Ch. 286..290: Breed Me, Daddy Alpha chapter 286-290

Breed Me. Daddy Alpha – Chapter 286

Kael lowered himself, slow and stiff, until he was eye-level with her. “Not your fault,” he murmured, voice hoarse. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he whispered.

She sniffled as Cain walked passed me to her, crouching down to her level as well. “You are the queen, remember, you will defeat the naughty king?”

She wiped her tears clumsily with that black of her hands. “I want… to.” She sniffled again, spreading tears more than she was wiping then. “But we need… help.” She turned to Maeve who was now white as a sheet.

“You have to ask them… commander. We can’t let… him win.” Desperation coloured her voice as more tears spilt.

The Deltas who had been holding Kael back were still watching. Maera glanced at them, a silent command that made them leave closing the door behind them.

All eyes were on her now, the room seemed to have held its breath as she exhaled as though bracing herself for what she would say next. “We are lycans and werewolves, from the beginning, since the inception of your specie; it has bloodshed.” Her wrung her finger together, the action betraying her nerves. “We are nature’s sharpened edge,” Maera went on, her voice taut but unwavering. “Our survival has always been written in blood. But the war we face now…” She glanced at Kael’s mark, her jaw tightening. “…this is not the kind our ancestors prepared us for.”

Her fingers twisted together, betraying nerves even as her tone stayed steady. “The Crimson Rebellion was born from that truth. We are not loyal to thrones, crowns, or bloodlines, we are loyal to survival. And right now, survival means joining forces with those we would never have stood beside before.”

Her gaze moved from Sage to me, lingering, weighing. “We need an alliance with the Obsidian Pack.”Hades Find the newest release on find~novel~net

I watched Cain feed Sage, each time making a train whistle sound just before she took a bite. The mess hall that Maera had provided for our now-awakened men to eat dinner was filled with the chatter and light rowdiness of a group of men sitting together. Kael laughed at a joke I didn’t tune in to hear before his eyes slid over to me.

I knew I was worlds away from all this. Lavender and honey scents danced around me, red hair slicing through the current reality. Her smile—kind eyes looking down at me as she cradled my face, Elliot in her arms, green eyes twinkling like gems in sunlight.

I was a world away because I was back home with Eve and Elliot. The war would not be in the background, playing over our lives and peace. Eve’s wish for a divorce once all this was over was a ticking clock. It was painfully bizarre—the way I wanted time to slow down so we wouldn’t get to the inevitable, but still wanted it to hurry, because every second in this war was a second they were in danger. I was torn between wanting to freeze us in a moment that didn’t exist and wanting to fast-forward to the end just to make sure they survived to see it.

The laughter in the mess hall blurred into a low, indistinct hum. My hand rested on the table, knuckles white, nails digging into the grain. I could almost feel the warmth of her fingers brushing mine—not in memory, but in the way longing could turn into something so vivid it might as well be real.

It was a dangerous thing—how longing could build its own world, complete with the weight of her hand in mine, the faint tremor in her breathing when she was half-asleep, the soft sound Elliot made when he buried his face against her neck. I could live there forever if I let myself.

But forever wasn’t on the table. Not for me. Not for us.

Cain’s laugh, sharp and too close, cracked the illusion like glass. I blinked, and the lavender was gone, replaced by the tang of stew and woodsmoke.

He was leaning across the table now, elbow brushing my plate. “You’re chewing on something, and it’s not the food,” he said low, his gaze quick but pointed.

Kael noticed too. His smile from whatever joke he’d been part of had faded, replaced by that steady, measuring look he gave me when he knew something was festering under my skin.

Then Sage, blissfully unaware of the heaviness between the three of us, tipped her head toward Kael with a smear of sauce bright against her cheek. “Will I have to feed you again?” she asked, like the very idea was both a chore and a royal duty.

A ripple of chuckles went around the table, but Kael’s response was softer than the mood. “I think he can manage, Your Majesty,” he said, though there was still grit in his voice.

Sage frowned at him in clear suspicion, then pushed his plate closer anyway before returning to her own meal.

And just like that, reality pulled me back again. The war. Maera’s proposal. The decisions that could cost all of us more than we could afford.

I turned my head toward her end of the table. She was already watching me.

I hadn’t seen her come in. One moment, the end of the table had been empty, and the next, Maera sat there as if she’d been waiting all along.

