The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 68: The Face of Her Father

🦋 ALTHEA

The silence that followed my mother’s scream was worse than the howl itself. It was the sound of a foundation crumbling.

I expected her to lunge at me. I expected her to order the Gammas to charge against all odds. Instead, a sound bubbled up from her throat that made the hair on my arms stand up.

She started to laugh.

It wasn’t the polished, melodic laugh of the High Gamma. It was a jagged, manic sound—full of a bitter, roiling mirth that seemed to age her ten years in a matter of seconds. She doubled over, clutching her stomach, her eyes bright with a terrifying brand of resignation.

"You win, Cyrion," she gasped out, the name spitting from her lips like venom. "Like always. Always at my expense."

The name hit me like a physical blow. Cyrion. I had never heard it before, yet it vibrated in the silver light of my moths as if they recognized it.

My mother straightened, her gaze locking onto mine. The mask was gone. In its place was a raw, bleeding hatred—not for the Silvermoth, but for whatever ghost she saw when she looked at me.

"Despite all that I did," she whispered, her voice trembling. "Despite the fear I forced into your bones, the dread I wedged into your very being, the pain I seared into your skin... in the end, you let him win."

She took a step forward, though it did nothing to bridge the distance between us, her face contorting. "You have his eyes. You have his hair. Was that not enough to haunt me all my wretched life? To have to look at his face every time I look at yours?" She spat the words now, her hand trembling as she pointed at the shimmering insects swirling around us. "Only for you to become what I hated the most, Althea. Your father’s daughter. A thief and a killer."

My father. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

The world tilted. All my life, my father had been a shadow—a non-entity, a void my mother refused to fill. I had imagined him as a weakling, a man who had abandoned us or died in obscurity. But the way she spoke his name... it carried the weight of a titan.

She wasn’t looking at her daughter. She was looking at a legacy she had tried to drown in torture and hate, only to watch it float to the surface. Suddenly, it made sense why she always beat me down to nothing, why she smirked when I flinched. Every act of cruelty had been calculated to keep me tamed. Keep me too broken to be the person she feared and hated.

I had been looking for answers—why she seemed to loathe my very existence to the point of insanity. Now, the truth sank in. I finally knew why I had been made to endure it all, and yet, the realization did nothing—

But break the dam.

The "crevice" in my soul—the dark corner where I had shoved the memories of the Gammas I’d slaughtered, the lives I’d snuffed out in the dead of night to survive—burst open. The weight of it hit me with the force of a landslide. Every throat I had slit, every heart I had stopped with a silver flutter, rushed back into my mind.

I wasn’t just Althea, the victim. I was the butcher. I was the monster she had tried to prevent, and in trying, she had only sharpened my edge.

The silver moths reacted to my inner turmoil. They didn’t just flutter anymore; they began to vibrate, their glow turning a sharp, violent violet.

Thorne’s grip on me tightened. He wasn’t biting me now, but his heat was a constant, grounding roar behind me. He had known. He had lured this ghost out of her.

"A thief and a killer," I echoed, my voice sounding distant, like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well. My knees buckled, strength leaving me in one violent, shuddering whoosh. I would have collapsed—I should have—but Thorne held me up, his hard body the only thing keeping me from kissing the ground.

"Althy, please listen to me. I will never make that mistake again. I will never believe you would do something like that. Never again," Draven droned on, every word wrought with desperation. "You are not the Silvermoth. I know it."

Thorne vibrated against me, rage flooding him before he spat his response. His vibration was no longer just a hum of heat; it was a low-frequency growl that rattled the air in my lungs. He didn’t just speak; he unleashed his voice like a physical blow.

"Shut your pathetic, lying mouth!" Thorne roared. The sound was so immense it seemed to push the mist back. He hauled me tighter against his chest, his arm a band of iron across my waist, refusing to let me sink into the shame Draven was trying to gift me.

Thorne’s eyes, burning like twin suns, fixed on my mother and the trembling line of her soldiers. "Lower your claws. Release the Vargan captives. Walk away now, or this soil will drink every drop of Hollowhowl blood before the moon sets. I will let the Silvermoth’s army pick your bones clean."

Draven flinched as if struck, his face twisting into a mask of pure, unadulterated possessiveness. He looked at where Thorne’s hand rested on my hip, then at the violet-tinged moths pulsing with my heartbeat.

"I am not going without her!" Draven screamed back, his voice cracking with the frenzy of a man losing his mind. "Look at her! Look what you’ve done to her! You’ve broken her mind until she thinks she’s a monster." He took a jagged step forward, his eyes wild. "I know your kind, hound. I know what you do to your ’possessions.’ You’ve used her, haven’t you? Had your way with her until she’s useless, discarded—a shell of the woman I loved. Is that not enough for you? Do you have to steal her soul, too?"

The air went dead cold.

The silver moths froze in mid-air. I felt Thorne’s chest expand against my back—a slow, lethal inhalation.

"Stop projecting, Alpha weakling," Thorne drawled, his voice dropping to a terrifying, silky whisper that carried further than his roar. "You speak of ’use’ because that is all you ever intended for her."

Draven’s jaw worked silently, a flush of deep, shameful crimson creeping up his neck. He looked at me, then away, his grip on Yana’s throat loosening just a fraction in a moment of stinging realization.

"She was never yours to protect," Thorne continued, his head dipping low, his muzzle brushing the shell of my ear so the whole world could see the intimacy of it. "And you will never lay claim to her again. Not in this life, nor the next."

Thorne looked up then, his gaze sweeping over the entire Hollowhowl assembly, marking them as enemies of a sovereign power.

"You want to know what I will do with her?" Thorne’s hand moved, his fingers splaying over my heart, feeling the frantic rhythm of the Silvermoth within. "Unlike you, I will accept the bond. I will claim her. I will mark her as mine, and I will be hers—utterly, violently, and without apology."

He had seen I had no prior mate mark. Draven’s mark had been erased with his rejection. Thorne pulled me back so my head rested against his shoulder, forcing me to look at the mother who hated me and the man I once loved.

"She is not your ’Althy’ anymore," Thorne sneered at Draven. "She is a Queen of the Mist. Release my people, or she will be your executioner."

The silver moths descended on the brigade.