Claimed By The Hidden Alpha

Chapter Four

LYRA

The vision splits me open like lightning finding its tree.

Pine needles become teeth against my knees, but physical pain dissolves beneath the psychic wildfire racing through every synapse. The mate bond—that silver thread I've carried for six months like a secret burning beneath my ribs—suddenly pulls so tight I taste copper. He's here. Not distant states away but here, breathing the same mountain air, close enough that his heartbeat thunders through my marrow.

Luna Miranda's arms find me before stone finds skull. Through wool and winter-weight cotton, her emotions bleed into mine—maternal terror sharp as ice breaking, the metallic bloom of adrenaline. But I'm already drowning, consciousness scattered like smoke between my convulsing body and sterile corridors where antiseptic wars with the iron stench of fresh slaughter.

Fluorescent light strips shadows from halls built to cage nightmares. Two men in lab coats watch monitors tracking vitals that shouldn't exist in nature. The older strokes his beard with fingers that smell of coffee and formaldehyde. The younger paces, exhaustion carved into the geography of his face.

"Cellular activity during REM sleep unprecedented. The way his DNA responds to external stimuli suggests—"

"He's my son, Ham, not your guinea pig."

Father. The word tastes of pennies and love worn threadbare by terror. They can't see death stalking their halls on wolf paws. Can't smell the m******e already painting itself in arterial sprays across pristine walls.

Rogues flow through the facility like rot through healthy tissue. These aren't pack wolves who remember their mothers' names. These are the lost ones—seven feet of muscle and madness, humanity hollowed out and filled with endless hunger. They came for imprisoned pack mates locked in basement cells. They'll find infinitely more.

"Sweet girl, you're burning alive."

Luna Miranda's voice anchors me for a heartbeat before the current drags me deeper. My body becomes a battlefield—muscles locked in rictus while my mind fractures, trying to hold too many perspectives at once. Security feeds bleeding static. Final thoughts that taste of regret. The sweet-copper symphony of last breaths drawn in terror.

A guard fumbles for his radio. Static and half a call for help before teeth find the soft place where jaw meets throat. The radio spins across linoleum, tinny voice asking questions only corpses hear.

Through the c*****e, through the dying, I find him.

The pod dominates its circular chamber—seven feet of titanium arrogance built to hold monsters men don't believe in. He floats inside like something from the old stories, suspension fluid turning dark curls to kelp forest. Those impossible green eyes stay closed, lashes painting shadows on cheekbones that could cut glass. The mate bond thrums between us, electric despite chemicals designed to cage his wolf in pharmaceutical chains.

The door explodes inward, hinges screaming surrender.

Rogues pour through the breach—scarred female leading, others flanking like hunting dogs. The pod stops them cold, strange machinery singing siren songs to their fractured minds.

"Well now. What prize sleeps behind glass?"

The father plants himself between monsters and machine. Human. Soft. Magnificent in his hopelessness.

"This is a restricted area."

Her laughter sounds like bones breaking in winter ground. "Everything's restricted when you're wearing your intestines as a necklace, little man."

But she's already flowing past him, nostrils flaring wide. The pod draws her like moon draws tide, like fate draws fools. Her pupils dilate until iris drowns in black.

"There's something in there. Something that smells like..."

Words fail her, lost in scent-memories of power so pure it burns.

"Alpha. But more. Something ancient."

"Get the territory map. Now."

Alpha Earl's command cuts through dimensions sharp as winter wind. Kitchen table solid beneath my spine, worried faces swimming through fever-dreams. Someone presses ice to my forehead—trying to cool a forest fire with morning dew.

My hand finds pencil before thought crystallizes. Lines flow like blood from opened veins—not geography but memory given form. A woman's face emerges from white paper. Dark hair spilling like ink, beautiful in the way broken things can be, eyes that mirror the ones closed in chemical sleep. Young. Terrified. A bundle clutched against her chest like salvation or damnation.

"Mother of moon and starlight. That's Serenity. Earl, that's your sister."

