Chapter 248 Our Blood is Your Blood
Dozens of identical Fennigans and Jaxs.
The sheer, impossible volume of the slaughter made her vision blur. There were her mate's broad, powerful shoulders, repeated over and over in death. There was Jax's fierce, tactical jawline, slumped lifelessly against the blood-stained stone. They had all been shot, execution-style, with a single, precise bullet hole in their foreheads.
Beneath the horrifying imagery, Damon's clinical, cold handwriting crawled across the page, explaining exactly why. He hadn't written about them as his sons or even as living beings; he had written about them as defective livestock. No matter what alchemical formula or elemental magic he used to accelerate their growth, the adult clones suffered the exact same fate as the infants. They woke up, but there was nothing inside them. Damon's meticulous notes detailed how they opened milky, soulless eyes, completely unable to function, speak, or comprehend. They were just breathing meat—living shells with the terrifying physical strength of Alpha and Beta wolves, but absolutely no mind or spirit to anchor them.
So, when his own cloned sons failed to become the perfect, magic-wielding weapons he so desperately desired, Damon hadn't hesitated. He had simply marched the hollow, breathing copies of his own children into a sealed room and methodically put a bullet in their heads.
Leela’s eyes darted away from the ledger and snapped toward the heavy wooden door. Jax was standing there, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw, his gaze fixed firmly on the floor. She looked back at Fennigan, taking in the rigid, unyielding line of his chest.
She slammed her hand down flat against the desk, the crack echoing through the silent room like a gunshot. She looked up at Fennigan, her chest heaving, the absolute, crushing reality of what her mate and his brother had walked into three nights ago finally clicking into place. They had gone down into that bunker alone. They had been forced to look at their own murdered faces, over and over again, and they had carried that sickening trauma in absolute silence just to protect her from the nightmare.
"I swear to the Goddess, Fenn," Leela hissed, her voice a deadly, vibrating promise that filled the room with so much raw, Matriarchal power it made the hairs on the back of Draven's neck stand straight up. "If the man wasn't already dead... I'd kill him myself. I'd tear him apart."
Fennigan reached out, wrapping his large, warm hands firmly over her trembling ones, pressing them flat against the horrific ledger to ground her. His glowing silver eyes met hers. They weren't milky or dead; they were brilliantly, fiercely alive, holding all of his own grief, his own terror, and his absolute, unwavering devotion to their family.
"I know, Sparky," Fennigan whispered roughly, his voice thick with a heavy, ragged emotion he refused to show anyone but her. His thumbs gently smoothed over her white knuckles. "I know. But you need to take a breath. You need to calm down and think about the baby."
Leela let out a shaky exhale, her free hand instinctively dropping to rest over the swell of her stomach. The blinding, white-hot rage in her silver eyes dimmed just enough to let her Matriarchal control slip back into place.
Fennigan took a slow, grounding breath of his own, pulling himself back from the ghosts of the bunker, and slowly turned his head. He fixed the fifteen visiting Alphas with a look of such absolute, devastating lethality that not a single man in the room dared to breathe or shift in his chair.
"This is what the High Council funded," Fennigan rumbled, his voice dropping into a dangerous, subsonic register that echoed in the dead silence. "This is what they protected. They didn't just come for the elementals. My father cloned my children in his own bunker to try and manufacture magic, and he slaughtered dozens of versions of me and my brother when his experiments failed."
The heavy, suffocating silence in the study finally shattered. It wasn't broken by a question, a debate, or a demand for a tactical battle plan. It broke with the unified, absolute conviction of fifteen Alpha leaders who had just looked pure, unadulterated evil in the eye.
Chairs scraped violently against the oak floorboards. Alpha Maxon was the first to move, stepping away from the table, his weathered face hardened with a fierce, unwavering resolve. Draven followed a second later, the arrogant, old-school leader completely humbled and horrified by the depths of the Council's depravity.
Voices began to overlap in a deep, rumbling chorus that vibrated against the stone walls.
"The Eastern packs are yours."
"My warriors are at your command, Blackwood."
"Our blood is your blood."
As one, the fifteen most powerful, fiercely independent men in the territory shifted their weight. In a monumental, unprecedented act of submission—proud, ruling Alphas willingly bowing to another—they all began to drop to a single knee.
Fennigan’s glowing silver eyes flared.
"Absolutely not," Fennigan commanded, his voice a sharp, resonant crack of thunder that instantly froze every single man in place.
He stepped around the heavy oak desk, his massive frame radiating an authority that didn't demand blind submission, but absolute partnership. "Stand up. All of you."
The Alphas hesitated, caught halfway to the floor, exchanging bewildered glances.
"We are not building another High Council," Fennigan rumbled, his gaze sweeping over the frozen leaders. "We are not tearing down one tyrant just to crown another. If we do this, if we go to war against the capital and burn it to the ground, this rebellion is led as equals. You stand beside me, not below me."
Slowly, the Alphas straightened, finding their footing. But Maxon didn't step back into the line. The grizzled eastern leader looked at Fennigan, his eyes wide with a profound, almost reverent realization.
"But I think we've finally found our king," Maxon said, his rough voice dropping to a quiet, awe-struck murmur that carried easily through the silent room.
Fennigan’s jaw instantly tightened, a low, warning growl vibrating deep in his chest at the dangerous title, but Maxon held his ground.
"It has been prophesied before," Maxon pressed, looking from Fennigan to Leela, taking in the impossible, blindingly powerful aura of the Alpha and his Matriarch standing side-by-side. "You've heard the stories, Blackwood. We all have. The legends of the First Pack... the Alpha King who would rise from the darkest, most corrupted bloodline to burn the rot to ash, ruling as a true equal alongside a vessel of the Goddess."
A new, electric tension swept through the study. The fifteen Alphas weren't just looking at a strong leader anymore; they were looking at the living embodiment of a myth they had all been told as pups.
Jax let out a long, slow breath by the door, his tactical mind already spinning as he realized exactly what Maxon was doing. A rebellion led by an alliance of Alphas was a political uprising. But a holy war led by a prophesied King and his Matriarch? That was an unstoppable crusade.