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Chapter five
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2026-03-05 07:31:27The forest went on forever.
My wolf stumbled again and again, starved and half-broken, but the fear of being caught kept driving me forward. By now they'd have found the empty cell. By now Corvain would know his purchase had run. Just reach Hilda. Just make it that far. I kept repeating to myself. Dawn was breaking as I crossed the lake that marked the border between the packs. Relief hit me so hard my legs finally gave out. I collapsed on the far bank, and no matter how I willed them, my limbs wouldn't move. So this is how I die, I thought as the pain won and the world went black. I woke slowly, swimming up through layers of ache into softness. Clean sheets. Bandages. The smell of antiseptic and healing herbs. I cracked my eyes open. A figure paced beside the bed, fierce and familiar, and something in my chest loosened for the first time in days. "Hilda?" My voice came out a croak. She spun around, and her fear melted into relief. "Merliya. Oh, thank the Goddess." She was at my side in a breath, taking my bandaged hand with careful fingers. "How do you feel?" "Not great." "What were you thinking, running like that? If the border patrol hadn't found you when they did, if I hadn't been the healer on call—" Her words tumbled over each other. "You nearly died at my doorstep." The tears I'd held so long finally spilled. "I couldn't stay, Hilda. They were going to sell me. Everyone hated me. No one believed I was innocent, and I just—I couldn't—" "Shh. You're safe now." She smoothed the hair back from my face. "You're in my house. Outside Silverpine. This is the Alpha King's territory now." I blinked. "Alpha King?" "Right. You've been buried in that pack, you wouldn't have heard." She sank into the chair beside the bed. "The major packs came together and elected a king. Someone to settle disputes, enforce law, keep the peace. His lands are neutral ground. And he has strict rules about how Alphas treat their people." Her jaw tightened. "What Alpha Dayn did to you crossed every one of them." "So he wouldn't send me back?" "I don't think he could, in good conscience." She squeezed my hand. "You're safe, Merliya. You're going to stay here with me, and we'll figure the rest out together. I promise." I wanted to believe her so badly it hurt. But a small voice at the back of my mind whispered that safety was a lie. That nowhere was safe for a girl the whole world had already decided to destroy. Still. For now, I let myself rest. The next days passed in a blur of healing. My ribs knit slowly. The gashes closed. The bruises faded from purple to sickly yellow. The wounds inside would take far longer. Hilda never pushed. She brought food, changed bandages, sat with me when the nightmares came. On the third day, over tea in her small kitchen, she finally asked the question I'd been dreading. "Merliya. Did you do it? Did you kill your family?" It shouldn't have hurt. It did anyway. "No. I didn't." "I didn't think so." She reached across the table. "I've known you since we were pups. You couldn't." Tears burned. "Everyone else is sure I could." "Everyone else is wrong." Her grip tightened. "What really happened?" I opened my mouth to tell her everything. The fight. The woods. Ken's voice on the phone. *It's done. Made it look like an accident.* But the words jammed in my throat, too raw to touch. "I can't. Not yet." I pulled my hand back. "It's still too much." Hurt flickered over her face, quickly hidden. "Okay. I understand." "I'll tell you," I promised. "One day, when I can say it without falling apart. I just need to heal first." "Take all the time you need." By week's end I was moving on my own, the pain dulled to a background ache. But I was restless. Trapped inside her walls, afraid to step outside in case a face from Silverpine or one of Corvain's hunters found me. "You can't hide forever," Hilda said one evening, watching me pace. "You need to live a little. Even just for one night." "What if someone recognizes me?" "We're in the Alpha King's territory. No one here knows a thing about Silverpine." She pulled a black dress from her closet. "One night. Some music, some drinks. Let yourself feel like a person again." Part of me wanted to refuse, to stay hidden until I rotted. But another part, the stubborn ember that had climbed out of a dungeon window, was starving to feel alive. "Okay," I heard myself say. "Let's go."