Luna Miranda's recognition rings through the room like funeral bells. More lines—hospital steps in a blizzard. Empty one moment, basket materializing from nothing. The woman fleeing into white while her child begins his journey toward strangers' hearts.

Alpha Earl becomes granite, becomes winter mountain. "She had a child. My sister bore a child."

The pencil drops from nerveless fingers. My hand slams onto the map, finger burning against paper where Red Rock squats like a wound. Ten miles south. Close enough to smell smoke when wind shifts right, close enough that territory boundaries blur.

"Strike team. Full tactical. Now."

"Earl—"

"My blood is in that place."

Thunder lives in those words, old power that makes windows rattle.

In the pod room, the scarred female runs claws along titanium seams, testing, tasting metal with her fingertips. The father tries intervention, earns casual violence that sends him into monitor banks. Glass shatters in crystalline symphony. Blood paints his scalp in abstract tribute.

"Pop it open. Grendel will want to see what treasure we've found."

Grendel. The name burns into memory like brand into flesh. Leader of the lost. King of the abandoned. The one who takes pack laws and pisses on their ashes.

"Emergency override here. Should crack it like a robin's egg."

"Please. You don't understand what sleeps in there."

"Neither do you, meat."

The pod exhales its secrets in mechanical sighs. Seals break with pneumatic whispers. Suspension fluid drains in chemical waterfalls while the lid rises on protesting hinges. He lies still as carved obsidian, chest barely moving. The drugs should keep him under. Should hold the wolf in pharmaceutical chains for hours more.

Should is a word for people who've never met destiny wearing fur and fangs.

A rogue leans close, curious as a child with a caught moth.

"Big beautiful bastard, isn't he? Even for an alpha."

The hand moves faster than thought, faster than prayer. Wraps around throat. Squeezes.

What emerges from the pod exists between states—not man, not wolf, but the howling void where both meet and mate. Eight feet of midnight given form, the shift happening between one heartbeat and its absence. Bones shatter and reform in symphony. Skin splits like overripe fruit revealing fur dark as old blood, dark as spaces between stars. His hand, now tipped with claws that could gut steel, crushes windpipe like paper flowers.

The remaining rogues attack in waves. He moves through them like death dancing, like violence given grace. Claws part flesh with surgical precision while the two scientists press themselves flat against walls, trying to become paint, become nothing, become anywhere but here.

But even in the killing, even in the glory of blood and breaking, those gold eyes search.

He finds his father propped against shattered monitors. Each breath comes wet and red, lungs painting lips crimson.

"Riley. My boy."

Riley. The name sears itself into my soul like ownership papers. Two syllables that taste of destiny, of coming home, of every question I never knew needed answering.

The wolf-thing that is Riley drops to all fours. The sound he makes transcends species—grief given voice in frequencies that make windows weep glass tears.

"Find them. Your real family. They're waiting."

The father's last words hang in air suddenly too thick for breathing.

Deep in the facility's belly, explosions bloom like deadly flowers. Charges meant to free imprisoned rogues detonate early, hungry for destruction. The building shudders, dying beast drawing final breaths.

"Structural failure imminent! Everyone out!"

Smoke billows through ventilation systems like searching fingers. Emergency lights paint everything in hell's own palette. The strike team bursts through chaos—tranq rifles raised, movements sharp with practiced efficiency.

Darts find Riley's massive form. One. Two. Six before his legs buckle. Even drugged, he reaches for his father's cooling flesh.

"The scientist! Grab the live one!"

They haul the bearded man from behind overturned equipment. Sam throws him over her shoulder like a sack of grain while Marcus and David struggle with Riley's unconscious weight—dense as collapsed stars, heavy with grief.

"Move! Whole place is gonna blow!"

They run through corridors already surrendering to entropy. Ceiling tiles fall like snow in hell. Pipes burst, spraying chemicals that burn skin and sear lungs. Behind them, rogues give chase—not for prizes but for the wild joy of pursuit.

