All Chapters of FATED TO THE ALPHA I WAS BORN TO KILL: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Draven's POVThe healers thought I was sleeping. I let them believe it because it was easier than explaining that I hadn't slept properly in three years, not real sleep, not the kind that lets a mind rest instead of just replaying the same night over and over until dawn.Kade sat by the window when I finally opened my eyes. He looked older than I remembered. Not just tired. Worn down in the specific way command wears a person down when they never let themselves put it aside."You're awake," he said."Barely." My throat felt like sand. "How long?""Two days. You scared everyone half to death.""Good." I pushed myself up against the pillows, ignoring the way the movement pulled at muscles that hadn't fully recovered from whatever had used my body as a puppet. "Maybe now someone will actually listen to me instead of treating me like a ghost that wandered in from the woods."Kade's jaw tightened. "I listened to you at the treeline. I've been trying to listen since you first showed up with

Kade's POVThe frost let go of Nyra's ankles as suddenly as it had arrived, retreating back into the stone like something startled by its own boldness, and Draven collapsed the instant his wrist slipped free of my grip. I caught him before his head hit the floor, lowering him down carefully, my hands still shaking from how close his claws had come to my throat."Is he," I started."He's himself again," Nyra said, kneeling beside us, two fingers pressed to the pulse at Draven's neck. "For now."Riven helped me carry him back to the cot, and none of us spoke while the healers reset the chains, this time laced with something Nyra insisted on adding from her own supplies, a paste that smelled of ash and old iron and made my skin crawl just standing near it."It won't hold forever," she admitted, wiping her hands clean. "But it buys time. Whatever's inside him, it doesn't like this mixture much."I stayed by his side until dawn, watching my brother breathe, waiting for his eyes to open and

Kade's POVThe chest sat between us for three days before either of us worked up the nerve to touch it again.I told myself we were being careful. Strategic. Waiting until we understood more about wards keyed to bloodlines that shouldn't exist inside my father's private archive at all. The truth was simpler and less flattering. I was afraid of what it held, and afraid, more than that, of what it would mean if Nyra's blood was the key to something my own father had spent decades hiding.In the meantime, my own body had started keeping a different kind of score.It began with my hands. Small tremors first, easy to hide behind folded arms during council sessions, easy to explain away as exhaustion to anyone who hadn't watched me closely enough to know the difference. By the second day, the tremors had become something else entirely, silver fire licking along my knuckles without my permission, refusing to fully extinguish even when I clenched my fists hard enough to draw blood from my own

Riven's POVI'd buried Draven once already. I hadn't expected to have to do it a second time while he was still breathing.The wall gave me a clear view of the treeline, torches lit along our own defenses casting long shadows across ground I'd trained on since I was a pup barely old enough to hold a blade properly. Draven's forces hadn't moved in the two hours since the horn first sounded, holding position at the edge of the trees like they were waiting for something. Maybe they were waiting for us to break first."You should go inside," Marek said beside me, one of the younger guards I'd trained myself. "Kade needs every capable body ready, and you look like you've seen a corpse walk.""I have."Marek didn't have a response for that, which was fair, because I didn't have a good explanation ready either. How do you explain to a boy barely twenty years old that the man leading an army against his home used to sneak him extra rations during winter drills, used to laugh so hard at Kade's

Nyra's POVI didn't mean to fall into the vision. I'd only reached out, the way Mogra taught me, letting my senses drift toward the frost still clinging faintly to the stone where Draven's possession had first taken hold, trying to read whatever residue remained.The floor dropped out from under me instead.One moment I stood in the war room, the ancient record trembling in Kade's hands, Riven's face gone white with horror. The next, I was somewhere else entirely, somewhere that didn't have walls or floors or any solid thing to stand on at all, only endless black stretching in every direction, cold enough that my breath should have frozen and didn't, because I understood, distantly, that I wasn't truly breathing here at all."Kade?" My voice came out small, swallowed instantly by the vast dark.Nobody answered.I turned in place, searching for any point of reference, and found none, until a single thread of frost appeared beneath what should have been my feet, spiraling outward the wa