LOGINShare
Chapter 3 - “The First Debt”
publish date:
2026-10-28 17:32:11SIENNA
The eastern wall came down at dusk.
I heard the first screams before the alarm even sounded. Metal groaned. Concrete cracked. Then the dead poured through like water through a broken dam. Their growls mixed with the shouts of wolves shifting mid-run, claws scraping, guns firing too late.
I was already moving.
My boots hit the dirt hard as I cut through the chaos. Smoke stung my eyes. Blood—fresh and old—coated the ground. Somewhere to my left a young pack soldier went down under three zombies at once. I didn’t stop. I had one target.
Elder Voss’s right-hand man.
His name had been Marcus in my first life. I still remembered the way he smiled when they pinned me down and left me for the dead. Tonight he was barking orders near the secondary gate, trying to look brave while the real fighters took the front line.
Perfect.
I slipped between two burning cars and waited. A group of zombies broke from the main swarm and headed straight for the weaker side of the defense—exactly where Marcus stood. He turned too late. One of them slammed into him. He went down hard, clawing at the dirt, shouting for help.
I stepped into the open just far enough for him to see me.
His eyes locked on mine. Recognition flashed—not of who I used to be, but of the human girl the Alpha had claimed. Hope lit his face for half a second.
“Help me!” he screamed.
I didn’t move.
Another zombie landed on his back. Teeth sank into his shoulder. He shrieked, thrashing, blood spraying across the ground. Still I stood there, calm, watching every second of it. The same way he once watched me.
Only when the light left his eyes did I turn away.
By the time the breach was sealed, my clothes were soaked in blood that wasn’t mine. Someone had shoved a half-dead zombie into me during the final push. I killed it with a piece of rebar and kept walking. My hands shook, but not from fear.
From satisfaction.
I found a quiet corner near the medical tents to wipe the worst of the mess off my arms. That was where Kieran found me.
He came out of the smoke like a storm. Tall, blood-splattered, eyes glowing sharp gold under the emergency lights. The second he saw me, his jaw locked.
“Where the hell were you?” His voice was low and dangerous.
I kept cleaning my hands with a torn strip of cloth. “Surviving.”
He closed the distance in three strides. “Marcus is dead. He was isolated near the secondary gate. You were the closest one to him.”
I looked up slowly. “Was I?”
Kieran’s hand shot out and wrapped around my wrist, sticky with drying blood. He pulled me closer until I had to tip my head back to meet his eyes. The heat of his body hit me like a wall.
“You could have saved him.”
“I chose not to.”
The words left my mouth even and cold. His grip tightened.
“Say that again.”
“I chose not to,” I repeated. “He was already surrounded. One more body wouldn’t have changed anything.”
“That’s not how it looked from the wall.” His voice dropped lower. “You stood there and watched.”
My pulse kicked hard against his fingers. I didn’t pull away. “Maybe you should worry less about what I watch and more about how many holes are still in your defenses.”
Something dark flashed across his face. He crowded me backward until my shoulders hit the cold metal of a supply container. One of his hands stayed locked around my wrist. The other braced beside my head.
“You don’t get to decide who lives and dies in my territory,” he growled.
I lifted my chin. “Then maybe you should have been the one standing next to him.”
The air between us turned sharp. His breath mixed with mine. Up close I could see the blood smeared across his collarbone, the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes kept dropping to my mouth even while he looked furious.
“You’re different tonight,” he said quietly. “Colder.”
“I’m alive. That’s the only difference that matters.”
His thumb pressed harder against the inside of my wrist, right over my racing pulse. “You’re lying to me.”
“And you’re still holding me like you have the right.”
For a second neither of us moved. The sounds of the stronghold—shouts, wounded wolves, the distant crackle of fire—faded under the heavy silence between us. Kieran’s gaze burned into mine. I refused to look away. I had stared down death before. I could stare down him.
He leaned in until his mouth was close to my ear.
“Next time you make a choice like that,” he said, voice rough, “you clear it with me first.”
I turned my head just enough that my lips nearly brushed his jaw.
“I don’t take orders from dead men.”
His entire body went still.
I slipped my wrist free while he was frozen and stepped past him. My shoulder brushed his chest on the way by. I didn’t look back, but I felt his eyes follow me the entire walk across the yard.
The first debt was paid.
