The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 52: A Deal With Devil

🦋ALTHEA

Thorne was gone when I woke.

His bed lay untouched, the space beside it cold. A dull ache bloomed in my chest before I could stop it. I pressed a hand there, annoyed with myself, and swung my legs over the side of the bed just as a knock sounded at the door.

I froze.

Hope flared—unwanted, instinctive.

Had he come back?

I almost laughed at myself. The mate bond really would be the end of me if I let it. I’d felt this pull before. The wanting. The attachment that sank its claws in deep and refused to let go until there was nothing left but damage.

Draven had taught me that.

The next time I let a bond win, my blood would stain an altar.

I would not live long enough for longing to be anything but a liability.

I had a mission.

Yana. Thal.

Keeping them alive was the only thing that mattered. Freeing Vargans from chains, tearing them out of servitude one night at a time, leaving broken Gammas behind in the dark—that had been my life long before Thorne. Injuries came with the work. Bruises, gashes. My mother’s abuse made for a convenient explanation.

Pain blended together, no matter the source.

Another knock—harder this time—snapped me back.

I crossed the room and reached for the obsidian knob, hesitation slowing my hand. The moment I turned it, the door flew open.

I was knocked backward, breath tearing from my lungs as I hit the floor.

I expected Ivanna.

Instead, an older woman loomed over me—titian curls dulled by age, hazel eyes sharp with fury. She looked like Ivanna, only hardened. Stripped of restraint.

"Get up, whore," she snarled.

I scrambled back instinctively, palms burning against the stone.

"I said—"

She crossed the room in one stride and seized the front of my tunic, hauling me up with brutal force. Pain exploded along my throat as the fabric bit into my neck.

Before I could draw a breath, the world lurched—

—and I was thrown.

My back slammed into the wall, stone cracking against bone as the impact drove the air from my chest in a strangled gasp.

She didn’t give me time to recover.

Her hand came down again, fingers digging into my shoulder, yanking me upright as if I weighed nothing. The movement snapped something loose inside me—not thought, not fear.

Memory.

For a heartbeat, the room wasn’t the fortress anymore.

It was a narrow corridor. Stone damp with cold. My back against the wall. My mother’s shadow stretching too long in the firelight.

My body responded before my mind could.

I went still. Too still.

The way I always did.

"That’s it," the woman snarled, mistaking my paralysis for submission. "Stand there. Useless thing."

Her grip tightened. "You feel it, don’t you?" she went on, breath hot and sharp in my face. "That you were never meant to fucking exist."

The words hit deeper than the blows because it was familiar script.

"You’re a fucking mistake," she spat. "A rot the moon should have swallowed whole. A plague."

Something in my chest caved as my vision tunneled, the edges blurring as my heartbeat slowed—not raced, slowed—like my body was preparing for something worse than pain.

Her hazel eyes burned into mine. And then—

They weren’t hazel anymore. Blue bled through the specks in the brown-green whirls.

That sharp fanatical gaze, full of a righteous kind of hatred I knew too well.

My mother’s eyes. I couldn’t breathe.

"I will not let you ruin her life," the woman hissed, shaking me once, hard. "Do you hear me? I will not let you take him from her."

But her words were distant as my mother stared at me through her vengeful glare.

"The man she loves," she continued, voice cracking not with doubt but conviction. "After everything she sacrificed. After everything she gave up to hold this clan together."

I swallowed, throat burning.

"I tried to warn them," she said, quieter now. More dangerous. "Tried to make them see what you are. What you bring."

Her fingers flexed, bruising. "No one listened," she went on. "And now, you dared to try and take my daughter’s place. After you fucking beast attacked him, he refused my daughter and came to you instead."

My beast?

I snapped out of the haze of terror at the mention.

She seemed to notice, her lips curling. "I knew you. I sent them here on purpose to hurt the Alpha. So you could get your hands on him, all in the name of helping him. Ivanna could smell your hand on him this morning," she hissed.

My stomach twisted so far, I thought I might retch. My mouth opened, but no sound came out. My thoughts snagged, tangled, refusing to align with what she was saying.

She smirked, but her eye twitched like her body could not handle the amount of hate she had for me. "The plan has to work," she muttered, more to herself than to me.

Before I could decipher her words, she grabbed my cheek, squeezing, as she dipped her head lower, until her lips came to my ear. "You will have to follow that letter’s instructions and leave this clan by the Solstice."

Time slowed for a minute too long as I blinked, comprehension dawning. When I spoke, my voice came out shaky. "You are—"

She pulled away so she could lock eyes with me. "I am the informant," she completed for me.

I had been so sure it was Ivanna. But it had been her mother.

A slow smile crept up her face. "You will not tell him."

I knew who she was referring to. I swallowed painfully past the lump in my throat.

"Yana..." she drawled.

My stomach dropped.

"And what was her son’s name? Thal?"

I stopped breathing, the air growing too thick to inhale.

"The guillotine is hovering over their necks—are you going to tell Thorne and let the blade be dropped?"