Reclaimed By My Alpha (Natalia and Andrei) novel Chapter 592

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Chapter 592

Natalia’s POV

The world didn’t end like I expected it to.

I kept waiting for it to happen. In those first few weeks after we came home, I would catch myself looking at the sky while hanging laundry or tending the garden, half expecting to see it split open the way it had over the underworld.

But the sky stayed blue, then gray as fall crept in, then pale and cold as winter settled over Moonshadow. The birds still flew. The creeks still ran. Life, stubbornly and without any fanfare whatsoever, continued. Eventually, I stopped waiting for it to happen. In fact, I think a part of me even forgot about the moments that the sky had changed and the gods had grappled in the stormy clouds. Life here, in our world, became so utterly normal that everything that happened in the underworld almost felt like a distant dream.

Almost, although not entirely. After all, how could I forget that?

Andrei, for his part, slipped back into his role as Alpha with an ease that took us all by surprise. Despite everything that had happened, despite the late nights staying up and unpacking what we had both gone through as his memories of the five years that had passed slowly resurfaced in his mind, despite the therapy appointments he attended every week now without fail, he didn’t waver in his duties. Not once.

It wasn’t that things went back to exactly the way they had been, of course. They were going to be different forever after everything we had gone through, and I accepted that willingly.

But what we built in those months after everything felt better than it had been before, somehow. Steadier. Andrei brought his strength back to the pack, and I kept everything I had built while he was gone, and together we ran Moonshadow in a way that felt, for the first time in a long time, genuinely solid and tangible.

Trade agreements held. Relations with our allied packs improved. I renegotiated two contracts that had been quietly bleeding us dry for years and replaced them with terms that actually made sense. Andrei supported me through all of it, and never batted an eye when the other male Alphas asked why he didn’t refer to me as his “Luna” anymore, but rather as a Moonshadow’s first female Alpha.

I never took back my title as Luna, not that I ever had an issue with the title. It just felt wrong. We were both Alphas now, equals, partners in the most important sense, I had spent five years leading the pack without him, and he wasn’t going to take that title from me. I appreciated that, and I think he appreciated the help, too.

Summer came the following year, hotter than last year. Things changed even more during that time, in a very bittersweet way,

Max started training with the warriors in June. I had promised that I would let him do it, and I kept my word, even though watching my eleven year old son line up on the training ground with a group of grown men first thing in the morning made me nervous.

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He took to it immediately, of course. He was quick and light on his feet, and according to Mila, he had the instincts of a future scout. He came home every evening exhausted and filthy and in an excellent mood, not to mention the fact that he always ate enough at dinner for three people and grew two inches taller in the span of a month.

Jane received her acceptance letter from the healer academy at Bloodmoon in July. She read it at the breakfast table, once to herself and once out loud, and then set it down very calmly and went back to her eggs. It was only because I knew her so well that I noticed the way her hands were shaking and her eyes were misty.

“Well done,” Andrei told her.

“I know,” she said, and popped a bite of eggs into her mouth.

She left in August, promising to visit in a month, and the house was noticeably quieter without her.

Hope started school in September, in a classroom in town with twelve other children her age. She was nervous on the first morning, standing at the door with her backpack on and her hair in two braids that she had asked me to redo four times. I redid them without complaint.

“What if I don’t like it?” she asked.

“Then you’ll tell me about it when you get home,” I said. “And tomorrow, you’ll like it a little more.”

She seemed to find that satisfactory, because she walked into the school building without looking back.

She did wind up liking it. She came home that first afternoon and talked about it for an hour straight, barely pausing to breathe. Apparently, she made three friends that day, and there was a boy who pulled her hair but she was going to get back at him tomorrow.

Andrei listened to the whole thing with his chin in his hand and a small smile on his face that I didn’t think he was even aware of.

As for Aurelius–well. He was quiet for a while after the incident, licking his wounds, but not forever. He tried twice more over the course of the year to assert some kind of leverage over us, once through a formal challenge that went nowhere and once through a rather pathetic attempt to poach two of our

border warriors.

The third time, he made the mistake of doing it loudly, at a regional Alpha gathering with enough witnesses that word spread before he even made it home.

And then the story of what had happened at our house came out. All of it. Andrei throwing him off the front path, the vase, the servants in the corner, all of it.

No one took him seriously after that. It’s a little difficult to command respect as an Alpha when you get thrown out of someone else’s house like an unruly pup hard enough to leave bruises on your ass.

After that, life was good. It was genuinely, quietly, solidly good in a way I hadn’t let myself believe it could be again. There were hard days, of course. Hard weeks. Problems that needed solving and situations that needed managing and nights where I fell into bed so tired I couldn’t string two thoughts together.

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Chapter 502

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But none of it broke me the way things had in those five years alone. Having Andrei beside me changed everything.

It was October when it happened.

We had been laying in bed, half–asleep after a long day of border patrols and meetings, when the air in the room suddenly dropped and smelled like cold water.

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