Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 89: What Hunts Us

~LYRA’S POV~

I walked away from the door without answering it.

Not because I didn’t hear the offer. I heard every word of it, delivered in a voice I’d come to associate with the man who had tried to have me killed, carrying information that the part of me I was trying to keep quiet wanted desperately to pursue. I heard it and I felt the pull of it and I turned around and walked back down the corridor because some things you didn’t engage with regardless of what they offered, and I’d learned enough about the way manipulation worked to know that the first rule was not giving it a response to work with.

I found Eren in the strategy room, where he’d returned after the containment to document everything while the details were precise.

"Does the Dark Alpha actually know how to access the in-between?" I said. No preamble.

He looked up from the journal. "It exists at the border of the in-between, that’s its natural habitat, the liminal space between the living world and what’s beyond it. So yes, probably. It likely has knowledge of the access points and the conditions that allow passage." He paused. "That part of what it said may be true."

"Can it be trusted?"

He looked at me with the flat expression he reserved for questions that had answers so obvious that asking them was almost insulting.

"Absolutely not," he said.

—

The report came in two hours later, from one of the eastern perimeter scouts.

Cade brought it to me directly rather than going through the standard reporting chain, which meant it was either urgent or unusual or both. He had the specific quality of composure he wore when something had unsettled him and he was managing the unsettlement carefully.

"Body at the eastern border," he said. "One of ours. Tomas, twelve-year veteran, one of the best we have in that sector."

I looked at him. "What happened?"

"That’s the part we need you to see."

—

The body was still at the site. Cade had held the scene intact, which meant he’d suspected from the beginning that there was information in the specifics that needed to be read in place rather than from a report.

Tomas was on the ground at the edge of the border clearing, in the position he’d fallen, not on his back, not obviously defensive. He’d been upright when it happened, which meant he’d been taken before he could respond. He was one of the best we had. He would have responded to anything he’d seen coming.

The wound was in the centre of his chest. Perfectly circular, small, the diameter of a finger, maybe slightly wider. Clean edges. The kind of wound that came from something driven through with precision, not torn or slashed or bitten. Nothing around it. No claw marks, no secondary wounds, no evidence of a struggle.

I looked at it for a long time.

Cade crouched beside the body and stayed there in the particular stillness of someone running through information without speaking.

"Cade," I said.

He was quiet for a moment longer. Then he looked up.

"I’ve seen this before," He frowned. "Or I’ve heard of it. I’m reaching for the specific record." He went quiet again in the way that meant he was in active retrieval rather than waiting. "Silver spear. Laced with wolfsbane. The wound seals itself on the outside immediately, so it looks contained, but the wolfsbane spreads from the inside outward. Burns through from the interior." He looked at the wound with the expression of someone confirming an identification.

"By the time you can see the external seal, the internal damage is already complete. It’s designed to look like a smaller injury than it is."

I looked at the body. At Tomas, who had twelve years of service and had walked through a blood moon battle and had apparently been killed before he could turn around.

"When did you hear about this?" I asked.

"Old records," Cade said. "Before my time, before anyone currently active’s time. The method is documented in the early Silverclaw security archives,a specific type of kill used by a specific group." He stood up. He looked at me steadily. "They called the killers the Huntsmen."

The word landed in the clearing like something dropped from height.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

I looked at Eren, who had come with us and had been standing slightly back, watching the scene with the particular focused attention of someone doing multiple things at once, observing the immediate evidence and searching a much deeper archive simultaneously. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

"Huntsmen," He said it slowly, in the specific voice he used when he was pulling something up from a long way down, deliberate, careful, with the particular quality of something that he was not pleased to be recalling.

"Human hunters. Organised, coordinated, specifically anti-wolf. They’ve been operational, in one form or another, for centuries." He looked at the wound one more time. Then at me.

"They went quiet several decades ago. Stopped making visible moves. The working assumption in the few records that tracked them was that they’d disbanded, attrition, lack of recruitment, the changing political landscape." freewebnσvel.cøm

"But they didn’t," I said.

"They didn’t," Eren confirmed. "Going quiet isn’t the same as dissolving. It means they changed their approach." He looked at Tomas. At the precise, clean wound in the centre of his chest.

"This is not an opportunistic attack. This is a demonstration, a specific technique used by a specific group with a specific historical identity. And it’s not their first move in the current situation."

His voice had the quality it got when he was unhappy with what he was saying and was saying it anyway because it needed to be said.

"We just missed the pattern. There were earlier signs we didn’t connect."

I looked out at the border line. At the trees. At the ordinary-looking edge of the territory that Tomas had been patrolling for twelve years and that had apparently been being watched for longer than we’d known.

Huntsmen. Human hunters. Anti-wolf, organised, decades of patience.

And they had chosen now to make themselves visible. With one of our best, killed before he could respond, at a border we’d only recently unified.

I looked back at the body.

Cade was crouching again, and he’d pulled back the sleeve of Tomas’s tunic, and he was very still in the way he went still when he’d found something significant.

"Lyra," he said.

I crouched beside him.

Under the wound, on the skin of Tomas’s chest, barely visible, the colour only slightly different from the skin around it, the kind of mark you’d miss entirely if you weren’t looking for it, were four small circular burns. Arranged in a deliberate pattern. Not random, not incidental. Each one placed with precision relative to the others, forming a specific configuration that had clearly been applied intentionally.

Not a consequence of the wound. Not damage from the wolfsbane. A separate, deliberate marking.

I looked at it for a long moment.

"That," Cade said, "is a calling card." He looked at me. "They want us to know they were here. This isn’t just a kill. This is a message. They’re announcing themselves."

I looked at the four burns arranged in their precise pattern on the chest of a man who’d served twelve years and deserved better than to be used as a piece of correspondence.

I stood up slowly.

"Get me everything we have on the Huntsmen," I said. "Eren... whatever the deep archive has. Cade, the early Silverclaw security records. All of it, as fast as it can be compiled."

I looked at the border line one more time. At the ordinary-seeming trees that were apparently less ordinary than they’d been yesterday. "And double the eastern sector rotation. Starting tonight."

Cade was already on his feet.

The work had shifted shape again. The in-between and the Dark Alpha and Kael suspended between worlds were all still there, still real, still waiting. But something else had just announced its presence, and it had done it by taking one of mine, and I was not going to leave that unanswered.