Chapter 135
**ALARIC**
The candlelight flickered against the stone walls, shadows stretching long and thin like skeletal fingers. I stood before the map pinned to the table, inked with the boundaries of their community. Every ward, every patrol path, every weak point Alex had ever whispered to me was marked there. And yet, as I traced one of the lines with my fingertip, I felt no triumph.
I felt… anticipation.
Behind me, footsteps echoed, steady and deliberate. “You’re thinking of her again,” said Lucien, my oldest confidant. His voice carried a hint of reproach, but also amusement.
“Am I so transparent?” I replied without turning.
Lucien circled the table, his sharp features illuminated by the firelight. His hair was streaked with silver, though his body moved with the grace of a predator still in his prime. “Only to me. You speak of her more than strategy. For all your grand speeches about order, I think you’ve let chaos into your heart.”
I smiled faintly, though it felt like a crack in my armor. “Aria is… unusual.”
“That’s one word for it,” Lucien muttered. “She is dangerous. Carrying those… things. Two abominations wrapped in her womb, and you speak as though she is a saint.”
“She is more than her condition,” I said, perhaps too quickly. My hand curled into a fist on the table. “Have you seen the way they look at her? As if she’s the sun itself. Even the hybrids—especially the hybrids—draw their strength from her presence. Without her, they falter. With her, they believe they are unstoppable.”
Lucien tilted his head. “And so you wish to remove her, to cut out the heart of their strength.”
“Yes,” I whispered, then paused. The word tasted false.
Lucien caught it, of course. He always did. “But you don’t mean to kill her.”
The silence stretched between us, heavy and telling.
I turned at last to face him. “No. Not kill. Keep. There is a difference.”
His expression hardened. “That is not strategy, Alaric. That is obsession.”
Perhaps he was right. Even I did not understand the pull. I had crossed centuries with unshakable certainty in my mission: preserve the balance, keep the species in their rightful places. Vampires rule the night, werewolves the wild, humans the dust in between. Hybrids were the corruption, the crack in the foundation. I had destroyed dozens of them, watched their malformed bodies crumble to ash or rot into madness.
But Aria was not like them.
She was strong, yes, but also luminous. I had heard her voice in the forest, defiant even as fear wrapped her throat. I had felt the tremor of her pulse, the fierce will to survive that made even seasoned warriors pale beside her. And her children—my mind lingered on them with a curiosity I refused to name. They should not exist, and yet they thrived.
Perhaps in keeping her, in studying her, I would finally understand what went wrong.
Or perhaps I simply wanted her near.
Lucien broke the silence again. “Alex failed us.”
I let out a short, humorless laugh. “Alex was always going to fail. I trusted him only as far as his longing would carry him. He liked them too much—those cursed hybrids. He admired their strength, their bond. He wanted to belong. That was his weakness, and weakness is always fatal.”
“You used him.”
“I tested him,” I corrected. “And he gave me what I needed before he broke.”
Lucien’s eyes narrowed. “But he nearly gave them more. You saw the way he looked at the girl. He would have betrayed you for her, had you let him.”
I didn’t deny it. “Which is why he is no longer among the living.”
The wards I had woven into his very veins had served their purpose. The instant his loyalty wavered too far, the magic had devoured him from the inside out. I had watched it unfold through the tether, a cruel satisfaction blooming in me even as part of me mourned the waste.
“Then what now?” Lucien asked, gesturing at the map. “If you truly mean to keep her, you must move soon. She grows closer to birthing those… creatures. And the longer you wait, the stronger their defenses will become.”
I leaned over the table, studying the small circle that marked her residence. “We cannot simply storm their gates. They expect that. Their security has doubled. No, we must let them believe they have the upper hand. They must think they have time. That is when they will falter.”
Lucien’s voice dropped low. “And when you have her?”
My throat tightened. I had thought of it a thousand times—her in the quiet of my halls, her children safe in my hands, the questions finally answered. But the image was not clinical. It was not only about prophecy or survival of our kind. It was… personal. Too personal.
“I will keep her,” I said finally. “Safe. Hidden. She will understand, eventually, that what I do is not cruelty. It is preservation.”
“And the others?”
“They will break without her.”
Lucien studied me for a long time, then nodded slowly. “Very well. But remember, Alaric—if you let sentiment rule you, it will destroy you.”
I smiled, though there was no humor in it. “Perhaps. Or perhaps she is the piece I was missing all along.”
The wind howled outside, rattling the shutters. Somewhere in the distance, wolves cried into the night, a reminder of what awaited me if I faltered.
But my mind was not on them. It was on her.
Aria.
Soon, she would be mine—not in death, but in captivity. And the world would finally see that I had been right all along: hybrids could not survive free.
But even as I told myself this, a dangerous thought lingered in the back of my mind.
What if she did not break?
What if, instead, she broke me?
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