Through medical ward doors hanging off hinges like broken wings. Past empty cells where imprisoned monsters once counted heartbeats. The main entrance appears through smoke like salvation's promise, but overhead support beams sing steel death songs.

They burst into winter air as the first tower begins its genuflection to gravity.

"Go go go!"

SUVs wait with engines growling, exhaust mixing with smoke and fear-sweat. They throw Riley's form into reinforced cargo space, the scientist into another vehicle. Rogues pour from the dying building like wasps from burning nest, fire reflecting in eyes gone mad with bloodlust.

Engines roar to life, feral and desperate. Tires scream against asphalt as they accelerate into mountain darkness. Behind them, the facility draws its last architectural breath.

The explosion paints night in colors that shouldn't exist outside fever dreams. Glass and steel and concrete become memory, become dust, become nothing but stories whispered around pack fires. The building that housed horrors, that stole fathers from sons and sons from mothers, collapses into its own footprint like it's ashamed to have existed.

But they're not free. Freedom is a luxury the hunted can't afford.

Rogues flow from wreckage like water from broken dam, like prophecy from dying lips. The hunt is on—predators drunk on destruction and the musk of a powerful alpha. Their howls promise violence, promise vengeance, promise that this chase is only foreplay.

The strike team pushes vehicles past manufacturer limits on roads carved by deer paths and desperation. Headlights sweep across pine trunks that blur into walls of shadow and suggestion. In side mirrors, yellow eyes multiply like malignant stars.

"Perimeter breach in ninety seconds if we maintain speed!"

Through it all—through fever cooking my brain like meat in a pan and the mate bond screaming across ten miles of mountain air—I feel him. Feel the drugs metabolizing too fast in his system. Feel consciousness clawing back to find loss waiting with patient fangs.

The SUVs scream around curves that would kill drivers who haven't spent lifetimes racing death through these mountains. But the rogues gain ground, some dropping to all fours, others taking to trees, branch to branch like nightmare acrobats. The scarred female leads them, Grendel's lieutenant promising what her master will claim when darkness settles all debts.

Marcus pushes the accelerator through the floor. "Forty seconds to the boundary!"

In the medical wing, my body arcs off the table like I'm trying to fly. Nana packs ice that turns to steam on contact while the pack watches their omega burn from inside out, watched their touched-by-moon girl pay the price for a bond she never chose.

But I'm there, in that racing vehicle, feeling Riley's eyes flutter like moth wings. Gold fading to green. Wolf receding to leave only man—a man who just lost everything, gained a heritage written in blood and starlight, and has no idea that ten miles north, a mute omega paints his face from memory and calls it prayer.

The territory line approaches like salvation's edge. But the rogues run faster, fueled by bloodlust and the promise of prizes. Their claws reach for metal, for flesh, for the Alpha Prime who burns like a beacon in their fractured minds.

Twenty seconds.

Ten.

Five.

The vehicles roar across the invisible boundary as rogues close the final gap, the scarred female's hand actually touching the rear bumper before ancient magic makes her fingers smoke and burn.

The vehicles cross into Moonhaven territory, and the psychic backlash hits me like a sledgehammer to the skull. The mate bond snaps tight, then releases, sending me crashing back into my own burning body. The medical wing ceiling swims into focus—white tiles blurring into abstract patterns as my vision fractures. Nana's weathered hands press something cold against my forehead, but it might as well be a snowflake against a volcano. One hundred eight degrees and climbing. My body convulses once more, back arching off the table as every nerve ending screams.

Then the darkness rushes up to claim me, not the shared darkness of the mate bond but something deeper, older. A place where even bonds can't reach. I feel myself falling, falling, falling into fever dreams where green eyes burn gold and a wolf made of midnight howls my name. Nana's voice echoes from somewhere far above, calling for more ice, more herbs, more miracles. But I'm already gone, slipping into the coma's embrace where the only sound is the twin drumbeat of two hearts learning to beat as one across impossible distance.