Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 55: Face To Face

~LYRA’S POV~

I’d been preparing myself for something monstrous.

That was the picture I’d built from Eren’s research and Mira’s records and the vision in my room where she’d stood partially shielded in grey light and spoken to me in that unhurried voice. I’d been building a monster in my head without realising I was doing it, something that three centuries in the in-between would have twisted beyond recognition, something that wore its corruption visibly so you could look at it and know immediately what you were dealing with.

What walked out of the Moonveil tree line was a woman.

Tall, strikingly beautiful, white hair that caught the blood moon’s light the way something deliberate would. She moved with the contained ease of someone who had not had to hurry toward anything in a very long time. Her eyes, burning, the deep amber-purple of coals that hadn’t gone cold, found me the moment she cleared the trees and stayed on me, the way someone’s eyes moved to something they’d been looking for and had finally found.

She stopped twenty feet away.

She looked at me the way you looked at something you’d been searching for a long time. Examining. Taking inventory.

"You’re smaller in person than I imagined," she said in a smooth voice. Almost pleasant. The tone of someone at a formal meeting who was entirely comfortable with how it was going to end.

"You’re older than I imagined," I said.

Something flickered in those burning eyes. Almost amusement. She tilted her head, just slightly.

"I’ve been waiting for your bloodline to produce someone worth taking," she said.

"Your mother was promising. Your father was supposed to be the one, the convergence of the lineage suggested it would be him."

Another tilt of the head.

"But you." She looked at me with something I didn’t want to call admiration and couldn’t call anything else. "You might actually be better than both of them."

"You knew my parents?"

"I watched them die," she said. As simply as you’d state a fact about the weather. "I’ve been patient."

The words landed in me and stayed there. Not as grief exactly, I’d never known them, never had the chance to know them. But the casual way she said it, as if their deaths were simply items on a very long list, made something in my chest go cold and then immediately very hot.

My wolf felt it. The Moonborn power under my skin flared in response, silver heat running up through my arms, and I held it, not down, not back, just held it. Not yet.

Behind me, the three Alphas had spread out without any signal from me. I could feel them without looking, Ryland on my left, present and steady; Eren on my right, quiet and reading the space. Kael a half-step behind, contained energy that I could feel even through the bond as something close to rage dressed in discipline.

Selara glanced at them.

One glance. Casual. The contempt in it wasn’t even interested enough to be contemptuous, it was the look of someone dismissing something so far below their concern that they barely registered it.

"Three mates," she said. She looked back at me. "The Goddess was generous with you."

A pause, the particular pause of someone allowing an observation to settle before they walked past it. "Unfortunately it won’t be enough."

The air between us was doing something I didn’t have a word for. Crackling wasn’t the right word, it was more like pressure, like two systems of weather meeting and not agreeing about what the sky should be doing. Her power moved in slow, heavy waves that I could feel against my skin like heat from an open door. Ancient. Deep. The kind of power that had been sitting in the in-between for three centuries and had not come back diminished.

My wolf surged hard.

Not with fear. With something older and less controllable than fear, the particular response of the Moonborn bloodline meeting the thing that had been hunting it. Like iron to a magnet, Eren had said once, describing how Selara tracked the power. He’d had it backwards. This was what the iron felt.

The Moonborn light under my skin went hot and silver, brighter than I’d let it be in months of training. I didn’t push it down. I let it be what it was.

"I’m not going to let you take what’s in me," I said.

Selara looked at the light coming off me with something that was not surprise. She’d expected this. She’d planned for this exact version of this moment.

"You can’t stop me, child," she said. The almost-kindness in her voice was the worst part, the tone of someone explaining something to a person who hadn’t quite grasped the situation yet.

"You’ve had your wolf for months." She let that sit. "I’ve had mine for three centuries."

For a moment neither of us moved.

The blood moon blazed overhead, fully red, casting the clearing in a light that made everything look like it was already on fire. The trees at the edge of the southern corridor were still. The air between us was not.

I could hear the battle behind me on all three fronts, distant but real, the sound of the engagement Selara had built to scatter our attention and pull our resources thin before she arrived. I could feel Ryland’s focus at my left like a hand on my shoulder. Eren’s stillness at my right like a held breath.

I could feel Kael behind me. The tightly leashed thing he was holding.

"You came all this way," I said to Selara. "Planned for three centuries. Sent in three waves to map our response time." I held her gaze steadily. "You could have just asked."

Something shifted in her expression. The amusement went thin.

Then she raised her hand.

The tree line erupted.

They came out of the forest the way water came through a dam when the dam broke, not in a line, not in any formation that left gaps, just a mass of bodies pouring out of the trees simultaneously. Hundreds of wolves, blank-eyed, utterly silent, with none of the sound that a natural pack produced when it moved. No breath sounds. No growling. No communication between them. Just movement, all of it pointed in the same direction.

The Alphas moved.

Ryland’s voice behind me, cutting through everything, the command going to the outer formations. Kael moving past me on the right with a speed that had always been surprising for someone who carried himself so deliberately. Eren, already in partial shift, the particular grace of Moonveil’s Alpha at a run.

The battle collapsed into the clearing around me.

I stood in the middle of it and looked at Selara across the chaos.

She was looking back at me.

"Now we see," she said, over the noise of hundreds of bodies hitting a defensive line that hadn’t been built to hold this many at once. She wasn’t raising her voice. She didn’t need to. free𝑤ebnovel.com

"Whether everything the Goddess put in you is enough."