The Alpha’s Secret Obsession Now novel Chapter 49

The stranger’s teeth tear through my shoulder before I can twist away, and pain erupts across my nervous system with a violence that whites out conscious thought.

I snap blindly at the wolf pinning me to the forest floor, my jaws finding purchase on fur and muscle as we tumble through underbrush in a snarling tangle of limbs and fury.

Blood—mine, his, impossible to distinguish—spatters across pine needles and frozen earth.

‘Roll left,’ Nireya commands, her presence sharpening into battle focus. ‘He’s heavier but slower on the turn. Use it.’

I obey without question, throwing my weight sideways and scrambling free as my attacker’s momentum carries him past where my throat was moments before.

The brief distance gives me time to plant my paws and face him properly, hackles raised, teeth bared in a warning that means nothing to a wolf who has already drawn first blood.

He circles me with patience, amber eyes tracking every tremor in my exhausted muscles.

The scent hits me between one ragged breath and the next—familiar beneath the musk of aggression and forest, carrying notes I have encountered before in hallways and doorways and the peripheral spaces of a packhouse I spent my childhood at.

‘I know him,’ I realize, and the recognition sends dread coiling through my belly. ‘Nireya, I know this wolf.’

‘Focus on survival first,’ she snaps back. ‘Identify him after we’re not dead.’

The stranger lunges again, and I meet his charge with a snarl that tears from my throat like a war cry. Our bodies collide with bone-jarring force, and I sink my teeth into his foreleg while his claws rake across my flank in parallel lines of fire.

We break apart, circling, bleeding, measuring each other.

The scent keeps nagging at me—pine and leather and the particular musk of a male wolf in his prime, threaded through with undertones I associate with formal dinners and whispered conversations I was never meant to overhear.

Thomas.

The name surfaces with the force of revelation, and everything clicks into place with devastating clarity.

Sarah’s lover. Sarah’s weapon. The wolf who has been sharing my cousin’s bed while she plots my destruction from the comfort of her Luna’s quarters.

‘You,’ I snarl, and the word emerges guttural and barely recognizable through my wolf’s throat. ‘Traitor. You sold yourself to a woman who murdered her way into power.’

Thomas’s lips peel back from teeth stained with my blood, and his response carries the cruel amusement of a predator who knows he holds every advantage. ‘Bold words from the poisoner’s daughter. Did you think you could run forever, little Luna-killer?’

The accusation lands with familiar agony—the same lie that has haunted me for eleven years, the same false narrative that stripped me of my birthright and turned me into a servant in my own father’s house.

‘I didn’t kill my mother,’ I growled, circling to keep him in front of me. ‘Sarah did. Your precious mistress murdered my Luna and framed a child for the crime, and you’re too blinded by whatever she does in your bed to see the monster you’re protecting.’

‘Convenient story.’ Thomas feints left, testing my reflexes. ‘The pack believed otherwise. And now I’m here to make sure you never have the chance to spread your lies.’

He attacks with a speed that catches me off guard, his massive body slamming into mine and driving me backward into a tree trunk that knocks the breath from my lungs.

I twist and snap, catching his ear between my teeth and tearing until blood sprays across my muzzle.

Thomas howls with rage and retaliates with a bite to my already-wounded shoulder that sends agony screaming through every nerve.

‘You’re tiring,’ he observes, and satisfaction threads through the words. ‘How long do you think you can keep fighting before your body simply gives out?’

Two wolves tear at each other with savage intensity, but the contest is brief and brutal. The newcomer moves with lethal precision, each strike designed to incapacitate, to destroy, to eliminate the threat with maximum efficiency and minimum mercy.

Thomas’s yelp of agony cuts short with a wet crunch that echoes through the silent forest.

The victor stands over the corpse, sides heaving, muzzle dark with blood that isn’t his own.

He turns to face me, and even through the haze of pain and blood loss, I recognize the wolf who has haunted my dreams since the night I fled his packhouse.

The shift takes me without warning—loss of control forces the transformation back, my bones cracking and reshaping as fur recedes into skin.

By the time Paul crosses the clearing, shifting mid-stride himself, I lie naked and broken on the frozen ground, my human body bearing every wound my wolf sustained.

His hands find my face, warm against my chilled skin, and his ice-blue eyes hold mine.

“Morgan.” My name sounds like a prayer on his lips. “Stay with me.”

But the darkness creeps in from the edges of my vision, soft and insistent.

Paul’s face blurs above me, his mouth forming words I can no longer hear, and the last thing I feel before the blackness takes me is his hand cradling my cheek.

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