Todos los capítulos de GIVEN TO THE WRONG ALPHA: Capítulo 41 - Capítulo 47

Silas stands in the doorway.Not breathing. Not needing to. Negative space with teeth, and the teeth are smiling.“Mother,” he says. “I’m home.”The Tree screams.Not words. Not weight. Fear. Old and green and deep. The roots under my feet flinch.Moira steps forward. Between me and him. Between him and thirty thousand people who don’t know they’re about to be zeroed.“You’re not,” she says. “Home’s full.”Silas tilts his head. Wrong. Too smooth. Like a puppet with no strings. “I am the other side. The after. The quiet.” He looks past her. At me. At the crown. “She ate for centuries. I will un-eat. Balance.”“Balance is bullshit,” Wrath snarls. Knife out. Thorns behind him.“Stop.” Draven’s command hits like a wall. “He’s not here. Not all of him.”He’s right. I can feel it. The thing in the doorway is a shadow. The rest of him is still in the cells. Still chained. Still pulling.This is a puppet.Made of nothing.“Rowan. Lights.”He slams the table. Backup gens kick. White floods the

Dawn in Duskbane smells like bread.Not blood. Not ash. Bread.Thirty thousand people slept on stone floors the Tree grew overnight, and Sky and Creek spent the whole night coaxing ovens out of the walls. Now the whole valley smells like a kitchen.I stand on the new wall with Draven and watch it. Families lining up for water that runs clear from rock. Kids chasing each other through wheat that wasn’t there yesterday. Guards — ours and the National Guard who walked in with the refugees — sharing coffee.Rowan comes up the stairs two at a time, laptop under his arm. He hasn’t slept.“D.C. is gone dark,” he says. “No press conferences. No statements. No flyovers. They pulled the cordon back fifty miles at 0300.”Draven frowns. “Retreat or regroup?”“Neither,” Rowan says. He turns the screen. It’s not a news feed. It’s social. Thousands of videos. #Duskbane. #WeBelieveYou. People packing cars. People walking. “They lost the narrative. The salute broke them.”The man in the suit saluting

The map is in my dreams again.Not paper. Roots.I see them under the dirt of America — thin green threads, sleeping. Not dead. Waiting. Twelve points of light, spread from Washington to Maine, from Texas to Montana.Twelve seeds. Like Hope.I wake with dirt under my nails even though I never left the bed. Draven is already dressed.“You saw them too,” he says. Not a question.The bond hums. He dreamed as the Alpha — running a forest that wasn’t there yet, wolves weaving between trees that sang.Eli is waiting in the kitchen with Jonah and Silas. Silas looks better. Human tired, not hollow tired. He’s eating actual food now. Bread. Stew. He flinches every time someone thanks him.“Twelve,” Eli says before I sit. “There were always twelve. The first pack didn’t just plant one Tree. They planted a circle. To hold the continent together.”Rowan pulls up a topographical map on his new laptop — Tree-grown casing, doesn’t fry anymore. “If you give me the points from the dream, I can overlay