All Chapters of My hybrid lover: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The forest always smelled like him. Pine, rain, and something wilder underneath. Tonight, it smelled like blood.I found Bronte at the edge of Blackwood, where the trees thinned and the human world bled back in. His body was half in the creek, water turning black around him. Silver. They’d used silver. The wounds still smoked, eating through his chest like acid.“Bronte?” My voice broke. Stupid. He couldn’t answer. His throat was —I dropped to my knees in the water. Didn’t care that it soaked through my jeans, that the cold bit into my bones. His hand was still warm. Barely. I grabbed it, laced my fingers through his like I’d done a thousand times when nightmares woke me up gasping.“Hey,” I whispered. “You’re late. You promised we’d watch that stupid meteor shower tonight.”His eyelids fluttered. For a second, I thought — hoped — but it was just the wind. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky. They were gold. Not his usual warm brown. Gold, like a wolf’s. Like the eyes I’d been drea

The moonrise was bleeding.I stood at the edge of the fighting ring, barefoot on dirt that had swallowed Alpha blood for generations. Blackwood Pack circled us, a wall of fur and teeth and gold eyes. Northfall’s wolves held the perimeter, Valeria at their head with her arms crossed. Neutral party. Executioner, if I lost.Across from me, Rhys rolled his shoulders. The silver chains were gone. His chest was bare, the four claw marks I gave him yesterday now ugly black scabs. He grinned when he saw me looking.“Ready to die, little hybrid?”I didn’t answer. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Not from fear. From hunger.Valeria wasn’t kidding. The fae side was awake. I felt it under my skin like vines, like electricity. The grass at my feet was growing. Literally. Curling toward my toes, green and alive. I stomped it down.“Rules,” Elder Maeve called from the dais. Her voice shook, but she stood tall. “Challenge to the death. No weapons. No outside interference. Winner takes the Alpha seat,

The world went white.Not sound. Not heat. Just white, eating everything. The grenade wasn’t frag. It was flash-burn, iron-filament, made for fae. Made for me. The suppressant Doc gave me screamed in my blood. Iron on iron. My fae side went silent like a candle snuffed out. My wolf went next, whimpering. I hit the dirt human. Weak. Blind.“WELLIE!”Bronte’s voice. Real. Raw. Closer.I crawled. Hands bleeding on stone, eyes streaming. The den was chaos — wolves howling, Hunters shouting orders, the iron stink so thick I could taste it. “Valeria!” I screamed. Or tried to. My throat was full of ash.A hand closed around my arm. Not Valeria. Too big. Too cold.I looked up.Bronte.On his knees beside me, chains still on his wrists but broken, dangling. Blood on his face. His face. His face. Not the Skinwalker. Him. Brown eyes, blown wide with terror. “Baby,” he breathed. “Baby, can you see me?”I couldn’t speak. I just grabbed his shirt. Cotton. Real. Him. The scar on his eyebrow was t

The Thorn Palace wasn’t a building.It was a tree.Not like a tree. It was a tree. Bigger than skyscrapers, older than countries, its bark was black glass and its leaves were knives. The roots had eaten three towns. The canopy blotted out the sun. And it was alive.It breathed.“Well,” Valeria said, staring up at it from the treeline. “That’s not terrifying at all.”Bronte didn’t answer. He hadn’t spoken in an hour. Not since the wards broke. Not since Silas’s army set the forest on fire and screamed my name until the birds fell dead from the sky.He was holding my hand too tight. Human form, but his antlers kept flickering in and out. Nerves. Rage. Fear. For me. For her. For our daughter, who’d been kicking nonstop since we crossed into Wild Court territory. Like she knew we were close to him.To her grandfather.“The mouth,” Bronte said finally. His voice was gravel. “We go through the mouth.”I followed his gaze. At the base of the tree, where roots met trunk, was an opening. Round

HELLO, GRANDDAUGHTER.The voice wasn’t in the air. It was in my bones. In my teeth. In the baby. Thorne went still inside me, like prey hearing a wolf.The Palace floor cracked.Black roots, thicker than cars, erupted where Silas had planted the heart. They weren’t growing. They were rebuilding. A ribcage. A spine. A skull. All root and thorn and hate.“Grandfather,” Bronte breathed. His face was ash. “He seeded himself.”On the screen, Clone-Elias grinned. “Citizens, meet the true King of the Wild Court. The one they hid from you. The one who’s been eating your missing hikers for centuries.”The human army roared. Guns raised. Drones lifted off. “Wards are falling!” Valeria shouted from the doorway. She was covered in blood. Not hers. “Iron rounds! They’re using iron artillery! The Palace can’t —”The Palace shrieked.Not pain. Rage. The god-tree didn’t like iron. Didn’t like humans. Didn’t like anything right now.“Evacuate,” Eira said. No question. No fear. Just Queen. The old Que