Dust Bowl の小説・ストーリー

A blizzard erupted without warning, and the glacial mountains began to collapse. My instinct screamed at me to shift and run, to let my Inner Wolf take over and flee—but it was too late. The storm swept in, laced with a strange silver dust that hung heavy in the air. It was like an invisible chain, binding me tightly, locking away my wolf. Worse still, my strength was nearly gone. As captain of the Silvermoon Patrol, I had been out on the tundra all night. Hours ago, I had fought off a vicious ambush by Rogues, and my body still bore the wounds—deep, bleeding, and far from healed. I could feel it: my wolf energy had been pushed past its limit. Maxin, my Inner Wolf, was silent now, his strength depleted and unresponsive. My limbs were going numb, my body sinking into the snow as the roar of the wind drowned everything else out. But I wasn’t afraid. Because I knew he would come. My boyfriend—the head of the tribe's Search and Rescue Unit—had never failed a mission. I believed with all my heart that he would find me. And yet… he didn’t come himself. He sent a rookie instead, while he went after Daisy, whom he believed had been caught in an avalanche. But Daisy hadn’t been in danger at all. She merely wanted a dramatic way to confess her love to him. Three days later, Xander finally found me, buried deep beneath the frozen layers. He froze at the sight—my body, encased in ice, unmoving. He couldn’t believe it: the fierce, relentless warrior he knew, dead beneath the snow. He reached out to touch me… but the ice cracked. And before he could react, my body slipped into the depths of the glacier, vanishing into the abyss.

All her life, Ava Malcolm has given her all to her dead beat husband, Carson. She spent years trying. Smiling. Grinning at cameras just for him. Raised as the brilliant marketing prodigy of the Malcolm family and an heiress, everyone says he's after her wealth. Ava turns a deaf ear to their words. She loved him even if he cancels all anniversary plans, berate and neglect her. His family doesn't like her. On his 34th birthday, she decided to give him her inheritance hoping it'd light up the spark in their marriage and throws a big surprise party for him with high hopes that when he finally comes back from the 6 month business trip he went on, he'd see all the efforts she'd put into making his day special. He doesn't. Carson sweeps her aside like a pound of dust while grinning at cameras and heads up the stairs with a lady. She follows. Just as she gets to the room, she catches him with his first love, Giselle. Turned out he'd been cheating all the while. When she wakes up in an hospital, she realizes he's found the papers and had signed them. He pays the hospital to lie she was mentally unstable and leaves her there to build a life with his new lover. When Ava gets out, she's bent on getting just one thing: revenge. When she storms his party, he lies to the world that she cheated with an photoshopped image. No one believes her. Only he did. Jaxton Steel, heir to the steel conglomerates. He offers Ava a deal. A marriage with him in exchange for revenge against everyone that had ever wronged her. And Ava? She's no longer the damsel in distress. She's the storm he didn't see coming.

While packing Ethan's flight bag, I found a custom solo wings pin. The engraving on the back read: For Lark, to celebrate your first solo. Beneath the box sat the receipt for Skyler's flight school tuition, paid in full by Ethan, along with a photograph. In the photo, she was sitting in the pilot's seat. Ethan's gloved hand rested over hers on the control yoke. Seven years ago, I had sat in that same seat. Back then, I was one step away from my first solo flight, but Ethan talked me out of it again and again, always claiming it was "for my own good." He said flying was dangerous, that someone had to stay home and take care of things. I put down my logbook, pressed the wrinkles out of every one of his captain's uniforms, and spent seven years living by his flight schedule. Only now did I finally understand. It wasn't that he didn't want to take anyone flying. He just didn't want to take me. What made it even more absurd was that the night Skyler first flew through the clouds, I was alone in a hospital, losing our baby. I called him over a dozen times. At three in the morning, he finally called back, his voice flat and indifferent. "I just took Lark through the clouds. Next time something comes up, give me a heads-up." I put the wings pin back exactly where I found it, then pulled the crumpled ultrasound printout from the bottom of the drawer and tucked it inside the logbook that had been gathering dust for seven years. This time, I wasn't going to wait for him to look back. He convinced me to leave the pilot's seat, then turned around and put another woman in the sky. So I would leave him and take back the sky that had always been mine.