All Chapters of THE ALPHA MUST DIE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Before there was an Alpha… before the bones were burned into the earth… there were two boys chasing ghosts through the ash fields.Max Rutherford and Victor Marshall.Not enemies. Not rivals. Just two sons of dying bloodlines, born beneath the same cursed moon.They grew together like twisted trees—separate trunks, but roots tangled so deep, you couldn’t tell which fed which.Victor remembers the first time Max shifted. Not in rage. Not in battle. But in pain. The bones cracked like they were too old for his body. His scream wasn’t human or wolf—it was something else. Something caught in between.Victor had held him down, whispering, “Breathe. Breathe. It’s not killing you. It’s becoming you.”Max had smiled through his sweat and blood.“You always talk like a goddamn priest.”Victor didn’t mind. He liked being the one who spoke when no one else could. He liked being the one Max looked at like he might know the answers.They had found the Hollowborn cave not long after that. A scar in

The package arrived at dusk. No knock. No sound. Just there... resting on the farmhouse porch like it had grown from the wood itself.Emilia didn’t touch it at first.She stood at the door, barefoot, watching it. The box was matte black, no markings, no string, no return address. It pulsed against the light in a way that made the shadows crawl longer around it.Asher found her like that... frozen in the doorway, hands clenched, teeth locked.“You smell it too?” she asked, voice low.He didn’t answer right away.“Yes,” he said finally. “It reeks of him.”Still, she reached.Her fingers hovered just over the edge, her breath shallow, as if some part of her already knew what was inside. And when she opened it, the air didn’t move. The world held still.Inside, folded with impossible precision, lay a cloak.Dark as rotted velvet. Threaded through with silver seams that caught the failing light. But it was the texture that made her skin crawl... fur. Black, coarse. Familiar.Not animal. No

The clearing behind the hunter’s cabin had been silent for years.Now it breathed again.A sliver of moon cut through the trees like a blade, casting pale ribbons of light over damp moss and broken roots. Asher leaned against a rotting log, arms crossed, jaw tense, eyes colder than the air around him. He hadn't drawn his claws, not yet. But his bones ached for it. The old ache... the one that came when a ghost walked back into your life with blood on their tongue and a half-buried truth.Julian stepped from the woods like a memory that refused to stay buried.His coat was long and dark, still dusted with the scent of pine and something metallic beneath it—not quite blood, but close. His movements were careful, measured. His hands empty. His gaze sharp."You came alone," Asher muttered.Julian smirked. "You'd smell the lie if I didn't."Silence fell again, thick with old tension and older betrayals. The trees, the earth, even the wind—they all remembered. Once, these two had hunted tog

The bones were not meant to last.She knew it before she touched them again.They had begun to rot, not in the way of natural decay, but as if the earth had remembered what had been buried… and decided it should not remain unearthed.They had once been her father’s.Not in name, perhaps. But the marrow of him lived in their history.... bones from the Hollowborn, bones from the bloodline she shared, bones that whispered even now beneath the cellar floorboards.The box they had been buried in stank of copper and soil. Emilia crouched by it, her fingers hovering above the now-warped lid. The sigil carved into its face had flaked away in dust, as if even symbols could be broken.Asher stood at the top of the stairs, arms crossed, shadow sprawled long down the concrete steps.“You don’t have to keep going down there,” he said, voice strained. “Whatever they were… they were meant to rest.”She didn’t look back. “Then why are they calling me?”Asher didn’t answer.Because they were calling.

The forest did not sleep.Not that night.Not with the blood still fresh and the moon’s eye open—red and endless and watching. Emilia stood at the threshold of the old graveyard, where the trees thinned like breath catching in a throat. No gate. No fence. Just the land, raw and unmarked, as if the dead had buried themselves.She had followed no trail. Her feet moved of their own will, guided not by memory but instinct—a pull inside her bones like a song she didn’t know the words to, only the rhythm.The old shifter graveyard was not like human ones.No tombstones. No crosses.Just earth.Earth and silence and wind that moaned through the weeds like voices too tired to finish their stories.The Hollowborn didn’t mark their graves. They buried their kin with teeth still bared and hearts still beating—ritual deaths under the bleeding moon. The dead didn’t rest here. They waited.And now… they stirred.Emilia’s boots pressed into soft moss, and with each step, the silence deepened. The tr