Find The Alpha

The airbag hit Aurora so hard.

Aurora sat still for exactly three seconds. Then she pushed the deflated airbag aside, forced the door open with her shoulder, and stepped out into the cold night.

A warm liquid slid down the side of her face. She touched it.

Blood.

She kept walking.

The hospital was four blocks away. She walked all four of them barefoot, in a torn wedding slip stained with blood.

She walked through the hospital entrance.

“Aurora.” Mira’s voice sounded as she rushed forward.

The moment she saw Aurora’s face bloodied, shaking and barely standing. Her expression changed.

“What happened to you….”

“My mother,” Aurora said immediately. “Tell me.”

Mira moved closer to her.

“They resuscitated her twenty minutes ago. She’s alive… but Aurora, her condition is worsening. Without Nightbloom Serum, she has less than forty eight hours.”

Aurora didn’t respond.

She walked past Mira and head straight to the ICU.

She stood at the bedside and looked down at the woman who had raised her alone, who had worked double shifts for years to fund Aurora’s medical education, who had made Aurora promise with tears running down both their faces. To be extraordinary, to use her gift, to save people.

The monitor was beeping steadily.

Aurora reached for her mother’s hand, but her fingers trembled. The same tremor Ethan had caused years ago when she took a blade for him. And now, that same man was using her mother’s life to force her back.

“Mom.” Her voice came out barely above a whisper. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I wasted seven years. I’m sorry I let him hold this over us. I’m sorry these hands. I’m sorry I let this happen.”

She stopped and her voice steadied.

“But I’m going to fix this. I promise you I’m going to fix this.”

She clean her tears and stand up.

Mira was in the doorway, watching her with red eyes. “Aurora”

“There has to be another source for the serum.” Aurora’s voice had changed. “Nightbloom isn’t exclusive to Sterling Pharma. Who owns the original formula?”

Mira blinked. Then she grabbed her laptop from the chair beside her and pulled up a document she had clearly already been searching.

“Blackwood Biomedical.”

Aurora’s eyes widened.

“Blackwood?”

Mira nodded slowly.

“It’s a subsidiary of Blackwood Global. The patent belongs to Damon Blackwood.”

The name changed the air in the room.

Damon Blackwood.

The name that made city councilmen choose their words carefully and made rival CEOs cancel meetings rather than sit across a table from him.

Aurora had never met him. Nobody in her circle had. He existed in a different level, not just billionaire but powerful, dangerous and untouchable.

“Aurora.” Mira’s voice was careful. “It’s Wednesday.”

Aurora looked at her mother’s monitor.

“Where is he?”

“You cannot be serious.” Mira set the laptop down and stepped forward. “His security put three men in the hospital last month for getting too close to his car. The top floor of Blackwood Club goes completely dark every Wednesday, no exceptions. It is the Blackwood pack night. nobody gets in and the ones who tried…” She stopped. “They disappeared, Aurora. Not arrested. Disappeared.”

“Mira.” Aurora looked at her. “Where is he tonight?”

Mira looked at the monitor and looked at Aurora’s bloodied face and her shaking hands and the absolute certainty in her eyes.

Then she sat down, opened her laptop and Aurora collected it from her without another word.

She took a slow breath, she placed her trembling fingers on the keyboard. And then something shifted in her, some deep muscle-memory recognition, like a language she had never forgotten.

Her fingers stopped shaking and they began to move.

A black terminal window opened. Code cascaded down the screen in rapid columns.

Aurora’s eyes tracked it without blinking, her hands moving faster now, the familiar architecture of encrypted systems opening before her like doors she had built herself.

Because she had. Seven years ago, before the knife and the hospital and Ethan Sterling’s promises, Aurora Vale had been two things simultaneously, a surgical prodigy and the most feared hacker in three countries.

The underground identity that cybersecurity firms had spent years trying to unmask.

The ghost in every system

Nyx.

She had buried that identity like it never existed before she met Ethan.

Tonight she unfolded it.

Mira watched the screen with her hand over her mouth.

The building’s internal cameras blinked onto the screen one by one, lobby, corridors, private floors, service entrance.

And then the penthouse level.

Aurora zoomed in.

The feed was dim. One figure was visible, a man, sitting in a chair near the window.

“That’s him,” Mira whispered. “Aurora, that’s Damon Blackwood.”

Aurora looked at the feed for exactly four seconds. Then she closed the laptop and stood up.

She went to the small bathroom attached to her mother’s room, turned on the tap, and washed the blood from her face.

She borrowed Mira’s jacket, smoothed her ruined dress as far as it would go, she looked at herself in the mirror.

She looked like someone who had nothing left to lose.

“I’m coming with you,” Mira said immediately.

“You can’t stop me.”

“There is no negotiation with him, Aurora. People don’t survive forcing their way into Blackwood Club.”

Aurora turned, her voice was quiet.

“I’m not forcing my way in.”

A pause.

“I’m walking in.”

Tonight, Aurora Vale was walking straight into the den of the most dangerous Alpha in the city.

And she had no intention of leaving empty handed.