I Survived Midnight With The Alpha King—Now His Board Wants Me Dead

The gunshot cracked through the mountain canyon like splitting timber.

The high-caliber round didn't hit my chest.

A wall of black fur and muscle launched between me and the bullet. The round struck Kane’s shoulder with a sickening wet thud, spraying dark crimson across the pure white snow.

The impact didn't drop him. It broke the fever.

The scent of my imminent death, the sound of the trigger being pulled—it shattered the paralysis holding Kane’s nervous system. The beast didn't roar. It didn't pause. It was an engine of pure, prehistoric slaughter.

Kane closed the ten yards between himself and Julian Mercer before the spent brass casing hit the ice.

His massive jaws locked around Julian’s rifle, snapping the steel receiver in half like a dry twig. With a blinding sweep of his left forepaw, Kane severed Julian's throat with four-inch claws, dropping the mercenary commander into the snow before the man could draw a sidearm.

The remaining five operatives fired in blind panic.

Tracers slashed through the blizzard, kicking up geysers of pulverized ice. Kane moved like a shadow through the whiteout, a phantom predator tearing through the perimeter. In forty seconds of sheer, unadulterated violence, the ridge was cleared. Broken bodies lay scattered across the drift, their weapons useless against the wrath of a dying god.

When the last mercenary fell over the cliff edge, Kane turned.

The bullet wound in his shoulder was weeping black, silver-laced blood. His breath was coming in short, rattling gasps that sounded like drowning. The purple luminescence along his chest had turned pitch black—the necrotic phase.

His heart had reached total failure.

The massive beast took three staggering steps toward me, his legs giving out beneath his colossal weight. He collapsed heavily into the drift, his massive head coming to rest in my lap as I dropped to my knees beside him.

"Kane... please," I sobbed, stripping off my gloves, pressing my bare hands against his bloodied, freezing muzzle. "The spring is right there! Just fifty yards! Look at the steam!"

Just above us, through a natural cleft in the granite rock face, thick clouds of sulphurous white steam rolled into the freezing air. The Blood Spring. It was within reach.

The wolf’s eyes fluttered open. The gold was almost gone, swallowed by a dull, milky gray film—the onset of biological death. He let out a faint, broken whine, his tongue limply brushing against my cold wrist.

He couldn't stand. The poison had paralyzed his hindquarters.

"No," I growled, wiping blood and tears from my eyes with the back of my sleeve. "You carried me up this mountain. I am not letting you die outside the gate."

I scrambled to my feet, bracing my boots against the slick rock. I grabbed the coarse, blood-soaked fur along his massive scruff with both hands, leaned back with every ounce of muscle in my body, and pulled.

My boots slid. My bruised ribs screamed in agony. The iron platinum ring on my finger bit deep into my skin, tearing the flesh until my own blood mingled with his fur.

"Move!" I screamed into the howling blizzard. "Move, Kane!"

Inch by agonizing inch, I dragged nine hundred pounds of dying Alpha through the snow. My breath came in ragged, burning gasps; my muscles tore; the cold threatened to freeze the sweat on my forehead into ice.

Fifty yards.

Forty yards.

The heat began to push back the freezing gale. The scent of heavy mineral sulfur, warm iron, and volcanic steam washed over my face.

Twenty yards.

My knees gave out. I collapsed onto the steaming rock floor of the cave entrance, my hands still locked into his fur. I couldn't pull him any further. My body was completely broken, shaking with absolute exhaustion.

"Kane..." I wept, resting my cheek against his cold nose. "I can't... I can't lift you in."

A deep, subterranean shudder rattled through the stone beneath us.

Kane’s eyes snapped wide.

His blood—my blood—had pooled onto the ancient volcanic slate of the cave threshold. The Old Laws weren't just legal documents; they were ancient biological covenants written into the marrow of the first wolves who walked these mountains. The mountain recognized the sacrifice of the Sovereign Consort.

With a final, desperate surge of will, the wolf dragged his front paws forward, clawing through the shallow red mud of the cavern floor.

He hauled his massive body over the threshold.

Together, we tumbled down the short embankment into the steaming, subterranean pool of the Blood Spring.

The mineral water was searing hot, dark as crushed garnet, bubbling up from the earth's mantle. The moment Kane’s poisoned flesh submerged beneath the surface, the water violently churned into a boiling froth.

Kane screamed—a sound that was half-human, half-beast, tearing through the cavern rafters.

Thick ribbons of black, metallic silver began to leach violently from his wounds, drawn out by the geothermal sulfur like venom pulled from a snakebite. The water around him turned dark as crude oil, hissing and spitting steam as the synthetic poison was systematically boiled from his cellular structure.

I plunged my arms into the scalding water, holding his head above the surface, enduring the searing heat against my own skin.

"Hold on!" I screamed through the blinding steam. "Let it burn out! Kane, stay with me!"

His massive body thrashed in the boiling pool, the black fur sloughing off in patches, the silver rot erupting from his chest in thick plumes of smoke. The agony was absolute—a total biological reset that tore his DNA down to the bone.

Then, with a final, blinding flare of golden light that illuminated the entire cavern ceiling, Kane went completely limp in my arms.

The water fell still. The hissing stopped.

The black oil drifted away toward the drainage fissure, leaving the spring crystal clear, glowing with a soft, warm crimson light.

In my arms, the wolf was gone.

Kane lay submerged to his shoulders, completely human, his breathing deep, rhythmic, and unbroken. The black veins along his neck were entirely gone, replaced by smooth, flawless skin. His pulse, beating strong and steady against my trembling palm, sounded like the steady, magnificent tolling of an iron bell.