Her posture was composed, but her eyes… her eyes gave her away. Worry sat there like a shadow, sharpening the edges of her face. It wasn’t the calculated concern of a commander delivering strategy—it was the kind that came when the bad news had already settled in your bones.

My stomach twisted into tight, biting knots. I didn’t need any more. Not tonight. The incomplete mark on Kael’s skin, the way his voice had cracked describing it, her earlier proposition—they were already more than I could process without splitting open.

Still, I pushed back from the table. The bench scraped the floor, loud enough that conversation faltered around us. Kael rose beside me without a word, his expression hard.

Cain was already lifting Sage from her seat, settling her easily on his hip when she made a faint sound of protest at leaving her half-finished plate behind.

We crossed the mess hall together, my pulse growing louder with every step toward Maera.

If she was here, at this hour, wearing that look… whatever she had to say wasn’t going to wait.

—

“I know I don’t have a right to ask—three days ago we could have been enemies—but…” she hesitated, “I need to know the full truth.”

I exchanged glances with Cain and Kael, which only made her eyes narrow with even more dread.

I faced her again, bracing myself for another card I would have to lay down for this uneasy temporary alliance to work.

“The old woman we rescued called herself Ellen… Ellen Valmot,” she swallowed. “But I wanted to believe it had been some type of psychosis. She didn’t seem well to begin with. And she seemed traumatised enough to have believed she was someone she was not.”

I knew well where this was going. “Yes, I saw you write her name.”

“It was a temporary name.” She held eye contact with all of us before her eyes steadied on me. “But now… tell me. Could it really be Ellen Valmont in that room?”

“Because I married her?” I asked. “I married Ellen Valmont, so you believe she cannot be the person in that room?”

She nodded. “You married Ellen Valmont. Darius had to come to a compromise so you wouldn’t wage an all-out war on Silverpine. You married Ellen Valmont.”

“I thought so too,” I said. “But alas…”

Her eyes widened into saucers, and she took a step back as if she could put distance between herself and the truth. “But… who… how… you would have called for war. Who did you marry?”

“I married Eve Valmont.”

She shook her head immediately. “No, no—it’s not possible. I was at the execution. I watched her die, twice. I remember the carnage after…”

“After a member of your rebellion publicly spoke about the Blood Moon’s coming and about Darius’s tyranny that you continued to be blind to. He was immediately killed, and then the carnage began.”

Maera was frozen in place, her hands shaking. “You were there?”

Breed Me. Daddy Alpha – Chapter 287

I almost laughed as the memory formed in my mind. “She loves her people. She tried to kill me with a kiss. She hid her identity to protect them. She lied like her life depended on every woven deception—but it was their lives she was trying to preserve. Each and every decision she made—every lie she spun, every truth she buried—was to shield them from the noose tightening around their throats. Even when it meant branding herself the villain.”

Ellen studied me for a long moment, like she was turning my words over in her mind, testing their edges. “And if those same people turned on her?” she asked finally.

“They already have,” I said. “She never stopped loving them.” She knew exactly who I was talking about.

She looked away. “Final question. What do I call unicorns?”

When she looked at me, she was slightly smug—like she knew there was no way I would get this one.

“Uniform.”

Her thin smile withered as she muttered, “She loved you.”

Her words landed like a quiet verdict—the kind that didn’t need to be shouted to carry weight. For a moment, I could only hear the steady hum of the light overhead, the faint creak of the cell’s old hinges, the measured rhythm of her breathing.

Ellen’s gaze held me in place, the air between us thick with something I couldn’t quite name—recognition, maybe… or resignation.

“She loved you,” she repeated, softer this time, almost to herself, before straightening. “How many months, by your calculations, before the Bloodmoon?” she asked. Newest update provided by find{n}ovel.net

Of course she would know about it—but I didn’t know why the question settled in my chest like a stone. Maybe it was the way she asked it, as if the answer would weigh more than the asking.

My voice came out low. “Why are you asking me that? You promised information, not that you’d take more of it from me.”

From his place near the doorway, Kael spoke, his tone sharpened with suspicion. “You and your father would know. You’d be monitoring it as much as we are. So why do you need our calculations? Or is this so you can slip a nice little update to Daddy dearest?” His words dripped venom, and I knew exactly why—the things he knew Ellen had done to Eve were enough to stain his every syllable.

