Semua Bab THE ALPHA MUST DIE: Bab 71 - Bab 80

The cave swallowed light as if it had grown starved for centuries.Emilia’s bare feet pressed into the stone as she descended deeper into the sacred hollow. Moss clung to the walls like velvet decay. The scent of ash, iron, and old magic curled around her. Shadows brushed her skin. And deeper still, the sound of the pool called—no ripples, no drip, just a steady silence that felt louder than thunder.She held the blade Julian had given her. Her father’s dagger. Her lineage etched in its spine.Julian stood a few paces behind her, silent. Watching, but not intruding. He knew this part of the ritual was not his.This was hers alone.The chamber opened like a wound—wide, slick with condensation, glistening. At its heart, the pool waited, black as pitch, rimmed with silver veins that pulsed faintly in time with the moon outside. Even underground, it felt as though the moon’s eye stared straight into this place.She stepped toward the edge, shrugging off her cloak. Her breath steamed in th

The storm didn't start with thunder. It started with silence. The kind of silence that crept in first—on bare feet, breathless—and waited. Waiting like it knew what was coming, like it had already opened the door and watched the blood soak through the floorboards.By the time the town of Elderwood blinked, the dead were already walking.They didn’t wear rotted flesh. These weren’t the kind of corpses that moaned. No. These were worse.Former Alphas.Old ones. Hollow-eyed and grinning. Resurrected not with mercy, but with purpose.Victor had raised them.And he hadn’t raised them for peace.The first attack came at dawn, through the fog that curled like smoke through the cobbled streets. A single howl—long and metallic—ripped through the air, and by the time the townsfolk turned toward the sound, it was too late.The sheriff’s station was reduced to splinters. Blood soaked the walls of the pharmacy. A baker’s boy was found gnawed open at the throat—no clean kill, just carnage.

They strung the bodies like warnings. Upside down. Gutted. Silent.The trees had gone still again.No wind. No crows. No whispers of old wolves in the roots. Just blood drying on pine bark, black and sticky beneath the moonlight.Emilia stepped into the clearing barefoot, because the ground deserved to feel her rage. Leaves stuck to her feet, dew like tears clinging to her skin. Behind her, Julian halted at the tree line. Asher didn’t speak. No one did.Not here.Not where the pact had bled.The safehouse had been a sanctuary—one of three she’d personally claimed for the rogues who couldn’t fight. The wounded. The broken. The children. Now it was just another scar in the forest.A hanging one.Her eyes found them one by one.Jenna, the young mother who’d begged for a safe place to raise her son. Theo, the mute scout who never failed to find water. Kyran, the Hollowborn seer who read omens in smoke.Each one dead. Drained. Marked.Victor’s sigil had been burned into their chests.No

They moved in silence—not because they were afraid, but because something ancient had slipped into their bones, something older than fear.Moonlight.Even hidden behind the reddened curtain of the eclipse, the moon pulsed like a wound in the sky. Bleeding slowly across the clouds, it bathed the world in a strange, unnatural dusk. Not night. Not day. A space between.Emilia rode at the front.Her steed wasn’t a horse—but a massive half-shifted wolf, silver-eyed, claws digging trenches into the dirt with each stride. Its breath steamed in great clouds, chest heaving, muscles rolling beneath fur the color of charred oak. And when it howled, the world hushed.Behind her, the others came.Half-shifted wolves. War-bred, bone-bound, skin laced with sigils—some carved into flesh, some inked with blood. And every last one of them glowed faintly in the eclipse light.The Moonborn.Not rogues. Not pack wolves.Born beneath red moons. Whispered about in hushed tongues. The kind of wolves that did

The scent of ash came first.Not the sweet kind that lingered after an old hearth fire or summer bonfire—the acrid stench of burning hair, blood-slicked wood, and fear. It curled into the sky in thick black columns, strangling the clouds as they tried to pass over.By the time Emilia reached the outpost, it was already too late.Charred ribs of what used to be a watchtower jutted from the ground like broken antlers. The tents were cinders. The trees surrounding the perimeter were scorched bare, their bark peeled back in black strips. The earth was still bleeding.Bodies.Too many.Some still half-shifted, jaws stretched open in frozen snarls. Others burned in their wolf-skin, claws curled into the dirt like they tried to drag themselves toward the treeline. She didn’t recognize all their faces, but she remembered their scents.They’d called her Alpha.And now, they were gone.Asher crouched beside a corpse, his brow dark with soot, his mouth tight. “They used silver shrapnel. Chemical