Lahat ng Kabanata ng Killed and Reborn: My Alpha’s Obsession : Kabanata 161 - Kabanata 170

For one stunned heartbeat, everyone just stared at the stone.The slab—a shabby imitation of an altar that had probably seen goats and maybe one terrified volunteer years ago—had _moved_. Hair‑thin fractures veined its lip where the marked woman’s hand had slapped it. The wrong‑colored light from Talia’s wards still gnawed at the ghost of a circle around its base, chewing up whatever pattern had been drawn there.Then the moment shattered.“Heretic!” someone screamed.“Blasphemy!” another shouted, with the fervor of someone who had just watched their god stub a toe.The ring surged inward like a tightened noose.Rin didn’t have time to appreciate the irony.“Down!” she barked.Sera threw her whole weight sideways, dragging one of her captors with her and using his body to shield the other bound Nightfang from a knife that flashed down. The blade hit the man’s shoulder instead; he yelped, grip loosening enough for Sera to wrench one arm free. Rope burned her wrist bloody, but she was m

The stone under Rin’s cheek tasted of iron and old smoke.For one disorienting heartbeat, she thought she was back in the Blackmoon training yard, face‑down on the sparring mat after Rhea had dumped her there. The ache in her ribs fit. The grit in her teeth did.Then the chanting trickled in.Low, uneven voices in a circle around her. The faint sting of sage and something copper‑sharp burning in a brazier. The throb in her wrists was rough rope bit skin.Not the yard. Not home.The altar.Except—not the altar. Not like the stories.Rin opened her eyes to a slit.Gray sky. A ring of broken stone walls half‑encircling the clearing—what used to be the miner’s village square. The “altar” beneath her was a slab cut from the same local rock, black veined with rusty red. Someone had dragged it to the circle’s center and carved new lines across its surface. Circles inside circles. Angled marks like teeth.The patterns hummed faintly under her skin, where they touched her. Not like Aria’s desc

The broken altar still glowed with a sickly amber light, the jagged fissure through its stone a fresh wound in the earth. The chant that had once risen in a steady, hollow drone now sputtered, a broken hymn that fell apart the the people who tried to keep it alive. Rin crouched on the uneven edge, her legs bound by thin rope that had already begun to fray under the weight of her frantic movements. Sweat soaked the back of her neck and dripped onto the cracked ground, mixing with the dust and the faint metallic tang of the altar’s blood‑red veins.She could feel the pulsing magic that the cultists had tried to channel, a current that surged in uneven waves, lurching like a wounded animal. It was still there, still trying to find a path, still trying to finish the ritual they had begun. The symbols around the slab, crudely etched, pulsed in time with the jagged heartbeat of the stone.Rin’s mind jumped, involuntarily, to a night she had heard whispered countless times in the dim halls o

For the rest of his life, Kael would remember the way the square opened in front of him.Dust, first—thrown up by hooves and the dry bite of mountain wind. The jagged frame of the old village walls. The smear of red along a toppled post. The glimmer of half‑dead lines carved into dirt.And in the center, the altar.For a split second, his mind supplied what it expected: a body laid out, ropes, a knife poised.His vision tunneled. His lungs forgot what to do. Every nightmare he’d pretended not to have slammed into his ribs at once.Then the dust thinned, and the image snapped into its true shape.The altar wasn’t whole.A jagged crack split the slab down its length. One half had sunk lower, tilted. Carved symbols lay shattered along the fault line, blackened and dead. The focus stone at the southern post was toppled and broken, one carved face in pieces.And Rin—Rin was on top of the higher half, not spread on it.Standing.Barefoot, blood on her shins and fingers, hair wild, shirt to

By the time the last cultist was bound and the last wound roughly wrapped, the square smelled mostly of blood and cooling stone.The dust had settled over everything in a fine gray film. Wolves moved through it slow now, the jittery edge of battle bleeding into the bone‑deep ache that came after. Someone was sobbing quietly near the wall—one of the younger guards, adrenaline finally dropping. Rhea’s voice carried low and steady as she checked on Talia’s splinted leg.Rin stood at the rim of the collapsed altar, and weight shifted off her bad ankle, watching the breeze tease dust down into the jagged mouth where the slab had been.Her wrists throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Each breath tugged at bruised ribs. The thin cut along her side pulled when she moved. None of it felt as sharp as the emptiness where the ritual’s nasty itch had been.It was quiet in the stone now.Someone’s shadow spilled over hers.“Sit,” Kael said quietly.She didn’t jump; she’d felt him coming, the familia