Ellen turned her head toward him, her expression unreadable. “You hate me.”

Kael didn’t flinch. “Yes.”

“Not more than I can hate myself,” she said. No theatrics. No self-pity. Just a plain truth laid out in a voice that was too level to dismiss.

Whatever he saw in her then made him close his mouth and say nothing more.

Her gaze returned to me, unblinking. “How many months, Hades?”

I held her eyes and lied. “Sixteen.”

In my head, the real number rang loud—thirteen.

Her eyes narrowed, a small curl of knowing tugging at her mouth. “You’re lying. An Alpha with a pack like yours doesn’t miscalculate. And the current timeline you’re working with…” Her voice thinned into something that carried both certainty and warning. “…is thirteen months.”

The air in the space tightened—the kind of quiet that wasn’t empty but brimming, like the moment before a wire snaps.

I took a step closer, my voice low. “If you already know, why did you ask?”

Her answer came without hesitation. “Because calculating the moves of an enemy is what my father does best.” She leaned back slightly, but her gaze never wavered. “And manipulating those enemies once he’s predicted their steps? That’s his art form.”

She paused, letting the words settle before continuing, her tone as precise as a blade. “He lets them think they’ve taken the lead… that they’ve outpaced him in the race. But the path they’re running is one he’s already mapped, and just before the finish line, there’s a hole waiting for them to fall through. One they never see coming.”

Her lips curved—not in amusement, but in grim acknowledgment. “If I know the exact number of months you’ve been working with, I can know exactly where in the race you think you are. And if I can know that… so can he.”

The heat in the space rose as I assessed her. “What is the information you have, Ellen? I passed your test.”

She opened her mouth slowly, but it was not what I expected. “Under the full moon’s silver gaze, twins shall be born. One brings blessing, hope, and light, the other a curse, shifting as a Lycan, destined to bring ruin and darkness to the pack,” she said—the prophecy that was responsible for bringing us all together here today.

But that was just the first verse.

“Yet when the blood moon bathes the earth in crimson fire,” Maera took over.

“Neither shall fall,” Kael continued from where she stopped.

“One shall wield the moon’s fury as their shield, unbroken by its curse,” Little Sage spoke next, like she had spoken the words a million times.

“The other shall walk within the shadow’s heart, where no light nor affliction may reach,” Cain finished.

At that, Ellen smiled. “Eve is the Cursed Twin.”

“And you are the blessed one.”

Her lips quivered. “Eve was meant to bring ruin and darkness to Silverpine.”

“But you are meant to bring light.” My voice had more malice than I thought I could muster at the moment. “You bless the pack.” I laid the mockery on thick.

She laughed. “This isn’t about me.”

Her smile lingered, but it was thin and brittle at the edges.

“Silverpine isn’t a fairy tale kingdom, Hades—it’s Darius’. Malrik’s. And if she—Eve—brings ruin to the pack, then she brings ruin to his empire. Without that empire, he’s nothing.” Her voice hardened, each word deliberate, shaped to cut.

She leaned forward, shadows curling in the hollows of her face. “She will dissolve his kingdom. His pack. The place where his subjects are hunted for sport, subjugated without mercy, stolen from their homes and forced to fight in a war they never chose.”

Her eyes flashed—whether defiance, I couldn’t tell. “That is Silverpine. That is the pack. And she is meant to bring all of it down to rubble. Eve is a curse to Darius’ pack, yes—but she’s also the only one meant to free his people from their tyrant. She is a curse to Darius’ empire… a curse to Darius himself.”

Suddenly, more of the prophecy made sense. I had concentrated on the part that said she would be immune to the Bloodmoon. I had pushed that to the back of my mind. “So why didn’t he just kill her?”

“There are two ruins to his pack—the Bloodmoon and Eve. But Eve also happens to be immune to the Bloodmoon.”

“But you are immune to the Bloodmoon too. The prophecy said so.”

She laughed—bitter and sharp. “I am not immune. The prophecy says I can wield the Bloodmoon like a shield, and be unbroken by its curse. I can wield the Bloodmoon… like a whip,” she finished, the words snapping in the air between us.

