Sleepless Alpha

Chapter 22

Sleepless Alpha

POV: DAXON

I hadn’t slept in three days.

Not real sleep. Just flashes. Fractured images. The kind that haunted more than they healed.

Adelina.

Her face, bloodstained and defiant.

Her scream when I said the words.

Her silence when she vanished.

The mark that appeared beneath her skin fire kissed, ancestral.

And now… the reports.

Whispers carried by wind and fear.

The Ritual Circle had flared to life for the first time in a century.

Flames had risen.

A new crest never seen before burned into sacred stone.

A Luna had risen.

And she wasn’t mine.

I stood on the balcony of the safehouse in Red Ridge, looking out over dead pine and silver clouds. The mountains should have been beautiful tonight, but they felt like a cage.

They used to say I had a wolf that never slept. That I was built for war, not love. That I carried the old blood.

They were wrong.

I wasn’t sleepless because I was strong.

I was sleepless because I couldn’t outrun what I’d done.

Caleb found me before sunrise, his eyes rimmed in the same exhaustion I wore. He didn’t speak right away. He just handed me the folder.

“She marked the Circle,” he said, as if I didn’t already know. “It was Hollowgate.”

I opened it. Photographs. Satellite images. Captured heat signatures, flame patterns, evidence of supernatural convergence.

One image stopped my breath.

Adelina, standing barefoot in a burning ring, arms outstretched, eyes glowing.

She looked like a goddess.

No not a goddess.

A judge.

“She’s coming into her own,” Caleb said. “She’s not hiding anymore.”

I swallowed. My voice came out like gravel. “How many saw her?”

“At least two Council scouts. One escaped. The other... didn’t.”

“And Lux?”

“Still alive.” He hesitated. “Kicking, apparently.”

A pause.

“She’ll be born soon,” he added quietly. “You’re running out of time to decide who you’re going to be.”

I clenched my jaw.

“I already decided,” I said. “I’m not Alpha anymore.”

“No,” Caleb replied. “But you’re still her father.”

I couldn’t stay in the safehouse after that.

I shifted before the sun fully crested the ridge, letting the wolf take over. He wasn’t calm. He never was anymore. He tore through trees like they owed him something. He howled until the rocks echoed. He ran until even the wind lost its breath.

But no matter how fast he ran…

Adelina was always ahead.

And Lux… she was the horizon.

---

I shifted back in a glade marked by flame-scored stones. I recognized the area one of the old Matron patrol zones from the Hollow Moon era. A place we were taught to avoid. Too volatile. Too haunted.

I laughed to myself. Haunted was right.

The moon hung low, red and full.

The wolves in my blood howled for order, but order no longer lived in me.

Only ache.

I remembered her face the day I met her. Soft but wary. A fire hidden behind her fear.

I remembered the snap of the bond how it nearly dropped me to my knees. How I looked at her and felt... something ancient crack open in my chest.

And I remembered the cold silence in the Council chamber.

Sylvia’s voice cutting like glass.

The Elders, nodding as I was ordered to reject her.

The way I spoke the words but not from my own soul.

“I, Alpha Daxon Reyes, reject this bond...”

Coward.

I hated myself for how easily it had come out.

Not because I didn’t love her.

But because I did. And I still let them take her from me.

Now, she burned.

Not for me.

But for something greater.

And I wanted to be near it. Even if I couldn’t touch it.

I returned to the cabin near midnight. Caleb was gone. Probably patrolling. Asha had sent word they were relocating Adelina again. She wouldn’t stay in one place for long, not with the Council already mobilizing.

She was too smart for that.

I sat on the floor. No fire. No light.

The guilt wrapped around my ribs like chains. And beneath it… something else.

Hope.

Hope that she would make it.

Hope that Lux would be born into something better.

Hope that I could still be useful.

I didn’t want the bond back.

Not now. That would be selfish.

What I wanted was simpler. And harder.

To protect.

To rebuild what I broke.

To earn a place beside the fire even if I was never allowed to hold it again.

By morning, I had made my choice.

I wrote the letter and sealed it in blood.

Not to Adelina.

But to the Council.

My resignation as their enforcer. Their dog. Their weapon.

I was done serving lies.

Would they retaliate?

Of course.

Would they send hunters after me too?

Probably.

But it didn’t matter anymore.

Because Adelina had stopped running.

And now, it was my turn to stand.