Chapter 171

Raphael's POVThe files Victoria sent contained enough evidence to dismantle Konstantin's entire network. Facility layouts, guard rotations, the ritual timeline, corrupt Council members, financial trails. Everything Silas had been chasing for weeks, delivered in a single anonymous upload from someone inside the enemy's own house.My brothers focused on the ritual. The location, the approach routes, the structural vulnerabilities. They studied the maps and built strategies and calculated every variable they could measure.I couldn't stop looking at one name.Aldric Voss. Page seven of the Council asset list, with a handwritten notation in Konstantin's handwriting linking him directly to Stella's elimination. Confirmed asset. Reliable. Those were the words used to describe the man who traded our mother's life for money and protection.For eleven years, that man sat in Council chambers, attended diplomatic functions, shook the hands of pack leaders who would have torn him apart if they kn

Chapter 172

Orion's POVThe night before the end of the world felt quieter than it should have.We set up camp at the base of the mountain range, close enough to the ritual site that we could reach it by dawn but far enough that Konstantin's scouts wouldn't detect us in the dark. The vehicles were parked in a tight circle under a canopy of pine trees, and the supplies were laid out on tarps across the forest floor like the inventory of a war nobody wanted to fight.I spent the first hour sharpening weapons. Silver alloy blades, reinforced tips, the edges honed to a thinness that caught the firelight and threw it back in razor thin lines. My hands moved automatically, following a rhythm I had learned years ago, while my mind sat somewhere else entirely.Tomorrow, we were walking into the most heavily guarded facility Konstantin had ever built to stop a ritual that would make him permanently unstoppable. The plan was solid. Silas had mapped every entry point and structural weakness. Victoria's files

Chapter 173

Silas's POVThe fortress appeared through the trees at 4:47 in the morning, and the word building didn't do it justice.It was carved into the mountainside itself, a structure of concrete and steel and reinforced stone that looked like it had been designed by someone who expected to be attacked and wanted every attacker to understand the futility of trying. Guard towers rose from the corners at thirty foot intervals. Floodlights swept the approach in overlapping arcs that left almost no ground uncovered. Defensive barriers lined the perimeter in three staggered rows, each one positioned to funnel anyone approaching into kill zones where the crossfire would be devastating.Konstantin hadn't just prepared for us. He had built a monument to the expectation that someone would eventually come."Well." Jeremy's voice came through the comm, dry and steady despite what we were looking at. "That's terrifying.""Positions." Raphael's voice cut through immediately. No commentary. No hesitation. "

Chapter 174

Lyra's POVThe reinforced door opened, and the ritual chamber swallowed me whole.The room was enormous. Cathedral ceilings carved directly into the mountain's bedrock, rising so high above us that the top disappeared into shadows that the torchlight couldn't reach. The walls were covered in symbols. Not painted. Carved. Hundreds of them, spiraling outward from the center of the floor in concentric circles that pulsed with a faint, sickly glow that had no visible source.Artifacts lined the edges of the chamber on stone pedestals. Bones. Teeth. Claws sealed in glass containers. Vials of blood so old that the liquid had turned black. Every one of them taken from wolves Konstantin had hunted, and every one of them radiating a frequency that my wolf could feel like needles pressing into the inside of my skull.The energy in the room was wrong. Not dangerous in the way a weapon is dangerous. Wrong in the way that a body is wrong when too many things are living inside it at once. Dozens of

Chapter 175

Lyra's POVI stopped fighting.Not because I gave up. Because I finally understood that fighting wasn't what I was built for. Every instinct that had been driving me since I first shifted, the aggression, the fury, the desperate need to match Konstantin's violence with my own, all of it had been pointing me in the wrong direction. The white wolf was never meant to destroy. It was meant to restore.So I changed.I stopped throwing myself at Konstantin's body and started reaching for what was inside it.The shift happened in my chest first. The white light that had been burning outward like a weapon reversed its flow, turning inward before expanding again in a completely different frequency. Not aggressive. Resonant. Like a tuning fork struck against a surface that made everything around it vibrate at the same pitch.I felt them immediately. The stolen powers trapped inside Konstantin's body, dozens of them, layered on top of each other like voices screaming in a room with no doors. Each

Chapter 176

Lyra's POVThe world didn't fix itself overnight. But it started trying.In the weeks after the battle, Konstantin's network collapsed piece by piece. Without him at the center holding everything together, the system he had built over decades unraveled the way all systems built on fear eventually do, quickly and completely. Transport routes went dark. Shell companies dissolved. Facilities were raided by coalitions of packs who had spent years pretending they didn't know what was happening inside them.The wolves he imprisoned were freed. Not all at once and not without difficulty, because some of them had been captive for so long that the outside world felt more dangerous than the cages they lived in. But one by one, they walked out. Some went home to packs that had been searching for them. Others found new communities willing to take them in. A few stayed at the hidden pack's territory, choosing to help rebuild the place that had sheltered people like them for years.The Council was r