The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 100: Awake
🔹 THORNE
I drop through the surface with a gasp, my lungs stinging. I snapped upright, my eyes were covered but the presence of the others around me did not escape my notice.
I did not need anyone telling me—it had happened again.
I had not spoken a word before my name was shrieked, searing the nerves of my sensitive ears, then footfall before arms wrapped around me.
I recoiled at the contact, my body detesting the touch despite knowing who it was—Ivanna.
Hands cradled my face, lifting it. "I thought I lost you," her voice trembled as my familiar’s feet found its spot on my shoulders—giving me sight.
Tears streaked her pale face, her nose and eyes red from crying. "How are you feeling?" She asked, turning my head from side to side with less than clinical detachment and more like she was checking for cracks in porcelain.
The Great Hall came into focus through Nyx’s eyes—or what remained of it. The council table was splintered. The stone walls bore deep gouges, some still smoking faintly. The air tasted of ash and something sharper, something that made my wolf stir uneasily in the back of my mind.
The Zetas had surrounded me in a loose half-circle, their expressions ranging from relief to poorly concealed wariness. Riven stood closest, his arms crossed, jaw tight. Lysandra hovered near the shattered doorway, her hand resting on the hilt of her blade as if she wasn’t entirely convinced the threat had passed.
"Where is Althea?" I asked, my voice rough and scraped raw.
Ivanna’s hands froze on my face. The hurt that flashed across her expression was brief but unmistakable before she masked it with something brittle and practiced. She pulled her hands back slowly, her fingers curling into fists at her sides.
"She’s tending to Thal," Riven answered when Ivanna didn’t. His tone was careful, measured, like he was defusing a trap. "The boy inhaled too much of the shadow. She insisted on staying with him in the infirmary."
Umbra whined.
The sound was low and mournful, resonating somewhere deep in my chest where the wolf and I overlapped. It wasn’t a sound of pain—it was longing. A pull toward something that wasn’t here, toward someone who should have been.
I turned my head, seeking out the one person whose presence had always been a constant, even when everything else crumbled. "Grandmother."
The Crone stepped forward from where she’d been standing in the shadows—literally, as if the darkness had been concealing her until I called. Her milky eye caught the faint light, and the seeing one fixed on me with a weight that made my ribs feel too tight.
"How bad was it this time?" I asked.
Her expression didn’t shift, but something in the set of her mouth—grim and drawn—told me everything before she spoke.
"The worst it has ever been," she said, and the words fell like stones into still water. "The shadows consumed the eastern wing entirely. We evacuated to the tunnels, but not everyone made it. Three are comatose. Seven more may not survive the night—their lungs are scorched from the inside."
My stomach turned to lead.
"The fortress?" I managed.
"Standing, but barely. The structural damage is extensive. It will take weeks to repair, and that’s if we’re lucky." She took a step closer, and her voice dropped, not quite a whisper but low enough that only I could hear. "Thorne, this can’t continue. You’re tearing yourself apart."
"I know." The admission tasted like bile.
"Do you?" Her good eye narrowed. "Because every time you lose control, it gets worse. The episodes are closer together. The shadows spread farther. And one day—"
"I won’t wake up." I finished for her, the truth I’d been avoiding settling like frost in my bones. "I know."
Silence hung heavy between us, broken only by the distant sound of voices from the tunnels below and the creak of damaged stone settling.
"She had told you to rest and you refused. We all know Rowan is long dead, there was no rush..." Riven added.
"Like we thought he was dead the last time."
Riven could not counter that. "Still... everyone’s luck will run out."
"You don’t know he is dead." I returned curtly. "I am sure you thought I would die too."
"We can’t argue with you on that," Lysandra conceded.
"Your mate," the Crone said, and something in her tone shifted, it became lighter. "She stopped it."
I went still. "What?" How?
"The Nightfall," Riven interjected, stepping forward. His expression was unreadable. "It was spreading. Fast. We thought—" He stopped, his jaw working. "We thought it would take the whole fortress this time. But then she came."
"Who?" I demanded, though I already knew.
"Althea," Lysandra said quietly. "She walked straight into it. The shadows parted for her like she was made of light. And then she shifted. Like someone leashed a craken."
My heart stuttered. "Shifted." She had never done that before, she just found her wolf. It would have hurt and she was forced to because of me. She should have been aided through the process.
"For the first time," the Crone confirmed. "Right there in the Great Hall. We couldn’t see much through the darkness, but we heard it—the collision, the snarling. And then—" She paused, something almost like wonder crossing her weathered face. "The shadows pulled back. All of them. They retreated into you, and you collapsed. That was what she told us."
Umbra stirred again, a low rumble of satisfaction and longing tangled together. He remembered. Of course he did—the wolf never forgot, even when the man lost himself.
"She..." I started, but the words stuck.
"She saved you," Ivanna said, her voice flat and hollow. "Saved all of us."
The bitterness in her tone was a blade, and it cut clean. I met her gaze through Nyx’s sight, and whatever she saw in my expression made her look away.
"I need to see her," I said, pushing myself upright despite the bone-deep exhaustion that made my limbs feel like stone.
"Thorne—" Riven started, but I was already moving.
"I need to see her," I repeated.
---
🦋ALTHEA
The infirmary smelled of herbs and smoke, the acrid tang of burnt shadow still clinging to the stone walls despite the Crone’s cleansing incense.
Thal lay on the cot nearest the window, his small chest rising and falling in shallow, steady breaths that I’d counted obsessively for the past hour. His face was pale—too pale, the color of milk left too long in winter—but the healer had assured me he was stable, that his lungs would recover given time and rest.
I should have felt relieved. I did feel relieved. But there was something else, something that pulled at my ribs like a hook snagged in bone, tugging me away from this quiet room and toward somewhere else entirely.
The mark on my neck hummed with it, a low persistent frequency that made my teeth ache and my wolf pace restlessly beneath my skin. Thorne. The bond was calling me to him, demanding I go, that I see with my own eyes that he was whole and breathing and not lost to whatever abyss Umbra dragged him into when the shadows rose.
But leaving Thal felt like a sin. The boy had already lost his mother, had already been hollowed out by grief and terror, and now he lay here because of me—because I hadn’t stopped the Nightfall fast enough, because I’d hesitated before shifting, because I was still learning how to be what everyone needed me to be.
His small hand was cool when I touched it, his fingers curling reflexively around mine even in sleep. He’d called me Althy with his last conscious breath, his voice raw from screaming and smoke, and the trust in that nickname was a weight I wasn’t sure I deserved to carry.
The door creaked open behind me, and I didn’t need to turn to know who it was. The bond sang its recognition, a sharp bright note that cut through the guilt and exhaustion, and my wolf surged forward with a hunger that had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with need. I rose from the stool beside Thal’s cot, my legs unsteady from hours of kneeling, and turned.
Thorne stood in the doorway.
He looked wrecked. His shirt was torn, dried blood crusting the collar, and bruises mottled his jaw and throat like someone had tried to strangle him. His eyes were open—those amber eyes that burned even without Nyx’s sight—but there were shadows beneath them so deep they looked carved.
And I could see all of it even with the mask.
He swayed slightly, one hand braced against the doorframe as if the simple act of standing required more strength than he had left.
I crossed the room without thinking, without deciding, my hands reaching for him before my mind could catalogue all the reasons I shouldn’t.
My palms found his face, fingers spreading across his jaw and cheekbones and he leaned into it. l tilted his head down so I could see him properly in the dim light. I searched for injuries, for bleeding, for anything that needed tending, my thumbs tracing the line of his cheekbones with a gentleness that felt foreign in my own hands.
"Are you hurt?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
