All Chapters of THE ALPHA'S NAUGHTY LITTLE CHRISTMAS GIFT.: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

The sky refuses to stop tearing now with rain drops.Clouds spiral downward around Ivy like water disappearing into a drain far too small for the amount trying to pass through it, and she digs blue flame into the empty air beneath her, clawing for anything solid enough to slow the fall.There's nothing there.Every ounce of strength she throws against the pull only makes the burn in her shoulders worse, muscle fighting bone fighting whatever invisible hand has wrapped itself around her ribs and decided this is the direction she's going whether she agrees or not.Several hundred feet away, Numenessa is losing the same fight. Ivy can see it in the way her white hair whips wild and directionless, no longer moving with the grace it held an hour ago.Despite the panic, there's hatred and fear on Numenessa's face.That single realization does more to hollow out Ivy's chest than the fall itself. If Numenessa is afraid, whatever waits below deserves to be.Beacon Hill stretches out beneath th

Darkness that feels alive swallows Ivy.It's draining her so fast that she can't fight. The stone doors slam shut behind her with a sound that rolls through unseen tunnels for what feels like minutes, the echo traveling somewhere far beyond where an echo should reasonably be able to reach, and when it finally dies there's nothing left behind it at all.No dripping water. No settling stone. Even her own breathing sounds foreign to her, too loud and fragile, the only proof left that she still exists in a place built to make her doubt it.She stays on her hands and knees where the soldiers threw her, ribs aching with every shallow breath, and coughs blood onto stone so black it seems to swallow the low light along with everything else.The blood doesn't pool the way blood should. It vanishes into the surface slowly, the way dry earth drinks the first rain after a long drought, and Ivy's stomach clenches watching it disappear.This place is hungry. It has been hungry for a very long time.

Kai floats in darkness.Voices drift through it, muffled and far away, as if they're fighting through deep water."Kai!"Someone calls his name.The sound slips away before he can reach it."Kai!"Closer this time.Fear cracks through the voice."Kai."A woman's voice. Soft. Warm. Trembling.His mind claws through the fog."Kai."Recognition lands all at once.Eliana.His eyelids feel too heavy to lift, but he forces them open anyway. One slow inch at a time.A white ceiling comes into focus. Stone walls. The sharp scent of crushed herbs hangs thick in the room. He's lying on a bed he doesn't remember climbing into.Every breath tears through his chest, deep and raw.He can't remember how he got here.Kai tries to lift a hand.A sharp tug stops him.He blinks down at the thin tube taped to the back of his hand, the IV line swaying from the movement. A steady beep fills the silence. Turning his head, he notices wires running from his bare chest to a monitor beside the bed. The green li

The television is the first thing to break the quiet in Mystic Valley's command center.It hangs bolted to the far wall, sound turned low, and for over ten minutes nobody in the room gives it more than half an ear. Council members pass reports back and forth across the table, voices overlapping, coffee going cold in cups nobody remembers pouring. Then a single sentence cuts through everything else at once."We're receiving reports from every continent."Every head in the room lifts.The reporter on screen keeps her shoulders straight and her voice level, but her eyes betray her. They keep flicking off camera, toward something or someone feeding her updates faster than she can process them. Behind her, a bank of screens cycles through footage from six different countries in rapid succession. Japan. Brazil. Canada. South Africa. Australia. The United States. Different languages, different landscapes, the same impossible footage repeating itself across every border on the planet.A fishe

The chamber has settled back into silence.Water drips somewhere unseen, slow and irregular, marking time in a place that has stopped keeping any other kind. Candles crackle faintly along the ledges. Somewhere beyond the reach of the light, the witches hum to themselves. Ivy has stopped flinching at it because nothing left in her body is willing to anymore. She no longer knows if hours have passed since the doors sealed shut above her, or days. Time has stopped meaning anything down here.Her wrists have gone raw where restraints carved directly into the ancient stone hold her in place, the skin split and scabbed in uneven lines. Blue light no longer leaks freely from beneath her skin the way it did at first. Only faint sparks remain now, thin and reluctant, flickering out almost as soon as they surface. The witches have stopped feeding constantly. They take small pieces now, pause, laugh quietly among themselves, and return later for more, drawing the whole thing out, unwilling to le