Her gaze cut through me, not with triumph, but with the weight of someone who’d lived too long knowing exactly what they were made into. “A shield to survive it. A whip to weaponize it. That’s my role in the prophecy. It’s not immunity, Hades—it’s obedience to the moon’s fury. I can bend it, drive it, turn it on others. But the curse still touches me. Every time I wield it, it leaves its mark. Slowly.”

She looked down at herself. “As you can see.”

Breed Me. Daddy Alpha – Chapter 288

Meeting my wife’s sister nothing like had ever immagined. Ages, gray and frail– utterly unrecognizable. Surreal was the only word that would fit.

Cain had gone quiet, watching Maera as mumbled to herself.

“How come?” She whispered for what was probably the ten time since Ellen decided to stop speaking and without annoucemt, return to her bed to sleep. As mush as I wanted to believe that it could not possibliy the true I know what I had seen. The glimpse of turquoise in gray.

“Maybe she will be up for another questioning tommorrow,” I suggested.

“My thoughts too,” And the she stopped in her tracks and turnd to me. “You will be the on to do it. You will question her, your majesty.”

I stopped too. “Me ?”

“I think it will be for the best. It is very obvious she will only willingly talk to you. We can use that fact to our advantage. She is a goldmine of information. No caputured gamma could possibly have more tell than she does.” He turned to face Maera. “He will do it,” He assured her like he could force me.

But I could not ignore that fact that they were right but before that…

I held Maera’s gaze for a long moment, searching it for even a flicker of smugness. There was none—only that unwavering steadiness she wore like a crown, the same composure she’d had when she dragged us out of Silverpine with death at our backs.

“You’ve risked more than you should have,” I said finally, the words heavier than I meant them to be. “For me. For Cain and our men.” My jaw tightened. Gratitude wasn’t something I offered freely, but this one had teeth to it, and it had been gnawing at me since the night we arrived. “So I’ll say it now—thank you, Maera. For the rescue. And for the sanctuary you’ve given us since.”

Her lips curved, not into a smile, but into something softer that somehow made the scar that marred her face less jarring. “It wasn’t charity, your majesty You know that. I don’t rescue people I can’t use.”

Cain made a low sound, halfway between a laugh and a scoff. “She’s telling the truth, you know. If she’d thought you were dead weight, we would be minced meat by now.”

I let out a short breath, somewhere between amusement and curiosity. What the hell did she mean by that? I opened my mouth to ask when hurried little footsteps cut me off

The hurried little footsteps echoed down the corridor before I could speak. Sage appeared, practically vibrating with excitement, her curls bouncing as she beamed.

“Your handsome beta is awake!” she announced, like the news was a gift she’d been dying to unwrap in front of me.

My heart lifted so fast it was almost painful. I barely had time to process before she closed the distance between us, eyes fixed on me—only for Cain to move like lightning, scooping her up with one arm and balancing her easily on his hip.

“Lead the way, little girl,” he said, his voice gentler than I’d heard in years.

Sage blinked at him, startled, and then grinned like she’d been handed a crown. She raised her hand high, pointing down the hall with the exaggerated seriousness of a commander.

I couldn’t move for a moment. Hours ago, Cain had stood frozen, tears in his eyes, just watching her walk away. And now… now he carried her without hesitation, like she wasn’t a stranger at all.

His free hand shot out, gripping my arm and tugging me forward. “Come on,” he said, with the faintest curve of a smile. “Let’s see your beta.”

Behind us, Maera laughed—an actual, unguarded laugh. “Go,” she waved them on. “All of you. Before the poor man decides to fall asleep again.”

I let myself be pulled along, the sound of Sage’s delighted chatter ahead of me, Cain’s uncharacteristic ease at my side, and a strange, tentative warmth blooming in the cold edges of my chest but even now something was lacking

I wish you were here, Eve with Elliot… I thought as I let my brother pull me along, pushing back the fact that I had just met Eve’s aged twin sister. That could wait.

The infirmary doors swung open to the sound of chaos.

Kael was on his feet—barely—snarling like a cornered wolf, shoving against two Deltas who were doing their best to keep him in bed.

“Where is he?” His voice cracked, raw from disuse, but the force behind it made even the healers flinch. “Where the hell is he?”

“You need to rest—” one of the Deltas started, but Kael tore his arm free, staggering as his knees threatened to buckle.

