring around her pupils shone like a coin. Without the cold mask, she looked younger. Frightened, even. Her hands were