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The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty eight
“You think you have won, haven’t you?” she said, to my back, and there was something in her voice, some last coiled thing, that made me stop. “You think it ends with my son in the wild and me in a small room. Foolish girl. You don’t even know what you’re holding.” She laughed, low and awful. “Your sister knew. Kiara always knew. Why do you think she did it? Why do you think the Chain wanted your family gone and you sold and never dead? There are people who have been waiting a very long time for what runs in your blood to be born, and you’ve gone and born it, and now you’ve hidden it in a nursery and told yourself it’s safe, foolish girl.” Her eyes glittered. “Ask your King what the White Moon is. Ask him why the last one vanished. Ask him whose sister she was.” The floor seemed to tilt all of a sudden. “What did you say,” I whispered. But the Dowager Luna only smiled, the same bright terrible smile she’d worn over a girl beaten on a b
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty seven
The Dowager Luna’s performance saved her from exile and cost her everything else, which was a justice I had not planned and found I could live with.The Council believed her, more or less. They could not prove she had written the grain-contract letter in her own hand, because she was far too careful for that, and a mother’s grief is a difficult thing to convict. So they did not exile her. They did something the old woman found infinitely worse, though it took her some weeks to understand it.They stripped her of the Blackwood name, since there was no longer a Blackwood pack for her to be Dowager of, and they left her exactly what she had left me. Nothing. No title, no lands, no allies, no son, no protection. An old woman with a ruined name in a crown-administered territory, surrounded by the very servants she had once ruled, who remembered every cruelty and were no longer afraid of her.I went to see her once, before I left Silverpine for the last time. I told myself it
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty six
“Dayn Blackwood,” the Council speaker said, “you are stripped of your title, your pack, and your standing. Silverpine passes to crown administration pending its people’s protection. You are exiled beyond the borders of the seven packs, to live or die by the wild as a lone wolf, which mercy is more than you extended to those you sold. The Council has spoken.”Exiled. To the wilds, to die as a lone wolf. The exact sentence he had offered me in his office, the one I had climbed out a window to escape, handed back to him now by the Council he had thought he stood above.He asked to speak before they took him. It was his right, the last one he had.They brought him before the crown, and I could have refused to hear him, and no one would have blamed me. But I had come too far in learning to be the kind of person who does not run on boots and hands, and so I nodded, and let the man who had thrown me away have his moment.“I’m sorry,” Dayn said.The hall went very quiet.
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty five
The crown inquiry closed its case against Silverpine on a grey afternoon in the great hall, and I was there for it, which mattered to me more than I had let myself admit.I sat at the crown’s side, not the accused’s, in the deep blue that had become mine, and I watched the evidence go before the full Alpha Council one piece at a time, and every piece was one I had helped pull into the light. The auction ledger in the Silverpine steward’s own hand. The freight manifests placing a Chain courier at my family’s gate the night of the fire. The nursery assassin’s chain of payment, running back through a chartered labour company to a letter about grain contracts sealed in the Dowager Luna’s morning room. Ken’s cracked confession, taken before he was poisoned inside the crown’s own walls. And the library records, the vervain research pulled month after month from a terminal under my dead sister’s login.The hall was silent for most of it. Alphas who had come prepared to see a family
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty four
He opened his mouth. I will remember what happened next for the rest of my life, because I watched it, from three feet away, and there was nothing I could do.He opened his mouth to answer me, and his face changed, and his hand went to his throat, and the wolf beside him, the guard who had brought him in, stepped back a single pace with a stillness that was its own confession. Ken folded to the library floor with foam at his lips and his eyes rolling white, and by the time I got to my knees beside him the seizure had him entirely, and the crown’s healer could do nothing, and neither could I.Vervain. The same poison that had killed my family. Given to Ken, somewhere between his cell and this room, by a hand that had reached him even here, even now, even inside a crown inquiry, exactly as a woman in grey had reached my son through a wall.He was dying. He knew it. He looked up at me through the poison with the last of himself, and he used it, the way Corvain had used his
The Alpha King’s obsession. Fifty three
The library records broke the frame open in a single afternoon, and they broke it open in a way that stopped my heart.I had heard Ken on the phone the night my family burned. It’s done. Made it look like an accident. I had built three seasons of survival on the certainty that Ken had lit the match. And Ken had. The inquiry proved it twice over, once in the freight manifests that put a Chain courier at our gate the night of the fire, and once in Ken’s own account, which cracked within an hour of a royal interrogator who could not be bribed and did not care whose Alpha he’d served.But Ken had not planned it. Ken was a hand, not a head, and heads leave their fingerprints in the details hands never think to hide.The vervain. The poison in the gas line, the same poison the frame had claimed I’d been researching. The inquiry traced the research, as I’d asked them to, back through the pack library’s terminals to the exact machine and the exact login that had pulled every tex
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