All Chapters of THE ALPHA MUST DIE: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The smoke curled first. A thin tendril slithering beneath the farmhouse door like a secret too eager to keep. Emilia was already halfway to the porch by the time her grandmother called her name, voice full of dread, barely louder than the hiss of kindling catching fire.But she felt it before she saw it.Something… wrong in the woods. Like the forest had begun to scream.The air outside was too still. Even the insects had gone silent. The only sound was the crackle... distant, slow, deliberate.. like laughter through clenched teeth.She didn’t wait.Her boots hit the damp earth with full force, sprinting past the field’s edge, through brush that clawed at her legs like old hands trying to hold her back. Branches whipped her face. Leaves trembled around her like they too feared what waited.Then she saw it.Fire.The Hollowborn altar... burning.A column of flame licked up toward the bleeding moon, red-hot and wrong. Not wild. Not accidental. This wasn’t a fire born from lightning or c

The night hung low and heavy, like a blade pressed to the nape of the world.Clouds rolled slow and black across the sky, veiling the moon in streaks of blood-colored mist. The forest groaned underfoot, ancient roots pulsing like veins. Emilia rode quiet through it, cloaked in a mantle marked with the sigils of the Hollowborn, every line drawn in her own blood. No guards. No pack at her back. Only the steady rhythm of her breath and the biting frost of her defiance.She had been summoned—not requested. Summoned. Like a dog to a leash. Victor’s message had been clear: Come and witness the new order, or be swallowed by it.She didn’t come to bow.The clearing opened like a wound in the trees.Torches burned in a perfect circle, stakes of bone and iron hammered into the soil like a crown of thorns. Two packs flanked either side—one to the east, bare-chested, scar-slicked and branded with fresh ash. The other, darker, cloaked in soot-stained hides and silence. Neither made eye contact. Bl

It began with the sound of laughter in the street.Not the brittle kind Emilia had come to know... the sharp, frantic edge of people trying to survive—but the soft kind. Distant. Floating. Real.She stood at the edge of the field, her hand brushing tall grass gone silver in the moonlight, listening to something that didn’t belong. Joy. It trickled into the farmhouse like wind through cracked windows.When she turned back toward the porch, Asher was there. His arms folded. His brow furrowed.“They’re celebrating,” he said.She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”He nodded toward the town, toward the lights flickering in the valley below. “Julian came back. Blood on him. Said Victor’s dead. Said the coup worked.”Emilia’s throat tightened.Victor. Dead.Her mind immediately reached backward, toward the dreams that never left her untouched—his voice wrapped in smoke, his lips at her ear, the weight of him like thunder behind her eyes.Dead?It didn’t feel right.She stepped off the porch, boots cr

It began three nights after Asher vanished.A howl.Low, stretched thin like a scream trapped in ice. It slithered through the dark like smoke, curling under doors, through window cracks, beneath floorboards. It wasn’t just heard... it was felt, like fingers brushing the spine. It made babies cry and made old men reach for guns they’d sworn to bury.It didn’t belong to Victor.It didn’t belong to any known wolf.It followed her.The first time Emilia heard it, she was bathing in the creek behind the farmhouse—naked under the moon, hoping the cold might numb the ache beneath her skin. The night was quiet, the forest still… until it came.That howl.It moved through the trees like something ancient had been stirred. Something long-buried and pissed off.Emilia froze.Water dripped from her collarbone. Her pulse throbbed at her throat.Then, something inside her—not her wolf, not her grief, something else—shivered in recognition.Not fear.Not even surprise.But... belonging.The second

The church was no longer a church.Its bones were black. The roof, collapsed. Crosses melted and warped like wax in firelight. Pews gutted by rot, vines curling through shattered windows like the forest had clawed its way inside, determined to reclaim what holy men had once built and monsters had long since consumed.Emilia stepped over the threshold.Her boots crunched on ash.Each breath filled her lungs with smoke long dead. With silence that pressed in too close. This wasn’t a place made for worship anymore.It was made for reckoning.And he was already waiting.Victor stood near the altar—a broken slab of stone still slick with soot, vines wrapped around its base like offerings. Blood stained his shirt, not fresh, but drying—an open wound beneath the left ribs.Yet he stood like he’d never been touched.Eyes like fire behind stormclouds. Lips parted—not in smile, not in malice, but in possession. That look. It didn’t search for her. It didn’t devour her.It already had her.He sa