The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 97: Coordinates

🦋ALTHEA

"Thal!" I screamed, reaching for him.

He looked up at me, his face a mask of agony. His small hands clawed at his throat, and as he opened his mouth to cry out, he didn’t produce a sound. Instead, a plume of that same solid, oily smoke billowed from his lips, as if the darkness were hollowing him out from the inside. He retched again, his body convulsing as the shadows began to swallow his small frame.

"No!"

I lunged forward, expecting the darkness to burn or bite. But as my fingers touched the bellowing blackness, it didn’t resist. It parted. The shadows recoiled from my touch like a scolded dog, bowing and swirling away from my skin with an almost submissive grace. It was as if the darkness recognized me.

From the phantom of a second it has touched me, my skin lit up with a wild jolt that I recognized like its wielder.

This was Thorne’s shadow. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

The tendrils of darkness that coiled and whipped at his behest.

I snatched Thal up, his small body limp and shivering in my arms. He was still choking, the black smoke pouring from his mouth and nostrils in thick, suffocating clouds.

"Althea..." he wheezed, the word vibrating through the smoke.

Suddenly, the silence of the wing was shattered by a raw, visceral scream of terror.

"NIGHTFALL!" a Gamma roared from the end of the hall, his voice cracking with a panic I had never heard from a North wolf. "Nightfall! Umbra is rising! Evacuate! To the tunnels, now!"

The Gamma didn’t even look at me as he sprinted past, his eyes wide and fixed on the darkness behind him. "If the shadows touch you, you’re a corpse! This is the worst that it has ever been."

The Hellhound is out!"

I stood frozen in the middle of the corridor, clutching a choking child to my chest, as the fortress dissolved into chaos. This wasn’t the Allied Packs. This wasn’t my mother.

This was Thorne.

His wolf, Umbra, wasn’t just a spirit anymore—he was a physical plague, an inevitable blackness consuming everything in its path. And for some reason, the darkness was letting me through.

"Go to him," Zyra whispered, her voice sharp with a new kind of hunger. "The beast is calling. See what your ’transaction’ has unleashed."

I didn’t have time to be gentle. A Gamma stumbled past, his face pale with the visceral density of the terror around us. I grabbed his harness, shoving Thal into his arms.

"Take him! Get him to the tunnels!" I commanded.

"No! Althea, no!" Thal shrieked, his voice raw and wet from the smoke he’d been heaving. He reached out, his small fingers catching the hem of Thorne’s oversized tunic. "Don’t go! It’ll eat you! I can’t lose you too—Althy, please!"

He didn’t even see it. In his terror, he didn’t notice that while the shadows were flaying the stone walls and choking the very air, they were dancing around me like adoring servants. They avoided my skin as if I were made of holy fire.

"I’ll find you, Thal! Go!" I yelled over the rising roar of the wind that shouldn’t have existed indoors.

The Gamma didn’t wait for a second order; he turned and ran, Thal’s heartbroken cries echoing down the hall until they were swallowed by the stifling vacuum of the dark.

I turned and ran the opposite way.

I was a ghost moving through a massacre. People collided with me in the dark—mothers screaming for children, warriors tripping over their own feet as they fled the "Nightfall." I reached out, grabbing a sobbing girl and shoving her toward a retreating elder, my touch momentarily clearing a path of light through the oily mist for them to see.

I didn’t need eyes. The mark on my neck was no longer just a hum; it was a screaming compass, vibrating with a subliminal heft that dragged me toward the Great Hall.

The massive oak doors didn’t just open; they were flung wide by the shadows themselves, welcoming me home. The moment I stepped inside, the doors slammed shut with a finality that shook the floorboards.

The silence here was absolute. And terrifying.

Then I saw him.

He was no longer the man who had fed me soup. He was the nightmare the world told stories about. Umbra had fully emerged, but he was mutated—monstrous. The wolf was the size of a war-horse, his fur a churning mass of literal shadows that seemed to bleed into the floor. He wasn’t just a beast; he was a spectral mantle draped over the physical world.

His eyes were the only thing that hadn’t changed—amber fire burning against the void. He was standing over the shredded remains of the council table, his breath coming in low, rattling huffs of black smoke.

He sensed me. The massive head turned, the neck snapping with a sound like dry wood breaking. Those amber eyes locked onto mine, and the ethereal gravity in the room doubled, forcing me to my knees.

I reached out, my fingers straining to bridge the final inch between my skin and his shadow-drenched fur, but the crushing burden in the room was intensifying. The air had turned into something thick and crushing, a pressurized void that made my lungs ache and my bones groan.

​"Thorne!" I choked out, but the name was swallowed by the roar of the darkness.

​He didn’t move. He didn’t snarl. He simply loomed over me, a god of ash and amber, his gaze fixed on mine with a terrifying, vacant intensity. He wasn’t seeing me—he was seeing through me, looking at a horizon I couldn’t perceive.

​I tried to speak again, to call to the man who had whispered "Thea" against my skin just hours ago, but my voice failed. The heaviness of his power was pinning me to the floor.

​Then, his maw opened.

​It wasn’t a howl that emerged. It was a voice—hollow, resonant, and layered with a thousand echoes of death. It didn’t sound like Thorne, but the words were sharp and precise, cutting through the chaos of the Nightfall like a blade.

​"42° N, 19° E."

​I froze, my hand hovering in the cold air. The coordinates hit me like a physical blow, more shocking than the darkness itself.

​"The moon is a lie," the beast intoned, the shadows around him whipping into a frenzy at the words.

​The room seemed to tilt. I knew those numbers. They were burned into my memory, etched there by the hundreds of conversations I’d overheard when Draven became Alpha, even more when I became his mistress.

They were the coordinates of the place Draven traveled to before I was framed. The location that still made my soul with fear. The place I barely escaped from. It was the coordinates of the High Alpha’s Labyrinth.