“You’re evert—” another tried, only to be silenced by the look in Kael’s eyes. He wasn’t hearing them. Couldn’t. The fight was all instinct, born of fear.

Maera stepped forward, raising a hand in a silent command. “Let him go.”

The Deltas hesitated, but obeyed, stepping back just in time for Kael to lurch forward. His balance failed him halfway across the room, and I didn’t think—my body just moved.

I caught him before he hit the floor.

For a second, neither of us spoke. His weight was solid, shaking in my arms, the tension in him so tight it felt like it might snap. And then he broke.

“I thought I’d die,” he choked out, gripping the front of my coat like it was the only thing keeping him upright. His voice was wet, thick. “I was so scared. I—” He shuddered, the words spilling faster now. “I would’ve never forgiven myself if—”

A short, unexpected laugh escaped me. “You would’ve been too dead to forgive anything.”

He let out a noise that was half a sob, half a huff of disbelief, pressing his forehead to my shoulder. I tightened my hold, steadying him as his weight sagged.

“Still,” he muttered, voice breaking, “I mean it.”

I didn’t answer, but my grip didn’t loosen. Not until the tremor in him began to fade.

Cain’s shadow loomed in the doorway before his voice followed. Official source is FιndNovel.net

“Well, look who’s back from the dead,” he drawled, arms folding. “And here I thought you’d finally found a way to sleep through the war.”

Kael lifted his head from my shoulder, eyes narrowing, though the redness in them dulled the effect. “Missed you too,” he muttered, voice still hoarse.

Cain smirked. “If I’d known all it took to get you to shut up was a near-death experience, I’d have arranged one sooner.”

Kael rolled his eyes—slow, exaggerated, like even that movement was costing him energy. Then his gaze caught on the small, curly-haired figure perched comfortably on Cain’s hip. “And… who’s the kid?”

Before I could answer, Cain tilted his head toward her in mock formality. “You want to tell him, or should I?”

Sage’s grin spread like wildfire, and before I knew it, we all spoke at once—Cain, Sage, and me—our voices overlapping in perfect, accidental unison.

“The queen.”

Sage giggled, delighted with herself, while Kael blinked, his confusion melting into something halfway between disbelief and amusement. “Of course,” he muttered under his breath. “I wake up and the world’s upside down.”

 

Breed Me. Daddy Alpha – Chapter 289

Cain chuckled low. “Get used to it. Things change fast around here.”

I just shook my head, but the corner of my mouth betrayed me, curving faintly. For the first time in days, the air didn’t feel quite so suffocating.

Kael’s shoulders tensed suddenly, his breath catching like he’d just been jolted awake. “I—” He gripped my arm, eyes darting between me and Cain. “I have so many things to tell you. That place… Hades, you don’t understand. I heard them talking about Ellen. They said she ran away.” His voice pitched higher, urgent. “And there’s this thing—”

He faltered, shuddering, like the memory scraped something raw inside him. “He looked dead. Dead, but young. But fucking scary. Pale as bone. Not a Lycan. Not a werewolf. I don’t even think he was—” He broke off, words tumbling into breathless fragments. “I heard him ranting, muttering about—”

“Kael.” My voice cut clean through his spiral. He stilled, chest heaving.

I held his gaze. “We have Ellen here.”

His head snapped up. “What?”

“Ellen’s twin,” I said, letting the weight of the truth land between us. “The rebellion rescued her. She’s here, in the compound. Alive.”

For a moment, Kael just stared at me, as if trying to decide whether I was mocking him. Then something in his face shifted—relief, disbelief, and a sliver of fear, all tangled together. “You’re serious.”

“I wouldn’t joke about this.”

“How could she manage that?”

“Manage what?”

“Escaping,”

“You don’t seem to believe she did,”

“The thing, it was… I could feel it. He is the marker.”

“Marker?”

“Darius is not marking people on his own. He uses this creature. He uses the horn. They planned to mark me. He planned to imprint, the mark of Malrik on me.”

My stomach dropped as he turned his back. On him was what looked like a tattoo, but it half of what I could only recognise as a letter M.

Hades

The world spun around, every single thing losing colour in an instant. I reached for the wretched mark. Every other sound dull against the roaring of my own pulse against my ears.

I traced the jagged incomplete letter, my fingers twitching from the strength it took not to try and rip it off his body. But I knew well it could never be that simple, it would do no good.

