All Chapters of Alpha’s Enemy, Alpha’s Mate: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The city burned quietly beneath the morning fog.Smoke rose from the subway vents, curling over the rooftops like ghosts.In a safe house above an abandoned print shop, Aiden came back to himself.The pain was dull now, more memory than fire. He blinked at the cracked ceiling, realizing he was lying on a cot, stripped down to his undershirt. Someone had cleaned and re-bandaged him. The scent of antiseptic—and of Dante—hung in the air.A chair creaked. “You’re alive,” Dante said. His voice sounded rougher than usual, worn thin by worry.Aiden tried to sit up. “Define alive.”Dante pushed him gently back down. “You were out for ten hours. The shock fried half your nerves.”“Julian’s device?”“Destroyed.” Dante’s mouth twisted. “Or so I thought. He’s already on the move again.”Aiden closed his eyes. “Then we didn’t stop him.”“No,” Dante said. “But we slowed him down.”The room was quiet except for the hum of the generator and the steady rhythm of rain outside. Aiden studied Dante in t

The red lights bled across the steel walls like veins.Aiden froze, one hand still on the keyboard. The floor vibrated harder, deeper, and rhythmically, as if something enormous was stirring below them.“Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” he said.Dante drew his gun, eyes narrowing. “Julian always leaves a parting gift.”A mechanical hiss rolled through the chamber. One of the maintenance panels split open, spilling smoke and the smell of ozone. Then another, and another, until the entire room throbbed with sound. From the darkness beneath the grated floor came a low, inhuman growl.Aiden’s pulse spiked. “Whatever he built down there—it’s alive.”“Then we kill it before it wakes all the way.”Dante grabbed his arm and pulled him back toward the stairs, but the exit door sealed with a metallic clang. A single red diode blinked on the panel—locked from the outside.The growl became a roar.A steel claw punched through the floor, scattering sparks. Then another. The creature hauled

The northern forest looked nothing like the city.No lights, no noise—just black trees, snow, and silence thick enough to swallow sound. The truck’s engine hummed low as Dante guided it along the frozen road. The headlights cut narrow tunnels through the mist, and Aiden sat beside him, map open, watching the coordinates pulse on the screen.“This is it,” he said quietly. “Julian’s northern division base. Hidden under the old lumber yard.”Dante slowed the truck until the engine was barely a whisper. “Smells wrong,” he muttered. “Like metal and blood.”“Means we’re close,” Aiden replied.They parked beneath a line of dead pines. The cold hit hard when they stepped out—air so sharp it burned their lungs. Snow crunched under their boots as they checked weapons and comms. No backup, no guarantees. Just the two of them again, chasing a ghost through the ice.Dante broke the silence. “You ready for this?”Aiden nodded, though his heart was hammering. “I’ve been ready since he started this w

Three days of uneasy calm.That was all the world allowed them before the shadows started moving again.The coastal cabin had become a half-healed wound: wood smoke in the air, the salt sting of the sea, the muffled hum of the radio that Aiden could never quite bring himself to turn off. Every hour, he expected static to crack open into another Council alert. Every hour, it didn’t—and that quiet began to feel heavier than noise.He sat at the table with a half-drunk mug of coffee going cold. The screen in front of him glowed with lines of stolen data from the northern servers he’d salvaged before the explosion. Most of it was gibberish: corrupted coordinates, fragmented audio, encrypted signatures that refused to translate. But one phrase kept repeating across the files, a digital heartbeat pulsing between symbols:PHASE THREE.Aiden leaned closer. “What are you planning, Julian?”Behind him, the floor creaked. Dante’s scent—warm cedar, smoke—filled the room before his voice di

The city looked different when they came back.It wasn’t the smoke, or the sirens, or the half-frozen rivers cutting through concrete—it was the silence beneath all that noise. A silence that said someone’s watching.Dante drove through the outskirts under cover of darkness, headlights off, the engine barely louder than the wind. Aiden sat beside him, hood drawn low, scanning the skyline. The Council’s tower still stood, but new barriers circled its base—more guards, more cameras, more secrets.“They rebuilt fast,” Aiden muttered. “Julian’s fingerprints are all over this.”Dante’s jaw tightened. “Then we burn it down again.”“Not until we know what we’re burning.”Aiden’s tone carried the sharp edge of strategy now. The fear that used to tremble under his words was gone—replaced by quiet resolve.⸻They ditched the truck a mile away and went the rest of the way on foot. The air smelled of rain and ozone, thick with the promise of another storm. The city never truly slept; even in the