The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 89: Fangs

​🔹 THORNE

​"Alpha, you need to come now."

​The Gamma’s voice was urgent as he intercepted me in the hall. I didn’t ask questions; I followed. My boots thudded against the stone, each step heavy with the dread that had been trailing me since Althea woke up.

​As we reached the eastern wing, her voice carried through the open door—firm, defiant, and laced with a pride that made Umbra howl.

​"Yet your Alpha marked me."

​Umbra pranced on his paws within my mind, his tail wagging with a primal, puppy-like yipping. She likes us, he echoed. She claimed us.

​The door hadn’t even finished swinging shut before Ivanna was across the room. She didn’t move with her usual clinical grace as the High Delta; she moved like a woman drowning.

​"Thorne," she gasped, her hands reaching for my leather vest, her eyes searching mine with a terrifying, wide-eyed hope. "Tell me what she meant. Althea... she showed a mark. Tell me it’s a trick. Tell me the Allied girl is lying."

​Behind her, the hallway was no longer empty. The heavy silence of the fortress had been replaced by the muffled shuffle of feet. People were gathering. They hovered at the threshold, their ears strained, their scents a bitter cocktail of confusion and rising fear.

​I looked down at Ivanna. I looked at the woman I had been promised to since we were children playing in the long grass of a pack that no longer existed.

​"It is not a lie, Ivanna," I said. My voice felt like gravel in my throat. "The mark is mine."

​The sound that left Ivanna wasn’t a scream. It was a low, broken whimper that seemed to sap the air from the room. She recoiled as if I had struck her, stumbling back until she hit the edge of a heavy oak table.

​"Thorne, no..." she whispered. Then, her voice cracked, her stoic mask shattering into a thousand jagged pieces. "No!"

​She looked toward the doorway, seeing the faces of Gammas, the mothers, the children, and whoever else had gathered. She turned back to me, her face flushed with a raw, agonizing heat.

​"How could you?" she cried, and for the first time in my life, I saw the High Delta—the woman who had stitched up a thousand wounds without blinking—lose her grip. "Thorne, look at us! Look at me!"

​I felt a wave of crushing guilt, a cold weight in my stomach that told me I was destroying the only peace we had built. But in the back of my mind, Umbra was pacing. His presence was a thick, golden heat, his craving for Althea so loud it acted like a silencer on my conscience. He didn’t care about the past. He only cared about our mate and letting it be known that she was no longer simply a captive of the North Clan.

​"Think of what we were!" Ivanna’s voice rose, carrying out into the hall where the crowd stood deathly still. Some of the older Vargans began to bow their heads, the weight of her anguish as palpable as the tension. "We were children of Silverfang! We made vows before we even knew what love was. We promised to rebuild, to be the strength the other lacked."

​She stepped toward me again, her finger trembling as she pointed at Althea, who stood to the side, her fists clenched so tight her knuckles were white.

​"We watched it together," Ivanna sobbed, the tears finally spilling over. "We watched as Morgana—her mother—cut down your mother. We watched our Luna fall while the Allied Packs laughed. And then the chains, Thorne. Do you remember the weight?"

​She grabbed her own wrists, rubbing the skin as if she could still feel the iron.

​"I was five years old when they locked the first set on me. Wolfsbane-imbued iron. It burned into my skin every day for years while we toiled in those god-forsaken silver mines. We watched our brothers and sisters sent to the pits to never return. We suffered. I suffered. I stayed by your side when they sold you off like cattle to the empire, and I led the mourning because we thought we had lost our heart—the heir to the Thorne from which our Luna was ripped."

​The crowd in the hall was no longer just watching. Soft sobs broke out among the women; low, mournful hums vibrated from the men. The collective trauma of the Vargan people was bleeding out in the middle of the eastern wing.

​"Then you came back," Ivanna whispered, her voice dropping to a haunting, broken pitch laced with a sickening residual joy, as if she had rewound the clock. "You came back with Umbra. You broke my chains. You vowed that I would always be free."

​She looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow.

​"But now you break your promise. You’ve put a new set of shackles on me, Thorne. Shackles of heartache. And you did it using the daughter of the woman who destroyed everything we ever knew. How can you look at her and not see the mines? How can you touch her and not feel the wolfsbane?"

