All Chapters of Baine Family Love and War: Book 2 Finally My Own Love: Chapter 21 - Chapter 28

Dominic’s POV — Alpha Emergence & Prison AssaultThe night was colder than I remembered. Not the kind of cold that numbs flesh, but the kind that crawls under your skin, biting at your nerves and leaving fire in its wake. Every street, every alley we passed brought me closer to the prison—closer to Samantha, to Ava, to the storm that was already raging in my mate.Liza ran beside me, clutching the map and trembling, but steadying herself on every step. I could feel her, tethered to me, sensing the same surge I had—Samantha’s psychic scream had left threads in both of us, invisible but undeniable.And she was getting stronger.I felt it before I saw it.The air thickened, the shadows of the night bending toward us as though the world itself was bracing for what was coming. The psychic bond between us pulsed like a heartbeat—fast, uneven, electric—and the witch inside Samantha was screaming to be free.I shifted.Not just a glance. Not just instinct.I shifted.Muscles knotted

Third person POV The Hunt Through Ruin The prison did not collapse all at once. It agonized. Stone screamed as it tore itself apart, steel shrieked as it warped and buckled, and the earth beneath Dominic’s feet shuddered like a wounded animal trying to crawl away from its own death. Every corridor they passed through felt less like architecture and more like the inside of something dying—veins rupturing, bones splintering, the air thick with the coppery taste of fear and ozone. Dominic ran. He didn’t look back. He didn’t slow. His lungs burned, each breath scraping raw through dust-choked air, but pain had become irrelevant. The Alpha had stripped the world down to motion and intent—forward, faster, now. His boots pounded against fractured concrete slick with blood and debris, emergency lights strobing overhead in violent red pulses that made everything look wounded, bleeding, alive. Ava was gone again. The absence was a wound all its own. It throbbed through him with every s

Dawn arrived like it was afraid of us. It crept across the pack lands in thin, uncertain bands of pale gold, filtering through the canopy in fractured beams that never quite reached the ground. The forest didn’t welcome the light. It endured it. Shadows clung stubbornly to roots and hollows, coiled tight around tree trunks, reluctant to loosen their grip. Predators understood that kind of quiet. So did I. The land was awake—but it wasn’t calm. It was holding its breath. So were we. Samantha sat near the fire pit where she’d been since the sky first began to pale, knees drawn tight to her chest, shoulders locked in a tension that bordered on painful just to look at. She hadn’t slept. Not even drifted. Her body was still, but her energy never stopped moving—low, restless, scraping at the air like a blade dragged too slowly across stone. Her witch was fully awake now. Not raging. Not exploding. Waiting. The flames reflected in her eyes, turning the gold feral, molten. There was

Ava’s POVSomewhere UnknownThe world smelled like metal again.Metal and cold.Metal and quiet.Metal and him.The scent clung to the back of my throat no matter how deeply I breathed, sharp and sterile, like needles made of air. It didn’t matter that the room itself was warm—almost too warm. The smell carried its own temperature, sliding beneath my skin and settling into my bones the way fear did when it stayed too long.I sat on a soft mat in the middle of the room. That part was new. Softer than the other places he’d kept me. No restraints bolted into the floor. No silver lines carved into the walls. Just the mat, pale and clean, like something meant to look kind.My feet were bare. The floor beneath them felt smooth, unnaturally smooth, like stone polished until it forgot what it once was. My shirt hung too big on my shoulders, sleeves swallowing my hands. Someone—one of the quiet people who never looked me in the eye—had braided my hair. Not very well. It pulled too tigh