The Feral Alpha's Captive

Chapter 42: The One He Will Always Love

🦋ALTHEA

He looked back at me, and the pity in his eyes made me want to disappear.

"What you found—the scars, the fear, the way she flinches at everything—that wasn’t from two weeks of captivity. That was years. Years of systematic torture at the hands of the very people who sent her here to die."

The room was so silent I could hear my own heartbeat thundering in my ears.

"Her own mate," Kael said, the word an accusation, a curse. "Her own mother. The High Alpha himself. They broke her piece by piece, and when she was barely holding together, they sent her here with my arm and my blood, hoping you would finish what they’d started."

He turned back to the Hell Hound, his voice dropping to something raw and fractured.

"They wanted you to kill her, Alpha. Not because she was a spy."

His eyes found mine one last time.

"But because she was inconvenient. Because she knew too much. Because she was a loose end they wanted severed."

The silence that followed was deafening. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

And through it all, I felt it—that connection, that awareness—the Hell Hound’s gaze fixed on me through the silver mask. I knew. I knew that everything had just changed.

The mark on my back pulsed once, warm and insistent.

The mate bond sang.

And I understood, finally, why my body had trusted him when my mind screamed danger.

He was never going to be the one to destroy me.

He was the one meant to put me back together.

"All she did," Kael continued, his voice tightening, "was betray her first mate. That was what they used to justify it."

I stopped dead.

So did everyone else.

The Hell Hound was a statue as he asked, "What are you talking about?"

Zeta Kael’s gaze did not shift from where I sat. "She was young and naïve. She broke her mate’s heart. She must have thought she knew what she was doing." His jaw clenched. "Her actions do not justify what was done to her by the people she believed she could trust."

The world blurred with every syllable. The ground vanished beneath me, and all I could do was sink into despair and shock.

All eyes were on me—hundreds of gazes pinned to my skin until it burned like the soul-brand on my back.

"Zeta Kael," the Hell Hound’s voice felt distant, distorted, as though I were not just a few feet from him but separated by chaos and noise inside my head. "You have not answered my question."

A dreadful quiet reigned.

Kael said nothing.

"I ask that you do not judge her for her misdeeds," he finally murmured. "She was only a child."

"Then tell us what she did," Ivanna’s voice rang out, sharp and shrill.

"She rejected the Alpha of her pack—her mate—and ran to the High Alpha."

He dropped the lie like a bomb.

The aftermath left my ears ringing.

Was he lying? Or had they lied to him?

Nothing made sense anymore. The truth had been twisted into something grotesque, and I could do nothing but watch as the last hope of vindication shattered in front of me.

There would be no vindication.

What had I been thinking?

If the people I loved and grew up with could betray me so thoroughly—if my own mother could suppress my wolf from childhood and label me an omega—what had I expected from those who saw me as nothing but an enemy?

I am going insane.

"So she’s a cheating bitch too."

Even as I spiraled inward, I heard Ivanna’s poisonous voice clearly.

"So you were given a man to love you. A powerful man, no less. One willing to love you despite the low, wallowing, pathetic cunt that you are—but of course, that wasn’t enough. You had to have more."

Every word fell like an anvil.

"Stop," someone said. "She was young. She didn’t know he would be a—"

"A monster?" Ivanna scoffed. "The man responsible for the destruction of our pack? That same one? Of course he’s a bloody monster."

She rose from her seat. "Is that why you call her a victim? He hurt her? Do you know how many Silverfang women were victimized—our Luna Witch included? But this cheating, greedy, treacherous pack-born bitch deserves sympathy because she chased the affection of a monster?"

"Stand down, Delta."

The Hell Hound’s voice shook the room.

Ivanna’s voice wavered as she turned toward him.

"This is not the place for crude insults," he said coldly. "And they will not be spoken in my presence."

Ivanna scoffed, but it lacked venom. "You still defend her after everything you’ve heard. You don’t even call me by my name—you call me by rank. Because you owe the whore some—"

"Delta," he drawled. "I said stand down. You have said your piece."

The room held its breath.

Ivanna turned toward me slowly, her eyes blazing with hatred, as though I had silenced her.

Perhaps I had.

He had called her by her title twice.

But that mercy meant nothing compared to what Kael’s false statement had done.

I could see it—another layer of judgment settling over the Zetas’ faces.

It didn’t matter that the timeline made no sense.

It didn’t matter what the truth was.

Not when the lie was framed just well enough to condemn and vindicate me in the same breath.

"I have new for you," Ivanna’s voice stormed my senses. "The hell hound will never be yours, not while I still draw breath because while you were getting whipped and mounted like a mare, I was by his side, healing our people."

Another slap with words venomous enough to penetrate skin.

The hell hound no longer spoke, he was already moving—his hand flexed once at his side.

Ivanna was moving too.

I rose ready to brace for an assault that the others would not prevent.

"While you were getting gutted with cocks, and defiled, I was being engaged to him."

My eyes widened as that singular pronouncement shattered me into fragments.

I was sure that I didn’t have a wolf, my mother made sure of that but I was certain that something in me howled in anger and torment.

"You are the fated mate," She got in my face, the hell hound just a yard away from us both while everyone watched, my ears rang louder. "But I am the one he will always chose, the one he will always love,"

SLAP!