All Chapters of THE ALPHA MUST DIE: Chapter 51 - Chapter 58

The wind changed the moment she stepped outside.Not a breeze. A shift. Like the trees inhaled and held it.Emilia walked slowly, boots crunching the thin ice that had crusted over the grass like a second skin. The night hadn’t shaken off its fever yet—the sky still raw at the edges, red claw marks smeared across the clouds. The moon had dulled, no longer bleeding but bruised.And still, the ache in her bones hadn’t left.Victor's voice still ghosted her ears.Her mother’s face in that vision—so close, so far—still pressed behind her eyes like a smudge she couldn’t wipe clean.She needed truth. Something solid. Something not born from a dream or a blood-soaked whisper in the dark.And Julian was waiting.He stood behind the barn, back against the old willow tree. His hair was pulled back, jacket dusted with ash from the field where they'd burned something days ago—memory, ritual, regret. His eyes, always sharp, looked tired now. As if something inside him had finally cracked.She said

It began with a scent.Not the kind carried on the wind like a warning—but something low. Sunk into the soil. Bone-deep. Familiar in a way that scraped at the softest corners of her chest.Emilia had just stepped down from the Hollowborn altar. Her fingers were still stained with heart-blood. Her veins still hummed with the howls of others—wolves who had no packs until now.And yet… the moment she caught it—him—everything inside her stilled.Asher.The forest shifted.The wind slowed, curled inwards like it too held its breath.She didn’t run.Didn’t even move.She waited.Waited until the trees parted with a reluctant groan, and he emerged from between the columns of dark cedar and bone-root.Asher Wembley.Alive.Barefoot. Shirt torn. Mud across his chest like bruises painted in silence. There was no blood, but there was something worse—emptiness.His eyes didn’t gleam like she remembered. They didn’t glow. They were dull. Shadowed.“Asher,” she whispered, a ghost’s name slipping fr

Martha hadn’t been sleeping.For nights, she stared at corkboards pinned with case files, crime scene photos, blurry CCTV screenshots of shapes that didn’t walk like men. The Hollowborn theories had started as a whisper. Then a pattern. Then a voice in her skull that never shut up.Now it was a scream.She sat hunched in Nolan’s office, the blinds drawn, the scent of burnt coffee curling through the stale air. A manila folder trembled in her hands, still damp from the rain outside. She’d gone out alone. She hadn’t told Nolan.He walked in behind her, trench coat soaked, his expression pinched."You went to the Ridge facility without authorization," he said, no greeting. No pretense.Martha didn’t flinch. "I got the bones. The ones they tagged from the Cold Case Vault as 'unidentifiable hybrid remains.' They're Hollowborn. And you know it."Nolan dropped his keys on the desk with a dull clatter. His shoulders rolled with the tension of a man standing on a wire."You think breaking prot

The first thing to go was his skin.It sloughed in patches... paper-thin, curling at the edges like burnt leaves. Beneath, raw muscle pulsed, veins thrumming silver-black like they didn’t belong to a man or a beast. Just something... becoming.Victor Marshall sat alone in the hollowed ruins of the chapel, the same one where he'd once shown Emilia what he could be: power cloaked in gentleness, hunger disguised as prophecy.Now, the hunger made no pretense.Now, it devoured.He dragged a hand down his face, nails elongated and thick with blackened keratin. The skin came with it—strings of it caught between his claws, stretched, snapped. His teeth chattered from the cold inside him, not the air. There was no air in here anymore. Only the heat of rot, thick and damp and sacred.Moonlight spilled through the broken rafters in pale blades. It painted the altar. The same altar he’d knelt at a thousand times, where blood offerings had been poured, where promises had been made... and broken.H