Mated To The Crippled Alpha-Chapter 380: Burn the Ancestor’s Grave

Everything happened so fast my mind went blank.

One second I was watching two of the people I loved most take their last breaths. The next, Wisteria was lunging at me and then Lewis was there, stepping between us, pulling me against his chest before the blade could reach me.

I shook uncontrollably in his arms. I wanted to speak, to do something, but fear had locked every part of me in place. All I could manage was a trembling whisper against his shirt.

"Blood..."

His arms tightened around me, his voice dropping low and steady. "Elena. I’m here this time."

Those four words cracked something open in my chest. In my past life, I had faced Wisteria alone. There had been no one to step in, no one to pull me back from the edge. But this time was different. Lewis was here and something in his voice told me this wasn’t an accident.

Had he planned this?

Wisteria hadn’t expected him to intervene. That much was clear from the look on her face wild, unhinged, burning with a rage that had long since slipped past reason. She pulled out a second dagger without hesitation.

"Lewis, you and Elena will die together!"

She rushed at him. In one fluid motion, Lewis spun us both around and drove his foot into her chest, sending her stumbling backward. She’d lost her window, and she knew it.

Across the space, Dominic turned just in time to see it all unfold. His face was still carved with grief over Grandma’s death, but beneath it, something darker moved behind his eyes. Everything had gone according to his plan except for Wisteria. She had broken free of every leash.

"Wisteria, what the hell are you doing?" His voice cracked with fury. "I told you not to touch Elena!"

Wisteria’s laugh was sharp and ugly. "You’re too soft, Uncle Dominic. The Morrigans deserve to be destroyed you said so yourself. But now you let Anna go because of your son, and you’re sparing Elena because of a woman." Her voice dripped with contempt. "You’ve changed."

Lewis wasn’t listening to either of them. His eyes had gone completely flat as he watched her the look of someone who had already made a decision. I saw him reach for a gun, and my breath caught. I had never seen him hold one before.

He covered my eyes with one hand. "Don’t watch."

The gunshot was louder than I expected.

When he lowered his hand, Wisteria was staggering, a wound torn through her side. Not fatal but she was bleeding. Lewis fired again. And again. She was fast, rolling and twisting, each shot missing her by a breath. She moved like someone who had spent a lifetime dodging death.

Until she ran out of ground.

Her back hit the edge of the cliff. Below, the waves crashed and churned against the rocks. She struggled to stay upright, her glare cutting straight to me with a hatred so deep it felt like a living thing.

"Elena." Her voice turned quiet and venomous. "Even as a vengeful spirit, I will haunt every life you live. You will die at my hands, over and over, forever."

Lewis fired once more.

The shot landed. Wisteria fell backward off the cliff without another sound.

"Wisteria!"

Dominic’s face drained of all color. She was Blackwell blood the last thread connecting him to what remained of his family. Whether she hit the cliffside or the ocean below, there was no surviving that fall.

The silence that followed was broken by the sound of heels striking stone.

Amber stormed in like a force of nature, her wine-red dress coated in dust, her eyes blazing. Before Dominic could open his mouth, her hand cracked across his face.

"You lying bastard." Her voice shook with fury. "You faked being burned. You faked wanting to die. You lied about everything how dare you!"

Every trace of Dominic’s authority collapsed the moment she appeared. "Honey, I’m sorry."

"Shut up!" She hammered her fists against his chest, and he let her, holding her through every blow. "No more lies," he said quietly. "I swear. No more."

I seized the moment. "Aunt Amber Lewis’s hurt."

Her eyes snapped to him immediately. Wisteria’s blade had caught him in the back. It hadn’t gone deep enough to be immediately fatal, but I couldn’t tell how close it had come to something vital. The sight of the blood soaking through his shirt made my stomach drop.

We were still on Blackwell territory. But Amber’s presence changed everything and I needed to use that carefully.

Amber rounded on Dominic, her grief and fury fusing into something terrifying. "What are you standing there for? Get a doctor to Lewis right now. If anything happens to him, I will personally burn the Blackwell ancestors’ grave to ash."

Nobody doubted her.

Standing there watching it unfold, everything finally clicked into place.

Lewis could have stopped Wisteria before she ever reached him. He’d chosen not to. He’d taken the blade deliberately because only the two of us knew the truth about the Stone of Duality’s failed exchange. If I had walked away completely unharmed while he stood untouched beside me, Amber would have seen through it instantly. But this way, with his blood on the ground and her rage protecting us both, the story held.

He had used his own body to give me two shields at once Amber’s fury and the Blackwell pack’s reluctant obligation.

I pressed my face against his chest, not caring who saw. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

"Idiot," I whispered.

His hand moved slowly through my hair. "Don’t cry. It hurts more to see you like this than anything else."

The doctor pushed through, and Lewis gently shifted me aside. "Go say goodbye to Grandma," he said quietly. "I’ll be fine."

Amber had already taken off after Dominic, her voice echoing somewhere in the distance. Vito set Whitney down carefully she had lost consciousness, her body finally giving out. He glanced toward where Dominic had disappeared, then back at the room.

"Go calm her down, Dad. If she runs again, you won’t catch her."

Dominic looked once at the old woman kneeling by the gravestone, then left without a word. His worst problem had been resolved. Greg, barely breathing, no longer held any weight in his calculations.

I knelt beside Grandma and held her close, my eyes tracing the bloodstains on the stone behind her. Ronald’s grave. The blood had dripped slowly down its face, as though the earth itself was finally closing an old wound. The Morrigans had paid in blood and something long and terrible had quietly reached its end.

After Dominic left, I noticed Vito walking toward Josh. His expression was unreadable as he stopped in front of the two doctors standing nearby.

"Stop the bleeding. Now."

I stared at him.

The knife hadn’t struck anything vital. It had been left in deliberately making everyone believe Josh was already gone. In reality, he had simply lost consciousness from blood loss.

Vito had tricked his own father to protect Whitney.

"What are you "

He cut me off with a single cold glance. "Don’t misunderstand. I’m not doing this for the Morrigans."

He lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall, exhaling slowly, his posture carrying the kind of stillness that only came from someone who had spent a long time standing alone.

"You don’t need to tell her about today," he said without looking at me. "Let her go on thinking I’ve always been the villain."

I opened my mouth. "What about the chip "

A faint smile crossed his face. The first real one I had ever seen from him.

"There was never any chip."