Semua Bab The Ex-Luna's Return: No Longer His Doormat: Bab 11 - Bab 20

~ 11~ Mia ~The dinner wasn't over, but I had reached my limit of it.Between the toasts, the faculty questions, and Fanny's eyes finding my face between every course, I needed one minute that didn't have to be performed. When the dean called for second dessert, I excused myself and slipped out through the terrace doors for air.The evening was cool off the water. I stood at the edge of the terrace steps, half-hidden in the shadow of the delegation cars, and let Olga stretch through my senses the way she loved to at night — the lake breathing, the pines shifting, the town's hundred layered heartbeats.That was one of the things no one in East Lake could ever know.When Olga finally rose, she had not risen as an omega's wolf. She had risen as an Alpha's — my father's bloodline, arriving twenty-eight years overdue. Her hearing reached clear across a training field. Her nose could pull a single scent thread out of a crowded market. Jonathan had run the tests three separate times before

~ 13~ Darian ~"Dad. Dad. Dad."Nick had been circling my study for ten full minutes with a permission slip in his hand. Twelve years old, and he still worked up his courage exactly the way he had at seven."Out with it.""My class is visiting the Medical Academy tomorrow." He set the slip on my desk like an offering. "The whole year is going. There's a delegation from Red Moon… actual famous doctors and the school got permission for a tour. Please, Dad. You never let me go before, Daddy. Can I go this time?"Daddy. He only reached for that word when something really mattered to him.And he wasn't wrong about before. Two years ago, his class had toured the pack hospital, and I had kept him home. I told myself it was flu season. The truth was simpler and uglier: he had started asking questions about medicine, and I hadn't wanted him anywhere near his mother's world."Why the Medical Academy?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.Nick looked at the carpet. "Mom studied medicine.

~ 15~ Mia ~The SUV slowed as it drew level with the manor gates, and the rear window was already half down.Silver hair, pinned the exact same way it had been pinned every day for eight years. Pearl earrings. The sharp profile I used to watch across a breakfast table while she listed my failures.My former mother-in-law.Of course. Darian's mother had always used the Alpha's first car when he didn't need it. She'd enjoyed the way pack members straightened their backs when EL-1 rolled past.I pulled my hood up and lowered my head.My scent wouldn't betray me — no wolf's nose in East Lake would know me now. But scent had never been her weapon. Her weapon was watching. Eight years of studying my face from across that table, cataloguing every flaw in it out loud. Of everyone in this territory, she was one of the very few who might see through four years of change.And she was ten meters away."Keep talking to me," I murmured. "Casually."Hailey shifted, angling her body between me and t

~ 17~ Mia ~"Okay, before we go in," Hailey said, turning around in the front seat of the car, "a small confession about how I got this reservation.""You said your father pulled strings.""My father is the strings." She grinned. "The Beta of Red Moon has kept confidential VIP identities at luxury hotels and restaurants across the continent for thirty years. Security work — safe rooms for the Alpha family when they travel, tables no one can trace. Prandi has exactly two private suites overlooking the main dining hall. Both are permanently reserved for people who officially don't exist." She waved her phone. "Tonight, one of them is ours.""Your father frightens me," Ryker said with respect."He'd be flattered."The suite was worth the mystery. A private lift, a paneled room above the main floor, and one long window of tinted glass looking down over the dining hall — the whole glittering room below us, while no one below could see in. A table set for six. My mother inspected everythin

~ 19~ Darian ~Kade stood on the other side of my desk, two days of digging written under his eyes."So Franklin Cross is what. A rich merchant who values his privacy?""Possibly." Kade didn't sit. "Or possibly someone from another pack's ruling class entered East Lake without declaring themselves. And if that's what happened, Alpha, we have a political problem. An undeclared noble on our soil, moving under a ghost name, sitting one wall from the Alpha's family…""I was there, Kade.""Then you understand why I haven't slept." He exhaled. "It could be nothing. A businessman. A widow with old money. But identities this good aren't built for nothing, and they aren't woken for nothing. Nineteen years asleep, and it surfaces the same week the…"He stopped himself."The same week the what?""The same week the Red Moon delegation arrived," he said. "Which is the other reason I'm here." He set a second file on the desk, thicker, bound in the Academy's blue. "Dean Franklin has been asking thr