Chapter 8
The silver chains violently shrieked as he surged forward, falling to his knees on the flagstones. The black rot surged up his temples, completely drowning the amber in his eyes once more. A terrifying, inhuman aura exploded from his frame—the raw, ancient magic of the First Alpha, so suffocating, so heavy with predatory power that my knees buckled, sending me crashing to the floor.
He was losing it. The lucidity had shattered.
"Fenris... thinks... he can eat... my soul!" Oberon howled, his words slurring into a terrifying, animalistic snarl. He tore at his own chest with his clawed fingers, leaving deep, bleeding furrows in his bronze flesh. "He wants the power! He wants the blood! He will drown in it! *Drown in it!*"
"Oberon!" I screamed, scrambling backward as his massive, clawed hand struck the floor inches from my boots, shattering the flagstone into jagged gravel.
The Alpha didn't hear me. He was trapped in the waking nightmare of the Frenzy. His head thrashed from side to side, snapping his fangs at unseen phantoms in the shadows, roaring at ancestral voices that only his poisoned blood could hear.
*“Kill them all!”* he roared at the empty rafters. *“Rip the cubs from the belly! Burn the pines! Let the moon drink! Let the blood freeze!”*
The sheer terror of the moment pressed down on my chest like a lead weight. I was locked in a room with a nine-foot monster whose sanity was dying, bound only by silver chains that were already bending under his supernatural strength. If one of those iron rings pulled free from the granite...
*Clang!*
One of the anchor rings on the left wall groaned, a hairline fracture spidering through the stone surrounding it.
Oberon lunged again, snapping at my throat. His fangs grazed the wool of my sleeve, tearing the fabric clean down to the wrist. The cold bone dagger clattered against the stone floor, spinning until it came to rest against his silver-cuffed ankle.
The beast froze.
His black, pupil-less eyes drifted down to the bone hilt.
For three agonizing heartbeats, the solar was entirely silent save for the drumming of the freezing rain outside and the ragged, wet rattle of Oberon’s lungs.
Slowly, terrifyingly, the Alpha lowered his head. He sniffed the bone hilt. He recognized the scent.
Then, his gaze rose back to meet mine.
The madness was still there, churning like a black storm in his eyes, but beneath it, something ancient, tragic, and desperately pleading flickered to the surface.
He didn't reach for my throat.
He lifted his massive, blood-slicked hand, his claws retracting by millimeters, and pushed the bone dagger across the smooth flagstones toward my trembling knees.
*“Take it,”* he rasped, the voice torn from the deepest, most agonized recess of his soul. *“Take the steel, Rosalind.”*
My fingers hovered over the cold bone hilt. "Why?" I cried, tears of pure, unadulterated terror and confusion finally spilling over my lashes. "Why me, Oberon? Why did you bring me here? Why give this to a human girl who cannot even pierce your hide with a standard thrust?"
Oberon’s chest heaved, a thick, shuddering breath escaping his bloodied lips.
*“Because...”* he choked out, his golden skin graying as the black veins tightened around his throat like a noose, *“...a wolf... only knows how to feast.”*
Before he could finish, another violent convulsion seized his massive frame. He collapsed sideways onto the stone, his back arching in an unnatural, sickening curve as his bones began to shift and reform beneath his skin. The dire wolf was trying to force its way out, but the burning silver around his limbs was fighting the transformation, trapping him in an agonizing purgatory between man and monster.
He curled into a fetal ball beside the altar, whimpering—a sound so pitiful, so utterly stripped of the terrifying majesty he had commanded for fifty winters, that my heart twisted in my chest.
I picked up the bone dagger, slipping it back into my ruined sleeve, and retreated to the desk.
My hands were shaking violently as I opened the first leather ledger.
The title page was dated fifteen years ago—the exact year Oberon had brought me home from the smoldering ruins of my border hamlet.
I turned the pages, reading through the private, coded journals the Alpha had kept in absolute secrecy from his council, his sons, and the shamans.
With every line I read, the terrifying architecture of Oberon’s final years began to unveil itself.
For years, I had believed the fortress was simply a cage, and that Oberon kept me close to taunt his sons or maintain an illusion of absolute authority. But the records told an entirely different story.
Every entry chronicled his desperate, scientific search for an end to the bloodline curse. He had studied the anatomy of the Frenzy with cold, clinical obsession. He had dissected the historical accounts of his predecessors. He had analyzed the spiritual properties of the "Living Heart."
And three years ago, around the time Lucian was exiled to the frontier, Oberon had written a passage that made my blood turn to ice:
*“The Rite of the Living Heart requires an unbroken cycle of lupine savagery. The madness survives because the heart is torn out by teeth and claws—by an heir whose own wolf is aroused by the taste of Alpha-flesh. The consumption passes the demonic frenzy directly into the consumer's marrow.*
*If the heart is carved in the circle, the curse endures.* *If the Alpha is slain by an heir hungry for power, the demon claims another vessel.* *The chain must be severed before the eclipse crests. The living heart must never touch an heir's jaws. But an Alpha's wolf will not yield to death quietly. The beast within fights to the last drop of blood, demanding slaughter, demanding an enemy to tear apart.* *To starve the curse, the heart must be stilled before the circle convenes—not in fury, but in silence.”*
I stopped reading, my fingers gripping the parchment until the edges crumpled.
*To starve the curse.*
Oberon wasn't preparing for a succession trial. He wasn't planning a final, glorious battle to prove his dominance before the pack elders.
He was engineering a catastrophic ambush against his own clan's traditions.
He intended to deny Fenris the heart. He intended to break the cycle by ensuring that when the doors fell, there would be no living rite left to perform.
Yet the terror in my gut only tightened.
Why chain himself in silver if he wanted to cheat the rite? Why lock the doors and summon *me*?
My gaze dropped to the bone-hilted dagger tucked beneath my ruined sleeve.
The Fang of the First.
*“When the third moon rises, don’t let anyone else into this room.”* *“A wolf only knows how to feast.”*
What did he expect me to do? Did he think a fragile human could stand guard over his corpse against Fenris and three hundred blood-mad berserkers? Did he intend to use my scent, my presence, as some sick diversion to draw Fenris into a trap? Or had the rot already fractured his mind when he handed me the blade, dragging me into his tomb out of senseless, despotic cruelty?