I was less of a mark and more of an indentation scribbled into the skin. My breath caught, as I look in the cruel symbol. It pigment was darker, more arcane than simple ink. It could have been my paranoia and shock but I could hear it speak.

Ice carved its way up my finger tips, to my arms. I could feel it’s daunting coolness rake it’s sway through my chest to my heart and lungs— squeezing and tightening until my breathing thinned and turned shallow.

Though it was incomplete, horror gripped me like a wicked tendrils that refused to relent. When I spoke, my voice was not mine, not fully. It sounded distant to my still ringing ears.

Kael turned around to face me, I could see the way he tried to push down his own worry in order not to aggravate mine. He gulped but even that singular action looked painful. “I got far enough that I started to hear voices in my head. It not just some mind control, it is pressure.”

Someone behind me gasped.

Kael continues, ensuring that he held my gaze, trying to steady me even though he was the one that had been marked. “It pushes against your own thoughts, sieves through your memory like a hand through a file of documents. Then it puts in commands using your memory, aspirations and self has a …as a disguise,” he finished, his voice rasping. “So when you follow the order, you think it’s your own idea. You believe it. You’ll fight to defend it because you can’t separate it from who you are anymore.”

His words landed like stones in my gut. I’d seen mind control before—feral rage, compulsions, psychic manipulation—but this… this was worse. This was the theft of self dressed as free will.

I forced myself to take a slow breath, though it scraped ice through my lungs. “How long until it… takes hold?”

“He was close, but I continued to refuse. So they tried to weaken me physically. They beat me.”

The flames of anger were stoked at he continued to speak, fighting my hardest not to launch something into the wall.

“But it didn’t work, I refused but then they…” Kael cringed, his face contorting into something in between disgust and horror as though he was still at their mercy.

“They brought the wolfbane,” Cain supplied, his voice clipped. Long gone was the playfulness of before.

“They injected it little by little,” Kael bit his lip, hard. “Troy tried to take it, but it really did a number on me. And then it hit him hard enough to knock him out and without my wolf…”

I took over from him “…you were nothing but a man for them to break,” I finished, my jaw tight enough to ache.

Kael’s silence was answer enough. His eyes were still rimmed red, still fighting not to shake, dropped to the floor.

The image clawed into my mind: Kael, bound and bleeding, wolfsbane running like poison fire through his veins, his wolf’s presence ripped away until he was left bare in a place where being human meant being prey. I felt it in my bones, the vulnerability, the cold, the taste of iron in the mouth that never quite goes away. For more chapters visit find[ɴ]ovel.net

Little hurried footsteps permeated the fog of rage that had held my mind captive, Sage ran past me and to Kael.

Her shoulders were quaking, her little frame trembling as she patted Kael head, rubbing. “He… hurt you,” I wept. “I am… sorry… you got hurt.”

Kael blinked, caught off guard by this child trying her best to console him, even when she didn’t bother trying to console herself. “I am… sorry that… our king hurt… you.”

Kael’s mouth opened, but no words came—just a tremor in his throat, like her apology had struck someplace deeper than any blade could reach. His gaze flicked to me, as if to ask whether she understood what she was saying… or whether I did.

I did. And it was worse for it.

Her words weren’t just about the bruises or the wolfsbane. They carried something heavier, unspoken—the echo of all the things I had done in the name of war, in the name of control. And somehow, without knowing the full scope, she’d laid them bare in a handful of trembling syllables.

 

Breed Me. Daddy Alpha – Chapter 290Was that why she was old? Was it taking her energy—therefore her youth?

“What does that mean?”

She ignored the question.

Her fingers twitched, almost unconsciously, as if remembering the ache of something unseen. “Eve… she doesn’t just survive it. She’s untouched by it. No mark. No toll. That’s the difference. And Darius knows it.”

“Then why did he let her go?”

“…Over the years, he’s stocked up on her blood, marrow—anything that might be used to replicate her immunity. He kept her alive because, as long as he had her, he had the key to his own survival.”

Her voice didn’t waver, but there was something in it that made my jaw tighten.

“It wasn’t enough to just bleed her,” Ellen said. “The cells he needed weren’t always present in high enough concentrations, even with the wolfsbane he had her injected with twice a day—so he learned to force them.”

I stared, not yet understanding.

