Todos os capítulos de The Alpha's Regret: His Secret Hybrid Heir: Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 80

The pack house was quiet in the specific way that followed loud things.Xander carried Silas through the main entrance and the first thing he registered was the dust. It was everywhere — on the floors, on the windowsills, caught in the early morning light coming through the gaps where windows had been. Fine grey dust, slightly darker in places, with no smell and no weight. What was left of the Silent Sisters once the root frequency that had animated them stopped broadcasting.They'd collapsed all at once, Yemi told him later. Mid-movement, mid-reach, simultaneous. Just stopped and came apart, like the decision had been made somewhere else and the execution was instantaneous. Which it had been. Which was the moment the capacitor sealed.The walls had scorch marks from Elena's resonance work. Three windows were gone entirely. The east corridor had a section of floor that had gone soft from Void contact and would need to be assessed before anyone walked on it. The front door was a tempora

The forty-minute warning became thirty-five before anyone had finished moving.Xander didn't waste time being annoyed about it. He gave the evacuation order for the non-combatants, watched Lena and two enforcers begin moving people toward the hidden entrance to the old mining tunnels behind the carriage house, and then turned to the coalition fighters with the specific energy of someone who had made their decisions and was done making them."Nobody meets them at the gate," he said. "That's what they expect. We're not giving them expected." He looked at the map, at the forest sections, at the terrain he'd grown up running. "Teams of three. Spread across the north and northwest quadrants. No comms after you're in position — their scanners will pick up transmission signals. We go by proximity and instinct." He looked at Dunmore. "You said sixty wolves.""Fifty-four combat-ready," Dunmore said."I need twenty in the forest. The rest stay mobile for the second wave."Dunmore didn't hesitate

The deeper they went, the more the tunnel system stopped feeling like infrastructure and started feeling like geology.The upper levels had been worked — shored timber, cut stone, the evidence of human planning even under forty years of disuse. Two levels down, the human planning gave way to the mountain's own architecture. The passages narrowed and widened according to their own logic. The floor sloped unpredictably. The air moved in ways that didn't match any visible source.It smelled like wet iron and time.Xander kept the pace steady. Not fast — fast in the dark with non-combatants and children and a recovering post-surgical patient was how you lost people to ceiling drops and unmarked shafts — but consistent. Moving was better than stopped. Stopped gave people time to think about where they were.Garrett managed the rear. Marcus handled the middle, keeping the column together at the junctions where the tunnel branched and the temptation to make independent navigational decisions

The ventilation shaft was exactly where Sarah's survey said it would be, which was the first thing that had gone exactly right in several hours and Xander allowed himself four seconds of appreciation before Sarah's voice came again.Sarah looked up from the glowing screen of her portable terminal, her face pale in the blue light. "Don't go up," she said, her voice carrying easily in the quiet tunnel.He looked at the shaft. At the pale grey light filtering down from the surface, approximately twenty meters above them. At the non-combatants who had been underground for three hours and whose faces had begun doing the thing faces did when enclosed space and unknown threat timelines combined into something that didn't have a name but had a recognizable expression."Explain," he said."Sterling deployed a Resonance Net. High-altitude drone array, automated tracking system, silver-frequency detection. It's been up for about forty minutes — I've been watching the signature build from the rel

The gas was visible, which made it worse in some ways.A luminescent blue, faint but consistent, rolling down the ventilation shaft connections in the slow patient way of something heavier than air finding the lowest available path. It didn't rush. It didn't need to. It had the particular confidence of a thing that worked by accumulation rather than speed.Sarah moved three paces behind Xander, her face illuminated by the increasingly frantic blue scrolling on her portable terminal. She called out the concentration percentages over the sound of the grinding shale, her voice tight but steady.Concentration at upper shaft: thirty percent threshold. You have time.Forty-five percent. Move faster.It's in the maintenance tunnel entry. Fifteen minutes to critical concentration at your depth. Probably less.Xander passed each update to Marcus with a look and Marcus passed the information through the column in the way that kept it from becoming panic — not hiding it, just translating it into