Latest chapter
The Traitor's Mate In The Apocalypse Chapter 20 - “The Southern Line”
SIENNAI went before dawn, when the guards were thinnest and the dead were slowest.The southern line was forty minutes from the wall on foot. I knew the way without thinking. My feet remembered every cracked curb and every collapsed fence even though this body had never walked them. I moved low and quiet through the gray half-light, a small figure among the ruins, and the dead drifting through the mist never looked my way.The place hadn’t changed.A stretch of broken road. An overpass that had once carried traffic and now carried only shadow. A field of dead grass on either side, brittle and silver with frost. Somewhere to the east, a crow screamed once and fell silent.I stopped in the middle of the road.This was where it had happened.I could have walked it blind. Forty paces from the overpass. A crack in the asphalt, shaped like a lightning bolt. A fallen sign, bent in half.The memory came for me before I was ready.The cold of the pavement against my cheek. The weight of boots
The Traitor's Mate In The Apocalypse Chapter 19 - “Damien’s Report”
SIENNAI knew something was wrong the moment I saw them go up to the wall.It was past midnight. The stronghold had gone quiet, the last echoes of the drunken night long since swallowed by sleep. I stood at my window with the lights off and watched two figures cross the courtyard, one broad and one lean, both walking like men who did not want to be heard.Kieran and Damien.They climbed the south tower and vanished onto the wall.Whatever they were discussing, it needed open air and no walls.I waited an hour. Then I slipped out through the service hall, down to the drainage culvert, and crawled through to the dark where Ronan waited.He was crouched exactly where I had left him, a shape against the black. When I reached him, he didn’t say hello.“You should hear this,” he said.“Hear what?”“I was beneath the south wall earlier. Two men came up on the ramparts.” His eyes gleamed in the dark. “Wolf hearing carries.”My chest tightened. “What did they say?”Ronan was quiet for a moment
The Traitor's Mate In The Apocalypse Chapter 18 - “Marked”
SIENNAThe pack had found a bottle.Not just one. Three crates of it, buried deep in the Fenner Road cache behind the rice and the powdered milk. Rough, cloudy stuff that burned all the way down, the kind of homemade liquor that Ravenna would have thrown into the river.Kieran allowed it for one night.“They’ve earned it,” he told Damien, loud enough for me to hear from the stairwell. “One night. Then it goes under lock.”By the time I reached the main hall, the room had transformed.Tables dragged together. Someone playing a battered guitar. Wolves laughing, shouting, tipping their heads back, giving themselves up to the first real noise the stronghold had known in weeks.I kept to the wall.I took a cup of water and a place near the door, where I could see the exits and the pack at once. I watched the room the way I always did, counting faces, noting who sat beside whom.Selene held court near the fire with her usual circle, her cheeks flushed, her laugh a bright blade over the din.
The Traitor's Mate In The Apocalypse Chapter 17 - “Training Yard”
SIENNA“Every human in this stronghold learns to defend themselves,” Kieran said. “Starting with the one who keeps volunteering for danger.”It was not an invitation.I stood in the doorway of his study at dawn with a damp rag still balled in my fist, listening to him dress an order up as a favor. Two weeks ago someone had painted a word on my door. A week ago I had stepped in front of a pipe.He had been counting.“You want me to learn to fight,” I said.“I want you to survive long enough to stop being a problem.”“That’s very kind of you.”The corner of his mouth moved. Almost a smile. Almost. “Training yard. Seven o’clock. Don’t be late.”The yard sat behind the armory, a wide square of packed dirt ringed by sandbags and rusted weight racks. Thirty wolves were already warming up when I arrived, throwing punches into the air, stretching shoulders that could have broken a car door.Every one of them stopped to stare.I hunched my shoulders. I tucked my hands against my stomach. I let
The Traitor's Mate In The Apocalypse Chapter 16 - “Small Cruelties”
SIENNAHis name was Rook.I remembered the weight of his knee in my back. I remembered his breath on my neck, hot and sour, and the grin in his voice when he told me to stop struggling. I remembered that he was the one who held my wrists to the ground while the others walked away.He was a night sentry now. Twenty-six years old. Broad through the shoulders and narrow through the eyes, with the loose, lazy confidence of a man who had never once paid for anything.He did not know me.Good.I didn’t want his blood. Blood was loud. Blood got questions asked and fingers pointed. Kieran had seen me wash it from my hands once already, and I did not intend to give him another reason to look.I wanted Rook to lose everything slowly, and I wanted him never to understand why.The east yard gave me what I needed.Every crate of salvage passed through my hands before it reached the armory. Every box was logged by weight, by count, by contents. No one questioned the quiet human girl who copied numb
The Traitor's Mate In The Apocalypse Chapter 15 - “The Scientist”
SIENNAThe screaming started in the courtyard just after noon.I was carrying a crate across the east yard when I heard it, a thin, ragged cry cut off by a roar of voices. Dozens of wolves were gathered near the main gate, a tight, angry knot of bodies. Someone was shoving through the middle. Someone else was holding a length of iron pipe over their head.I set the crate down and walked toward the noise.At the center of the circle, a woman knelt in the dirt.She was human. Late twenties, small, wiry, with dark hair chopped short and a pair of glasses with one cracked lens. She clutched a canvas satchel to her chest with both arms. Blood ran from a cut above her eyebrow, but she did not cry.“Found her in the old clinic on Marrow Street,” one of the patrol wolves shouted. “Carrying vials. Dozens of them.”“She’s one of them!” someone else yelled. “One of the ones who made this!”“I worked at a research institute,” the woman said. Her voice was steady and very quiet. “I didn’t make any
You May Also Like
Apocalypse Rebirth: My fortress, His Regret
Bellazi 587 viewsReborn 30days Before The end
Marå Kått539 viewsBACK FROM THE DEAD: MY APOCALYPSE LEVEL-UP SYSTEM
Jaciwrites15.0K viewsApocalypse Reborn: My Second Life As The First Female Alpha
M U N A H 2.0K viewsThe Red Moon System
Vic101 viewsApocalypse Rebirth: I Took the World’s Supplies for Myself
Reflection Poetry550 viewsThirty Days Before Doomsday
AnnieBeck226 viewsReborn Before Doomsday: My Second Life In The Zombie Apocaly
Helix 133 views