“In medicine,” she went on, “there’s something called a granulocyte harvest. You stimulate the body into overproducing a certain immune cell, flood the bloodstream with it, then extract it at peak concentration. That’s what he did to her. Except instead of growth factors and controlled environments, he used pain. Prolonged, calculated, escalating pain. The body responds by producing not just immune cells, but hyper-adaptive ones—cells that learned, over and over, to counter the lunar affliction.”

Her fingers tightened into a fist. “It took him five years to find the threshold—how much agony she could take before the cells reached the potency he wanted without killing her. That was when her blood became… perfect. Not a cure, but potent enough to distill into a serum that could hold the Blood Moon at bay for weeks at a time. With that serum, they might as well be wearing full armour.”

The room blurred for a moment because red had filled the edges of my vision. My hands had clenched into fists without my permission, nails biting into my palms.

Ellen’s eyes flicked to me, reading the change in my breathing, but she didn’t stop. “They have enough stored now to keep his inner circle safe until the endgame. But the rest of Silverpine? Let them suffer.”

Kael spoke. “Lunar Cataclysm.” His voice sounded far away through the roaring in my ears.

I didn’t need to turn around to know that Maera was as white as bone.

I realized only then that my teeth were grinding together hard enough to ache. The image of Eve—broken and restrained—came unbidden, and the sound of her screams followed before I could shove them away.

“And then they rise,” Ellen’s voice lowered to an eerie whisper. “And feast.”

My eyes focused on her. Her gaze was glazed over, like she was looking into somewhere far away.

Kael’s head snapped toward her, his tone low and deliberate. “Who will rise, Ellen?”

Her eyes stayed on the floor, the shadow of whatever she was seeing flickering across her face.

“Who will feast?” Maera’s voice was barely above a whisper, but it held the tremor of someone who already feared the answer.

For a heartbeat, Ellen didn’t move—her gaze distant, lips parted like she was listening to something only she could hear. Then, slowly, her head tilted, and she spoke with the hollow calm of someone uttering prophecy.

“The streets will run with their hunger… the ones left starving will take their due. Malrik will rise as lord over them.”

It sent a cold weight straight through my spine. “Malrik?” I pressed.

She didn’t answer—not in the way I expected. Her eyes blinked once, twice, before her focus snapped back to us. Whatever haze she had been under seemed to burn away in an instant.

“What?” she asked, genuine confusion softening her tone.

Kael’s jaw tightened. “You don’t remember what you just said?”

Her brows furrowed faintly. “I haven’t said anything since you asked about the serum.”

The silence that followed wasn’t comfortable—it stretched, taut, over the tension in the air. Maera’s grip had whitened on the bars of the cell, and I couldn’t tell if the pounding in my ears was mine alone or everyone’s.

“You have not told us anything worthwhile, Ellen,” I growled. “Talk to me. If you know something, you have to talk to me.”

Her stump lifted slowly, the ragged edge of old scar tissue catching the light like something half-healed and still raw in memory.

“I am telling you why he made me stay,” she said, voice like ground glass, “and why he gave Eve back to you when he was done—when he was sure she would be useless to you. How he is steps ahead of you.” The rightful source is find✦novel.net

The air seemed to constrict in my lungs. “Tell me,” I demanded, every muscle in my jaw straining.

Her gaze didn’t flinch. “I wield the Blood Moon, Hades. I can pull it to me. Feel its path, its movement, even now. And Darius… Darius made sure you believed you had time. While you’ve been looking for your opening, he’s been shortening the distance. The Blood Moon is coming faster than you think.”

Something coiled tight in my gut, cold and vicious. I stepped forward, grabbing her shoulders, the bones sharp under my hands. “Tell me,” I growled, my voice low but trembling, with the dangerous edge to it.

She only looked at me, and there was something almost pitying in her expression. “It’s the reason I’ve aged, Hades. Why I look like this. I pulled the Blood Moon closer once before. I had power over it. But it takes something from you every time—years, life, strength.”

My hands froze on her shoulders. “How many months?” The words left me before I could think.

Her answer fell between us like the first crack of a fault line giving way.

“You have less than two months before the Blood Moon—that is, if he does not find a way to pull it even closer.”

Maera let out a choked sob and Sage began to cry, Cain trying to soothe her.

And all I could do was look at her.