The Feral Alpha's Captive

Chapter 20: Betrothed

🦋ALTHEA

He turned away from me, his movements sharp and controlled. "You have until tomorrow," he said, not looking back. "You will come to the war room and you will answer every question I ask. You will prove you’re the Silvermoth, or you will prove you’re a liar." He paused at the door, his hand on the frame. "And if you try to take the coward’s way out again, I’ll drag you back from death myself just so I can kill you properly."

The door slammed shut behind him, and I was left alone with the echo of his words and the phantom pull of the bond still thrumming under my skin. My hands were shaking, but not from fear this time—from adrenaline, from anger, from the uncomfortable heat that had pooled in my belly when he’d said you are mine with such absolute certainty. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

I hated him. Hated what he represented, hated that he saw me as nothing more than Morgana’s daughter, hated that fate had bound me to someone who looked at me with such contempt. But beneath the hate was something else, something fragile and dangerous that I almost didn’t want to acknowledge—hope. The faintest thread of it, barely more than a whisper, suggesting that maybe the same fates that had woven this bond between us could somehow work in my favor instead of against me.

It was a foolish hope, I knew. The fates had already proven themselves cruel by making him my second chance mate after Draven had rejected me, by binding me to the son of the woman my mother had murdered, by placing me in the hands of someone who had every reason to want me dead. But still, the hope persisted, stubborn and unreasonable, refusing to be extinguished no matter how much logic told me it was pointless.

Tomorrow, I would face him in that war room. Tomorrow, I would answer his questions and prove I was the Silvermoth, not because I expected him to believe me or because I thought it would change anything between us, but because maybe—just maybe—if I could show him the truth, the fates would stop being so relentlessly cruel. Maybe if I proved myself, he would see me as something other than Morgana’s spawn, something other than a liability or a tool for revenge.

I pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them, and stared at the spilled tea staining the floor. My heart was still racing, my skin still flushed from the intensity of that confrontation, and beneath it all was that fragile, dangerous hope that refused to die. The stories I’d heard about the Hell Hound painted him as a monster, as something inhuman and merciless, but the raven had saved me from the poison without being commanded to do so. His shadows had responded to his fury when I’d mentioned belonging to the High Alpha, as if the bond between us mattered to him even if he didn’t want it to.

Maybe he wasn’t like the stories. Maybe beneath the mask and the threats and the cold fury, there was something that could be reasoned with, something that could see past bloodlines and histories to the truth of what I’d done and why I’d done it. It was a thin hope, barely substantial enough to hold onto, and I doubted it even as I clung to it. The chances that the leader of the Vargans would be anything other than exactly what the stories claimed seemed impossibly small.

But it was all I had. That fragile thread of hope that the fates, having been so cruel as to bind me to him in the first place, might weave the threads in my favor for once. That tomorrow, when I stood before him and his council and told them the truth about the Silvermoth, about the Vargans I’d freed and the risks I’d taken, something might shift. That maybe, just maybe, the bond between us could become something other than a curse.

I closed my eyes, exhaustion finally pulling at me despite the adrenaline still coursing through my veins. Tomorrow would come whether I was ready for it or not, and when it did, I would face the Hell Hound with whatever truth I could offer. Not because I believed he would show mercy, but because hope—foolish, stubborn, dangerous hope—refused to let me give up entirely.

The fates had made him my second chance mate. And perhaps, if I was very lucky and very careful, they might let me survive long enough to understand why.

—

🔹THORNE

She stepped in—but she was not alone. No surprise there.

Asking the hostage who had given her the poison hadn’t been necessary. I’d already known the answer before I’d asked the question. But testing whether Althea would lie to protect herself, whether she’d try to manipulate me or deflect blame—that had been the point. She could have lied. Could have claimed ignorance or invented some convenient story that might buy her mercy. She hadn’t. She’d described her poisoner with clinical accuracy: red hair, hazel eyes, regal bearing, an entourage of hostile servants.

She’d handed me exactly what I needed without even realizing it.

No one in the clan knew poisons as intimately as Ivanna Weiss, my head delta and the daughter of my grandmother’s most trusted advisor. A cup of tea that appeared harmless to the naked eye but carried death in every sip? That was her specialty, her art form, and she was arrogant enough to believe she could use it on a mate-bonded captive without facing consequences.

She stood on the other side of my desk now, her mother Ivanka flanking her like a pillar of stone-faced disapproval. Two pairs of hazel eyes stared at me, and I looked back at them through Nyx’s ever-watchful sight. No one could be allowed to see my eyes—the fire would give too much away, would reveal more than I could afford to show. So I kept them covered, hidden behind cloth and shadow, and let the raven perched on my shoulder be my vision.

Nyx tilted her head, and my perspective shifted with her, the world seen through black eyes that missed nothing. The mother and daughter shared features—hair like beaten copper and piercing hazel eyes that could cut through stone—but they wielded those features differently. Ivanka wore her emotions on her face, her disapproval and barely concealed fury written in every line of her expression. Ivanna, by contrast, stifled everything beneath an unreadable blankness that revealed nothing.

She was like poison herself. Seemingly innocuous until you took the first damning sip.

And it made her an asset and my closest ally

"You called for me," Ivanna said, her voice even and unbothered, as if we were discussing patrol schedules rather than attempted murder.

"You offered her poison," I said, keeping my tone almost conversational.

"Is that what she told you?" Her expression didn’t change, her tone remaining perfectly neutral.

Not quite a denial. Not quite an admission. Just a careful deflection that told me she was weighing her options, calculating which response would serve her best.

"You suppose she tried to poison herself and frame you?" I asked, letting a hint of steel slip into my voice.

"She is Morgana’s daughter, after all," Ivanna said, and there it was—the weapon she’d been waiting to deploy.

My gut twisted, my body jolting at that name like it always did, like my flesh itself remembered what had been done to my mother even when my mind tried to stay focused. The rage surged hot and immediate, a living thing that wanted to tear through my control and rip into anything connected to that woman’s legacy.

She knew what she was doing.

"Morgana’s daughter," I repeated slowly, forcing each word out with deliberate control, "is mate-bonded to me. Which makes attempting to poison her a direct challenge to my authority."

Ivanna’s composure cracked—just slightly, just enough for me to see the flash of something hot and desperate in her eyes before she buried it again. "A mate bond that shouldn’t exist," she said, her voice dropping lower, harder. "We were betrothed, Thorne. Since we were children. Our families, our wolves, our fates—all of it was woven together long before that pack-born insect crawled into our territory."

"I’m not choosing her over you," I said, and my voice was colder now, stripped of anything that might be mistaken for sentiment. "I’m making a strategic decision. She is leverage. She is information. She is a weapon we can use against the people who have enslaved and murdered our kind for generations." I paused, and when I spoke again, my tone was quieter but no less final. "The bond complicates that. It means I can’t kill her, can’t let her die, can’t risk losing the one connection we have to everything we need to destroy. That’s not a choice, Ivanna. That’s a burden fate decided to place on me, and I will carry it because that’s what it means to lead."