Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Alpha's Regret: His Secret Hybrid Heir: Kabanata 151 - Kabanata 160

Aris had enforced the clinical quarantine with the specific authority of someone who had been present for enough of the last several days to have accumulated significant moral leverage."The regional delegates can wait," he said, to the third representative who had appeared at Elena's door since midnight. "The Queen's nervous system is not available for diplomatic consultations until I say it is."The representative left.Aris went back to his chair beside the cot and checked Elena's pulse with the patient routine of someone who had been doing this every twenty minutes since 8:45 PM and intended to keep doing it."It's improving," Elena said."I know," he said. "I'm the one reading it.""Then you can stop checking it every—""Every twenty minutes," he said, "until it's back to your pre-Aegis baseline. We don't know the full physiological profile of transmitting a tectonic pressure gradient through a human nervous system because nobody has done it before and there's no clinical literatu

The sun went down behind the western ridge at 6:14 PM and Xander used the next sixteen minutes of usable twilight to get his team into position at the meadow's outer scrub line.No electronics. No comm chatter beyond Silas's silent data link, which fed into a small bone-conduction earpiece rather than a transmitter, the kind of low-tech solution that worked precisely because it couldn't be picked up by anything looking for a signal.Vance moved beside him through the tall grass with the specific unhurried care of someone who had been doing exactly this kind of approach since before Xander was born. The two Iron-Ridge scouts flanked wide, running their frequencies low the way Vance's people did it instinctively — not the masking technique Xander used, something older, a discipline passed down through generations of wolves who'd needed to move unseen through difficult terrain for reasons that predated the current crisis by centuries."Thermal monitors," Vance said, almost soundless. "Thr

The mountain felt like it was holding its breath at 4:00 AM. The air inside was thick, the kind of pressure that made your ears pop and your shoulders hunch without you realizing. Sarah sat at her terminal, eyes red from staring at the same feed for hours. The Command Leviathan showed up as a slow-moving blip, inching closer to its firing position over the northern ridge. Four hours out, give or take. She rubbed her neck and muttered, “Come on, you big ugly thing. Stay right there a little longer.”Elena walked in, two mugs of something hot in her hands. She set one down next to Sarah without a word. Sarah took it, sipped, and winced at the bitterness. “Thanks. Xander just checked in through the runner. Last of the sixty thousand are tucked into those stone fissures. Natural radar shadows, he called them. Kids, old folks, everybody.”Elena nodded once, leaning against the console. She didn’t smile, but her hand rested on Sarah’s shoulder for a second. “Good. At least they’re not sittin

The rumble from the gorge was still fading at 8:10 AM, a low vibration that rattled cups on the stone table. Elena didn’t waste time. She looked at Xander across the chamber and gave a quick nod. “You take the meadow. Kincaid with you. I’ve got this mess in here.”Xander was already moving toward the side exit. “On it. Keep them contained.” He grabbed a couple of vanguard wolves on the way out and headed for the descent path. Kincaid fell in beside him without a word, face set like he’d been expecting this.Elena turned back to the forty pack representatives, who were still on their feet, voices overlapping. She stepped in front of the main doors, Torr’s Redshore scouts spreading out to block the thresholds. No one was getting past. She raised her hands, not yelling, just firm. “Nobody leaves. Not yet. The Viper-Ridge treason needs documenting first. Anyone who breaks perimeter before that loses their voting status. I’m not kidding. We do this right or we lose everything.”A few Alphas

The broadcast looped.Every thirty minutes, on the hour and the half-hour, Vane's voice came through the mountain's open frequency channels with the patient repetition of someone who understood that psychological pressure compounded over time. The offer didn't change. The timeline counted down implicitly in every repetition.Before the fifth sunrise.Garrett had the speaker output reduced at 9 PM, which brought the volume down to the ambient frequency range rather than the broadcast range, which meant you couldn't hear the words clearly but you could still hear that something was running. The knowing was worse than the hearing, in some ways.Elena was in the lower corridor at 11 PM doing the thing she always did at 11 PM since the Gravel-Lands, which was walking the internal perimeter of the sanctuary's residential levels and confirming with her own presence that the mountain was holding. It wasn't tactical. It was the kind of thing you did when you were responsible for sixty thousand