Chapter 296

ALPHA DRAVEN’S POV The doors slammed shut behind me, the echo rattling the hall as if the very walls mocked me. Her words still rang in my skull: If disease should be killed, then you should have died a long time ago. She had said it. In front of everyone. She had taken my name and spat it beside death. And worse—worse than all of it—the people had listened. I threw the goblet from the table; it shattered, wine spattering across the stone like blood. “Traitors,” I hissed to the guards who had faltered, to the women who had dared lift their eyes, to every whispering tongue in that courtyard. “They think she is their salvation?” The memory clawed at me. The way my men hesitated when she spoke. The way her power had pressed against the air, choking, suffocating, bending my wolves to her will. That was no ordinary defiance. That was something else. Something dangerous. “Summon the elders,” I snarled to the shadows. “If she thinks she can use her tongue to turn my pack against me, then I wi