Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 88: The Dark Alpha

~RYLAND’S POV~

I went to my father’s wing myself. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

I brought two senior warriors, Gareth and a woman named Senna who had fifteen years of containment experience, and Eren, who had been in the archive when Cade reached him and had come immediately without needing the situation explained twice. We walked the corridor in the particular formation of people who understood that what was at the end of it might require speed.

The door to my father’s quarters was closed. The guard outside it had the expression of someone who was holding composure together by sheer will and was very relieved to see us.

"He’s been quiet since the morning check," the guard said. "But the window..." freewёbnoνel.com

I pushed the door open.

The first thing I noticed was the window. The glass had broken outward, not inward, which meant whatever had broken it had been inside pushing out rather than outside pushing in. Cold air came through the gap in the curtains. The furniture was exactly as it always was ,nothing overturned, nothing disturbed, which somehow made the wrongness of the room worse rather than better.

My father was standing in the centre of it.

Barefoot. Hands at his sides. Completely still in the way that nothing naturally stood still, not the stillness of a person who had stopped moving, but the stillness of something that had simply elected not to. His hair had gone white at the temples overnight, a strip of white that hadn’t been there yesterday along both sides of his face.

And his eyes.

I stopped in the doorway when I saw his eyes.

Purple, saturated and deep, with dark red veining through them that pulsed very slightly when the light hit them at the right angle. No grey anywhere. No trace of the eyes I’d known my entire life.

"Father," I said. Carefully. The word that I had used his whole life, feeling very different in my mouth now.

The thing in my father’s body turned its head and looked at me.

Then it smiled. His exact smile, I recognised every component of it, the way it pulled at the corners, the particular quality of his mouth when something amused him. His smile, but stretched wrong, held too long in the way that faces didn’t hold expressions when something genuine was behind them.

"That name means something to you," it said. His voice, exact pitch, exact tone. "I can feel how much. It’s... " it tilted his head slightly, "fascinating. The attachment is enormous. Even now."

Eren’s hand found my arm and pulled me back two steps before I’d made any decision about moving.

"Don’t let it bait you," he said quietly, close to my ear. "It’s designed to find the specific thing that will make you reactive. And don’t let it touch you. Physical contact is how it reads and amplifies."

I held my position.

"What are you," I said to the thing that was standing in my father’s body.

"Older than your pack," it said pleasantly. "Older than the three-pack alliance. Older than the specific grudge that created the rivalry between Shadowfang and Silverclaw, which I watched develop, if you’re curious." It looked at me with my father’s purple eyes. "I’m attracted to men like him. Men who were powerful and then lost their power. Men who opened themselves up to something darker than themselves because they’d run out of anything else to be." A pause. "He didn’t resist. That’s the thing you should understand. He didn’t resist at all. He was empty enough that I simply walked through."

Eren said it later, in the briefing that followed, with the precise language of someone who had found the relevant documentation and was reporting its contents: a Dark Alpha. A corrupted entity that fed on Alpha power and the guilt that accumulated in powerful men who had used their authority badly and then lost it. It didn’t force its way in. It needed an opening, a crack in a person wide enough to enter through. Tyran’s months of isolation and bitterness and the particular emptiness of a man who had run out of the things that had defined him had provided exactly that.

It had simply walked through the door he’d left open.

The afternoon was brutal.

It broke through the containment we’d set up in the first hour when Gareth made the mistake of direct eye contact for too long, which was apparently enough for it to get a reading on him. It moved with speed that had no business being in a man Tyran’s age, crossing the room in three steps, hurling Gareth into the wall with force that left a crack in the stone. Senna hit it with the restraint cords and it shook them off with a dismissive roll of the shoulder and smiled at her with my father’s smile.

It took all three senior guards, Eren using the specific containment working I’d seen him use twice before on supernatural entities, and me physically blocking the corridor with every bit of Alpha strength I had, to push it back into the reinforced room.

I came away with four broken fingers on my left hand. I didn’t notice them until Mira pointed at my hand twenty minutes later with the expression of someone who was going to have very direct words about my decision-making.

Mira examined my father, the body, the person still inside it, because she was clear on that distinction immediately.

"He’s in there," she said. "Tyran is still present. He’s just not in control." She had her hands on his temples and her eyes half-closed, which was how she worked when she was reading something at depth. "The entity took up residence in the available space, but it didn’t displace him. He’s conscious and aware of everything that’s happening."

"Can you remove it?" I asked.

"There’s a cleansing ritual," she said. "Ancient, I’ve only encountered it in texts, never witnessed it performed. It requires the host’s willing cooperation. Mind, voice, and intention, all three, consciously directed toward expulsion." She opened her eyes and looked at me. "He would have to want to be free of it."

She paused.

"Right now," she said, "I don’t think he does."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"He’s been alone for eight months," I said. "Stripped of everything. This thing walked in and filled the space."

"Yes," Mira said. "And from inside, it probably feels like something rather than nothing. Which may be the only thing he’s had that felt like something for a while."

I stood outside my father’s door, the reinforced door now, iron-banded, guards on both sides, and I thought about a man I had loved and been frightened of and had watched slowly become the worst version of himself, and I thought about the cleansing ritual and willing cooperation and the particular cruelty of a trap that required someone to choose their own freedom.

Then I heard Lyra’s voice from around the corner. She’d arrived from the strategy room and had stopped outside the door before I came back around.

I came around the corner and found her standing at the door with her hand flat against the iron surface and her head slightly tilted, listening.

"Lyra," I said.

She held up one hand, the particular gesture she used when she needed a moment, and I stopped.

From inside the room, through the iron door, in my father’s voice:

"You want your mate back." A pause. The voice was almost gentle. "I know where he is. I know the exact location in the in-between, the specific frequency of his suspension. I can show you the path in." Another pause. "All you have to do is let me out."

Lyra stood at the door with her hand on the iron and her face very still and her eyes doing the thing they did when she was holding something and deciding what to do with it.

She didn’t speak.

"I know you’re there," the thing said, through the door, in a voice I’d heard my entire life. "I can feel the Moonborn. You’re not difficult to sense."

A soft sound that might have been something like a laugh.

"Think about it. I’m not going anywhere."