Reclaimed By My Alpha (Natalia and Andrei) novel Chapter 544

Natalia’s POV

I set the ruby aside carefully in the box and picked up the envelope. The paper inside felt thick, like there were multiple pages. I broke the seal and pulled out the letter inside.

It was three pages long, with writing on both sides.

I wasn’t sure if Celeste had ever said this many words to me in all the time we’d known each other, so this came as a surprise.

The letter started with an apology, which I hadn’t expected either. Not for the things she had done when she was young, but for something else entirely. She apologized for keeping a secret.

Five years ago, after Andrei disappeared, Celeste hadn’t just gardened. She had started looking for clues.

Celeste’s mother had been a secretive, nasty person, but she hadn’t been a fool. Three years after her mother’s death, Celeste had found something–a loose floorboard under Helena’s bed. Upon lifting it, Celeste had found a small trunk containing a treasure trove of information.

Most of it was useless, or so the letter said. Old books, yellowed documents that were too damaged to read, random trinkets, even a few teeth and locks of hair from the people she had killed–that part made me wrinkle my nose in disgust.

But Celeste had gone through the trunk anyway, too curious to stop looking. She’d read every book, every loose page, every scrap of handwriting she could find. It had taken her the better part of a year to decipher it all, since much of it was written in ancient languages and strange symbols that her mother had made up.

Eventually, she had found something.

According to what Celeste had pieced together from her mother’s notes and several very old texts that predated Bloodmoon itself, the portal beneath the mountain was not the only one. It was the most well–known because of the ruby deposit, and because of what the Moon Goddess had done there, but the original writings suggested there were others.

These ones were smaller and less stable. They were created not by the Moon Goddess herself but by the force of what she had sealed away, like cracks spreading out from a single point of impact.

Most of them had collapsed over the centuries, rendering them unusable.

But one still existed.

Celeste had cross–referenced the location three times before she believed it herself. It was remote, she wrote, and very difficult to reach due to the terrain surrounding it. But Celeste had managed to put together a map, using information she’d found from dozens of sources, that would lead me to the approximate location.

I looked down at the map with a lifted brow. It was beyond the mountain, even further north, where the landscape was truly wild and untraversed. I’d only heard stories of that region, and it was allegedly filled with all kinds of dangerous predators and subject to volatile weather conditions.

Shuddering, I continued reading, the letter. Celeste claimed that the portal, if it was even still there, would not open on its own. It would need to be activated. And based on everything Celeste had found, the only thing capable of activating it was a ruby of significant enough power.

Like the one she had left me.

She’d had it cut herself, she explained. Paid Ellen’s workers to mine it for her, then had it commissioned quietly by a skilled artisan, and told no one what it was for. The symbols carved into it were drawn directly from her mother’s notes.

She wasn’t certain they were right, she admitted. But she’d done the best she could with what she had.

There was one more thing.

T

Chapter 544

+25 Bonus

To open the portal, I would also need something from the mountain. Something left behind. She didn’t know exactly what–her mother’s notes were vague on that point, and she hadn’t been able to get to the mountain herself. But she believed it would be clear when I got there.

The last paragraph was short.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify