The Feral Alpha's Captive-Chapter 69: Her Final Bluff

🦋 ALTHEA

The silver moths hovered in the air like a living constellation, their wings catching moonlight and throwing it back in razor-sharp fragments.

One command. That was all it would take.

One whisper from me and the brigade would fall. Every gamma, every soldier, every wolf who had chained and beaten and brutalized the Vargans for decades—they would choke on their own blood as silver dust filled their lungs and stopped their hearts mid-beat while they all clawed at their throats.

It was the justice that I craved since I was old and conscious enough to see what was truly happening the allied-packs.

The moths trembled, responding to the dark want curling through my chest. How easy it would be. How satisfying to watch them suffer the way they’d made others suffer. To finally, finally balance the scales that had been tipped toward cruelty for so long.

My fingers twitched and in response, the moths dipped lower.

But Morgana jolted into action but she did wave the white flag as I had hoped. She didn’t retreat. Didn’t flinch or beg or show even a flicker of the fear she should have felt staring down her own extinction.

She grabbed Thal.

The movement was so fast I almost didn’t register it—one moment the boy was kneeling in the dirt, the next his small body was yanked backward, Morgana’s claws finding his throat with the practiced ease of someone who’d done this before. Many times before.

Thal screamed.

The sound punched through my chest like a fist, scattering my thoughts, obliterating the dark satisfaction that had been building. His back was still bleeding from the earlier strike, the torn fabric of his shirt clinging to wounds that wept red into the night. Fresh tears carved paths through the dirt on his face.

He was fifteen years old.

Fifteen. Yet he looked ten from overworking and malnutrition.

And Morgana held him like he was nothing more than a shield. A tool. An object to be used and discarded.

"If we die," her voice rang out across the clearing, cold and absolute as winter ice, "they die with us."

The words landed like physical blows.

No. No, she wouldn’t—she couldn’t—

But I knew better. I knew my mother. I’d spent my entire life learning the depths of her cruelty, mapping the contours of her capacity for violence. There was no bottom to it. No line she wouldn’t cross.

"NOW!" she barked.

The brigade moved as one entity, a coordinated strike born of training and fear. Gammas moved forward, each one grabbing the nearest Vargan, claws finding vulnerable throats in a choreographed nightmare. The sound of it—fabric tearing, skin splitting, choked gasps as sharp edges pressed into soft flesh—it filled the air like a chorus of damnation.

Twenty Vargans.

Twenty lives suspended on the edge of my decision.

Twenty hearts beating rabbit-fast against the promise of steel.

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t process what I was seeing. My mind stuttered and stalled, trying to find a way out, a path forward that didn’t end in mass slaughter.

But Morgana wasn’t finished.

She gestured sharply toward the Red Mist behind the brigade, and my stomach dropped as more figures were dragged forward—Vargans who had been hidden in the mist’s crimson embrace, reserves I hadn’t known existed, hadn’t accounted for in my desperate calculations.

Ten more emerged from the fog.

Thirty total.

Thirty Vargans, each one with a gamma’s claw pressed to their throat. Each one staring at me with eyes that held every shade of terror and resignation that I could taste like the bile that coated my tongue.

The woman who’d spent years freeing their people.

The phantom who’d slaughtered soldiers and burned outposts and left silvery death in her wake.

Surely she could save them now.

But I was frozen. Paralyzed by the impossible mathematics of it. Thirty innocent lives on one side. Fifty guilty soldiers on the other. And me in the middle, holding the power to tip the scales either way—knowing that no matter which way they fell, blood would flow.

"Call them off, Silvermoth," Morgana purred, and there was a sick satisfaction in her voice, a triumph that made my skin crawl. She’d found my weakness and she was pressing on it with all her weight. "Or watch them all bleed."

The moths pulsed with violet light, responding to the anguish tearing through me. They could feel it—my rage, my grief, my desperate, screaming helplessness. They wanted to descend. Wanted to rip and tear and make my mother pay for what she was doing.

One command.

Just one.

But it would cost thirty lives.

Thirty Vargans who’d done nothing wrong except be born into the wrong caste, under the wrong moon, in the wrong pack.

Thirty people like Yana. Like Thal.

Like every soul I’d risked my life to save over the years.

My vision tunneled. The world compressed down to a single point—Thal’s face. The way his small hands clutched uselessly at Morgana’s arm, fingers scrabbling for purchase against her iron grip. The blood soaking through his shirt, so much blood for such a small body. The tears streaming down his cheeks.

He was just a child.

A child.

And my mother held him like he was garbage.

My chest constricted. Air wouldn’t come. The edges of my vision went dark and spotty as panic closed its fist around my lungs.

I couldn’t do it. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

I couldn’t sacrifice them.

Not even for justice. Not even to end the brigade’s reign of terror. Not even to—

Then Thorne spoke.

His voice cut through my spiral like a blade through silk—calm, conversational, almost bored. It made every hair on my body stand on end because I recognized that tone. I’d heard it in predators before. The sound a wolf makes right before it goes for the throat.

"Same story, Poppy."

The casual use of the nickname—familiar, almost affectionate—was more unsettling than any threat could have been.

Morgana’s eyes snapped to him, and for the first time since she’d grabbed Thal, I saw something flicker across her face. Not fear, exactly. But wariness. Recognition of a player on the board she couldn’t quite control.

"You have no power," Thorne continued, each word measured and precise, "unless you have a Vargan under your heel."

The observation hung in the air, clinical and cutting.

He was right.

Gods help me, he was right.

Morgana’s entire regime, her authority, her iron grip on Hollowhowl—all of it rested on the backs of enslaved Vargans. Without them to mine silver, to serve, to bleed and break and die in the dark—she had nothing. She was nothing.

"A hundred Vargans will die today in the mines," Thorne said, and his tone didn’t change. Didn’t waver. He might have been discussing the weather. "Crushed under rockfalls. Suffocated in cave-ins. Worked until their hearts give out in the dark."

My blood turned to ice in my veins.

"A hundred more in the scorch pits," he continued remorselessly. "Burned by dragon fire. Rendered down to ash and bone for your forges."

No.

No, he couldn’t be—

"Two hundred dead by sunset, Poppy. Minimum." His grip on me tightened fractionally. "These measly thirty won’t sway me."

The words detonated in my mind like grenades.