All Chapters of Alpha's Regret: The Forsaken Luna: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Rhiannon's POVWe left at midnight.No ceremony. No speeches. No tearful goodbyes from the pack.Just five people slipping into darkness, moving north toward the Carpathians.Thorne watched us leave from the packhouse steps. Arms crossed. Expression unreadable. He'd spent the entire final day arguing against the mission, cataloguing every way it could go wrong.Then spent that same evening sharpening our weapons personally.That was Thorne.Cade said nothing. Just gripped my shoulder once, briefly, before stepping back."Bring him home," he said."I will."Marcus led us out. Then Sera. Then Nyx. Then me.Darius fell into step beside me as Crescent Moon disappeared behind the tree line.Neither of us spoke.The first hour was silence.We moved fast. Forest floor soft underfoot. No moon yet — it would rise later, around three in the morning, giving us a window of true darkness to approach the mountain unseen.I focused on breathing. On moving quietly. On saving energy for what waited at

Rhiannon's POVThe mountain was alive.Not literally. But close enough.Every step up the eastern slope felt like walking into something aware. The air thickened as we climbed — not with cold, though it was cold, breath misting and fingers numbing inside gloves — but with pressure. Like the mountain itself was exhaling against us. Ancient wards layered over centuries pressing outward, pushing back, saying leave in a language that bypassed thought and went straight to instinct.I pushed through it. Kept moving.The killing wards were higher. At the fortress walls. At the main entrance where Malachar's magic was concentrated and maintained and fed.Down here it was just persuasion. Just the mountain making its preferences known.I ignored its preferences.Nyx led us in a wide arc across the slope. The route she'd memorized from the Archives documents kept us below the ward boundary — barely. I could feel the edge of it above us. A line in the air where discomfort would become something

Rhiannon's POVThe first floor of the fortress smelled like centuries of violence that had long since stopped surprising anyone.We moved in single file through a corridor narrow enough that our shoulders brushed both walls. Real torchlight — flame, not magic — threw shadows that jumped in patterns designed to make the eye expect shapes that weren't there.I kept my eyes on what was real.Stone floor. Smooth. Ancient. Worn clean by centuries of foot traffic with nothing left to catch a boot on.Nyx led. Then Sera. Then Marcus. Then me. Darius at the rear, watching everything we'd passed.We moved in total silence. First intersection — Nyx checked both directions, signaled left. Second corridor. Third. The fortress was a maze of deliberate complexity, original monastery architecture buried under two centuries of paranoid renovation. Walls built inside walls. Passages blocked and rerouted. A building reshaped by something with unlimited time and unlimited suspicion.We had the original

Rhiannon's POVThe third floor smelled like old stone and something colder. Something that had nothing to do with temperature.We moved in single file through the eastern corridor, torchlight throwing orange shadows that leaned away from us as we passed, as if even fire wanted distance. Nyx led. Then Sera, her violet light extinguished now—too visible, too bright. Then Marcus, still moving carefully around ribs that ached with every step. Then me.Darius behind me. Close enough that I could feel the bond humming between us like a wire pulled tight.Third floor. Eastern wing. End of the corridor.Caelum's words. I held them like a compass.The door came into view before I expected it—solid oak reinforced with iron bands, two torches flanking it in stone brackets. And in front of it, two guards.They were young. Young for Bloodletters meant centuries instead of millennia, but I felt the difference immediately. Less of that ancient pressure, less of that wrongness that made the air itsel

Rhiannon's POVWe made it forty feet down the eastern corridor before she stepped out of the shadow between two torch brackets and the air temperature dropped four degrees.She didn't walk. She manifested. One moment the corridor was empty; the next she was simply present, the way cold is present when a window opens.Six hundred years old.I knew her from Nyx's account and from the particular quality of the silence she created—the silence of something that has outlasted so many opponents it has stopped tracking individual faces. She was tall, lean in the architectural way of very ancient vampires, dressed in dark armour that moved like cloth and stopped blades like iron. Her hair was white and straight and fell past her shoulders.She looked at our group with the patient attention of a collector examining new acquisitions.Then her eyes found me."A half-powered Chimera," she said. Her voice carried harmonics below the words, like speech over deep water. "How disappointing.""You'd be