All Chapters of Alpha’s Forbidden Mate: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

There was no sleep in the house, not really; the oldest parts of the pack had always run on violence and adrenaline, the electric current of fear coiled with joy. The return walk felt like the tail end of a riot, the pack still high off the hunt, blood on their jeans, on their teeth, sidelong glances full of envy and respect. They brought the woods back with them: the spiral of the trees, the crooked shadows, the taste of conquest under their tongues.Carolina hadn’t realized she was leading until the doors swung open and everyone poured through behind her, their noise slamming off the hard floors and up the stairwell. Cas pushed past, whooping, Lyra flicked her head to the side and disappeared into the kitchen, and Marcus—who was very pointedly *still here*—headed for the den, where the oldest wolves nursed their wounds and their power. The house was split by the new order and the old, and each step up the stairs was tacit proof that only one side of the schism really mattered anymor

The first assault hit at noon, though afterwards Carolina would remember it as happening in the colorless ambiguity between hour and moment, with the sunlight so sharp it broke the stained-glass tape and painted killshot halos everywhere. Sybil’s mercs—twenty maybe, but the way they moved it felt like more—came through the side door with military symmetry, rifles up, gas masks huffing, not bothering with announcements. Sybil herself, petite and iron-strung, stalked directly behind, dressed in a suit that looked plucked from the 1930s but cut to look faster, meaner, entirely modern. When she saw the altar, the pack crowded on and around it, she smiled a cut-glass smile.Xander was already moving. He sprinted the nave, hit the first merc from behind and brought him down in a tangle of knees and teeth. Gunfire erupted: three percussion cracks, then the whole room deafened by echo. Carolina’s ears rang, but her eyes stayed wide open; she counted how many guns, saw three of her own already

The pack drifted to their chosen corners as the light faded, no curfew but a thousand years of evolutionary etiquette dictating it was time to cave inward, to lick wounds and plot dreams behind half-closed doors. By ten, the piano had gone quiet, and so had Briony, curled on a pile of coats like a satisfied cat. Even Cas and Marcus, who once would have prowled the length of the hall to keep vigil or stir up mischief, lay side by side in a nest of blankets under the ruined chandelier, sky-blue moonlight striping the floor around them.Xander found her on the balcony. They were both too tired to speak, so he just folded her into his arms, pressing his jaw above her ear, his hands unsteady but certain as they crept under the hem of her shirt. Carolina didn’t resist. She tilted her head back and bit his shoulder hard enough to leave a crescent. He lifted her off her feet and staggered with her toward the nearest empty bedroom, not caring that it still smelled of smoke and dried blood. Ins

A storm battered the city that night, lightning branding the skyline and thunder rattling the glass teeth of its towers. The city’s monsters tucked in and waited. The wolves did not.Carolina was everywhere at once, restless, a hyperactive nerve. She roamed the halls with her sleeves rolled, patching up wounds and excuses with equal efficiency. In a guest room she found Marcus, cradling a bandaged hand and staring at the wall like it had finally spoken back. She perched beside him on the foot of the bed, shoulder to shoulder but facing away, letting silence do the talking for once."Can’t sleep," he muttered."Won’t sleep," she corrected, and let the space after that fill with thunder. When she put her hand over his, she left it there, grounding him in the present, and when she rose to leave he let her go without another word.On the lower floors, Lyra was running a sparring ring in the old dining room, the tables long since cannibalized for barricades and kindling. Even with the stor

The weeks blurred. Wounds healed, nerves broke, patched together with adrenaline and cheap vodka and something that felt, for the first time, like purpose. The edges of Carolina’s pack sharpened. The others flocked or fractured. Some defected, crawling back to Sybil’s reconstituted regime in the Heights; others sulked in the gutters, dreaming of their own revolutions.Inside the cathedral, they slept fitful and close, claiming territory in pews and on battered blankets. Marcus jury-rigged a morning patrol, and Cas learned to bake bread from the Irish woman down the corner. Even Briony took up a cause—she mapped the city’s water access, stashing collapsible batons and antiseptic at every drain and alley. They became a colony of survivors, a mosaic of bruised egos and shared blood.Xander visited the roof each sunrise, as if reconciling some script only he could read. Sometimes Carolina joined him. They said little. Both needed space to think, to let their ferocity cool into reason. One