The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 96: Living Dark

🦋ALTHEA

The empty space beside me in the bed should not have made my heart clenched. Yet, the bond had no care for logic.

Our sex was nothing but a transaction. WE gave our bodies what they craved. Still, the phantom weight of his body yielding into me still made a pleasurable shiver run down my spine.

Transactions didn’t leave you feeling like your soul had been rearranged.

Helpless.

That was what I was in the face of this bond of ours. It gave not one darn about the implications of what it all meant. It just wanted and craved, it hungered and I had no choice but to oblige.

Even if my obliging carved ecstasy into every fibre of my being.

My body felt heavy, uncurled, and utterly spent—like a bowstring that had been snapped after years of being pulled too tight.

The fever of the heat had broken, replaced by a low, humming glow that radiated from the mark on my neck to the tips of my toes.

My fingers traced the ridges, and the bond pulsed in response, a phantom sensation of his teeth breaking skin, of the moment he’d bitten down and everything had changed.

​"A transaction," I whispered into the silence, trying to anchor myself to the lie.

​But my skin remembered the way his calloused hands had traced the curve of my waist as if he were memorizing a map. My ears still rang with the sound of his voice—not the Hellhound, It was Thorne... that made love to...

I shook the words away. We did not make love—we fucked.

That was all it was.

Even if the mark on my neck burned like a brand, and when I closed my eyes I could still hear the way he’d said my name—

Not Althea.

Thea.

Like I was something precious, something adored, worthy.

I touched the mark again, and this time, I didn’t pull my hand away.

​"Ecstasy is a dangerous anchor," Zyra purred in the back of my mind. She was sated, her usual jagged edge smoothed over by a predatory smugness. "You feel it, don’t you? The way the air in the room has changed because his scent is now woven into yours?

I swallowed the painful lump in my chest.

She roused, alert. "In this bond once again you will be left wanting—but will he give when it does not serve him?"

Ye—

I caught myself. I did not know this man. I had grown up with Draven, believing because I could finish not even his sentences but his thoughts that I knew him.

I winced at the memories.

Amber eyes flashed in my vision—soothing like a balm, his scent—

"Do not be a fool," Zyra hissed, her voice no longer a sated purr but a jagged warning that scraped against the inside of my skull. "You think because he fed you and held you, he is your sanctuary? He is an Alpha, Althea. His nature is to conquer, and yours—according to this insidious bond—is to be won."

I gripped the furs tighter, the scent of him still clinging to the fabric, mocking my attempt at distance.

"The bond demands the body," Zyra continued, her presence growing heavy, a dark shadow looming in the corners of my consciousness. "So, give it. Let him have the skin, the sweat, the gasps. Let him have the mutinous pulse that betrays you. But you must wall off the rest."

But the way he looked at me—

"A mask!" she snapped. "The only way to survive a predator is to never let him see the soft underbelly. Love is a poison dressed in the skin of a sweet fruit, Althea. It tastes like ambrosia upon the tongue, but once swallowed, it eviscerates you from within. It turns your blood to glass and your spirit to ash. Look at what it did to Ivanna. Look at what our first mate did. Never forget our pup.

Her words felt like cold iron slamming into place.

"You can oblige the hunger," Zyra murmured, more gently now, though the edge remained. "You can let him carve his ecstasy into your fibers. But the moment you hand him your heart—the moment you give him your soul—you give him the blade to finish what your mother started. In this world, the one who loves less is the only one who survives."

I stared at the door, the wood grain blurring as my eyes stung. The precarious balance of my life had tilted. I was his mate by blood and mark, but I had to be a ghost in every other way.

"Body, but never the heart," I whispered, the vow feeling like a second brand, colder and deeper than the one on my neck.

"Exactly," Zyra agreed, her voice fading into a satisfied hum. "Let him hunt the body. That is all he will ever want.

Her words rang through even if it curdled in my gut. "Keep the soul for the war."

A slam at the door tore through my reverie, turning into a desperate pounding that shook me to my core.

"Althea! Althea!"

Thal—

I leap out of my bed, clothing myself in the tunic that Thorne had left behind and

Thal coughed outside the door. "You need to come out," His voice turned even more hoarse.

Thal’s voice broke into a wet, jagged sob that made my blood run cold.

"Althea, run!" he shrieked, the sound ending in a violent, hacking retch. "Before the shadows... They’re coming! They’re already here!"

I didn’t think. I threw myself at the door, the tunic Thorne had left behind—large, smelling of him, and far too long—swirling around my bare thighs. I fumbled with the latch, my heart hammering against my ribs with a spectral burden that made every movement feel like I was dragging lead.

The moment the door swung open, the world vanished.

Thal was there, slumped against the stone frame, but he wasn’t alone. A thick, churning wall of living, ink-black smoke was roiling down the corridor. It wasn’t just mist; it was an dread made living, heavy and sentient, moving with a terrifying, rhythmic pulse that felt like a heartbeat.