The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 23: Raven

🔹THORNE

The silence was a heavy blanket over the room as she said the words.

Even my wolf’s incessant growling fell quiet.

We all waited for the punchline, for the moment she’d laugh and admit it was a jest, some desperate ploy to buy herself time. But the grey-eyed daughter of Morgana simply continued to stare down at her feet, wringing her fingers nervously together, not saying a word.

Which meant she believed what she’d said. Or wanted us to think she did.

But when the silence finally broke, chaos crashed down like a war hammer. Every single Zeta spoke over one another, their voices overlapping in a cacophony of fury, but the sentiment was the same—utter disbelief laced with revulsion.

"Kill her now. We have no use for her," Zeta Riven scowled, already half-rising from his seat.

"What else do you expect from Morgana’s spawn?" Zeta Lysandra spat, her contempt sharp enough to draw blood.

"I knew the Silvermoth was one of us," Zeta Kael added, his voice dripping acid. "But like all pack-born, she tried to steal the identity. To claim our hero as her own."

She flinched at their voices, folding into herself as if she could make herself small enough to disappear. But there was no escape here—all eyes were on her, and she still had questions to answer.

Despite her absurd story of animals acting as sidekicks in her supposed heroic adventures, intrigue wormed its way in—probably exactly as she’d planned. The idea was ridiculous, fantastical, the kind of tale you’d tell children to make them laugh. But she’d said it with such quiet conviction, such absence of theatrical flourish, that part of me wondered if she actually believed it.

Or if it was true.

I raised a hand, and the room fell silent immediately, the Zetas’ fury simmering but contained. Nyx tilted her head on my shoulder, analyzing Althea for me through eyes that saw more than mine ever could. I moved closer to the interrogated captive, my boots heavy against the stone floor, each step deliberate.

Her form was shaking, her honeyed skin pale in the torchlight, and she looked small sitting in that chair—smaller than she had any right to be considering the claims she’d made. She squirmed as the distance between us was eaten up with every stride, her breathing shallow and rapid. Then she froze, still as a statue, and slowly raised her head.

But not to where my eyes would be beneath the cloth I wore. Instead, her gaze shifted to the raven perched on my shoulder.

I kept a yard between us—far enough to give her space to breathe, but close enough that she’d know there was no escaping this by lying. "You commune with animals, Althea?" Her name tasted honeyed on my tongue, like her skin looked in the torchlight, and I hated how easily it came out, how the mate bond smoothed the edges of my fury and made speaking to her feel almost natural.

The scheming bond had already begun to cast its treacherous net, and I was the fish it wanted caught.

But the Fates were going to be in for a rude awakening.

I was going to reject her.

"No, she is mine," Umbra growled.

Even as I asked the question, she didn’t face me. Her eyes remained on Nyx, grey and intent, studying the raven with a focus that bordered on intensity. Her eyes narrowed slightly, and I found myself almost taken aback by the minuscule action. I was used to people looking directly at my face even when my sight was hidden, accustomed to them addressing the mask instead of acknowledging what lay behind it or beside it.

So having her look squarely at Nyx instead—addressing the raven as if it held the answers, as if it were the one interrogating her rather than me—was unsettling in a way I couldn’t quite name.

"Yes," she said finally, her voice quiet but steady, and she was still looking at Nyx when she said it. "I commune with animals. They help me. They always have."

There was far more behind that statement, but she wanted us to believe it was simple.

Her eyes remained on Nyx—which meant she was looking directly at me through the raven’s sight, without even knowing it.

Strange.

"You speak to them, you understand their language?" I asked.

"I—"

"Prove it. Bring in the dogs, and if she can’t translate, they can tear her—" Zeta Riven interjected.

I silenced him with one sharp turn of my head in his direction.

"He is too old to be acting that way," Umbra snarled.

And I was inclined to agree.

I turned back to her, but her eyes never strayed from Nyx.

"Speak," I prompted.

"I can’t hear their language—"

The Zetas were close to bursting at her admission, but they knew the lines not to cross.

"It goes beyond that—" Her voice took a less strained note and became something more conversational and distant, like her mind was somewhere else entirely, like she wasn’t in the war room at all but caught up in whatever she was perceiving through Nyx. Her eyes narrowed again, and before I could ask what she thought she was doing, she spoke.

"You are connected to the raven. Your essences are intertwined."

I stopped dead. All the oxygen in the room evaporated.

But she didn’t seem to notice the shift. She continued, her voice taking on a pleasantly bemused cadence, as if she were discussing something fascinating rather than impossible. "She is bonded to you in a way I have never seen before." 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

She?!

"She is the oldest I have seen," Althea confessed, her grey eyes still fixed on Nyx with that unsettling intensity. "Decades old, I am sure."

"Try centuries, pack-born," Nyx corrected, her voice gravelly and sharp, dripping with sardonic sass.

Althea didn’t jump back at the voice. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t show any sign of surprise at all.

Instead, she smiled—genuine and knowing, like she’d just won some private victory. "I was waiting to see how long it would take for you to crack."

It was like she forgot where she was, forgot the roomful of hostile Zetas and the Alpha standing close enough to kill her, forgot everything except the bird in front of her. For a moment, she wasn’t a prisoner being interrogated. She was just someone delighted to be proven right about something she’d suspected.

"Where are the rest of your teeth?" Nyx asked, her tone as cutting as her voice was rough, addressing Althea’s smile with the bluntness only a centuries-old raven could manage.

The amusement was snuffed out in an instant. A haunted expression crossed Althea’s face—something raw and wounded that she clearly hadn’t meant to show. She tucked it back in quickly, like a vial of poison after it had been administered, her features smoothing into careful blankness.