​I stood frozen. The bond with Althea was a tether, pulling me toward her, but Ivanna’s words were an anchor, dragging me back into the blood and ash of our history. I looked at Althea. Her expression was a mask of stone, inscrutable and cold, but her chest was heaving.

​I had made my choice in the heat of the mark, but as my people wept in the shadows of the hallway, I realized the war hadn’t just started with the Allied Packs. I had just started a war within my own walls.

​Still, there was no turning back. I had seen Althea’s memories as I marked her; I could count on my fingers how many times she had laughed genuinely. But the rest was uncountable—her begging for mercy, the sobbing, the screaming, her toiling away in the cover of darkness to free Vargans behind her mother’s back, only for the morning to bring more suffering.

​The betrayals, the revelations that had scarred her, the losses, her sister’s lost mind, her blood stolen from her as she begged for someone to believe her—her body carrying a corpse—I had lived the Vargans’ fateful enslavement, but I had seen Althea’s as well.

​She might have been Morgana’s daughter, but in the same tragically ironic vein, she was her greatest victim.

​The silence that followed my internal admission was deafening. I looked at Ivanna, and for a moment, the Alpha in me wanted to command her to stand down. But the man in me—the boy who had bled beside her in the mines—could only stand paralyzed.

​Ivanna wiped a stray tear with the back of her hand. She looked at the crowd, then back at me, her chin lifting with a spark of her old fire.

​"You know your heart is not hardened enough, despite the truth," she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, vibrating low. "You see her as a victim. I see her as the face of the monster that ate our childhood."

​She took one final step toward me, closing the gap until the scent of her grief—sharp, like rusted iron—filled my lungs.

​"Choose," she whispered.

​The word was a guillotine blade. "Ivanna, what are you saying?"

​"I am the woman who waited for you in the dark!" she shrieked, the sound echoing off the stone rafters. "I will not share this pack, this home, or your soul with a daughter of the Allied Packs. Choose, Thorne. Either she goes back to the pits she came from, or you find yourself a new Delta, a new mate, and a new history. Choose between the ghost of our past and the enemy of our future. Choose... her, or me."

​A collective gasp rippled through the hallway. The murmurs began—a low, discordant thrum of voices.

​"She’s right," a woman’s voice drifted.

"He is Alpha, he will not do it. He will never choose her."

"Silverfang deserves justice!" another barked.

​Ivanna stood her ground, her eyes searching mine for a flicker of the boy she once knew. But the boy had died in the mines, and the man had been reborn in Althea’s scent.

​"Choose," she repeated, her voice a jagged edge.

​I looked at her, then at the crowd of my people. Finally, I looked at Althea. She remained impassive, a statue of cold marble. She didn’t plead. She simply waited for the world to turn against her again.

​"The vows of children are written in the sand, Ivanna," I said, my voice gaining a resonance that vibrated in the floorboards. "But the mark... the mark is written in the soul."

​I stepped forward, addressing the crowd as much as her.

​"I will no longer hold you captive to a promise made in the shadow of our ruin. I release you, Ivanna. I break the betrothal. I break the vows. The Moon has spoken, and she has given me Althea. She is my mate and I am hers."

Althea whipped to face me, stunned speechless.

​For a heartbeat, there was a vacuum of sound. Then, the dam broke.

​"No!" a man shouted.

"She is a murderer’s seed!" a woman cried.

"Throw the Allied girl to the wolves!"

​The air turned toxic. Someone lunged forward, a snarl ripping from their throat as they reached toward Althea.

​"SILENCE!"

​The word didn’t just come from my throat; it erupted from Umbra. The Alpha command slammed into the room like a physical shockwave. The air grew thick, pressing down on the shoulders of everyone present. The shouts died instantly as lungs were squeezed tight. The man who had lunged fell to his knees, his jaw locked shut by the weight of my will.

​I let the silence hang until the only sound was the frantic beating of a hundred hearts.

​"She is mine," I growled. "And you will respect the bond, or you will answer to the Alpha."

​Ivanna stood at the center of the wreckage, her face pale, her eyes red-rimmed and hollow.

​"You’ve lost me, Thorne," she whispered.

​I looked at her, the final snap of the invisible cord echoing in my chest. "I didn’t lose you, Ivanna. We were never each other’s. We were just two people sharing the same cage."

​Ivanna flinched as if I’d drawn blood. Without another word, she turned and fled, leaving her mother.