Chapter 262 The Hunt Above
I know him.
It wasn't just his blurry, distorted face swimming in the harsh fluorescent glare. It was the incredibly familiar, deeply ingrained, arrogant slope of his shoulders. It was the casual, overly confident, entirely recognizable way he tilted his head when he spoke down to her. And underneath the suffocating, sterile stench of harsh bleach, evaporating rubbing alcohol, and burning ozone, her desperate Matriarchal wolf finally caught it. It was a hauntingly recognizable scent that had been meticulously, chemically masked.
A visceral, paralyzing spike of pure, unadulterated horror violently pierced her heart, overriding even the freezing pain of the massive needle.
This wasn't an anonymous, hired mercenary. It wasn't a faceless rogue Alpha looking for a ransom. It was a ghost from their own world. The fragmented, chaotic puzzle pieces of his impossible identity violently slammed together in her rapidly fading mind. The horrifying, world-shattering realization of exactly who the traitor really was crystallized into absolute, undeniable certainty.
But right as her heavy brain screamed his name, desperately trying to push it across the mate bond to Fennigan, the massive, concentrated dose of the sedative violently crashed over her like a suffocating, pitch-black tidal wave.
The name instantly dissolved into the freezing void. Her silver eyes rolled completely back in her head, the heavy lids sliding shut. Her body went utterly, terrifyingly limp against the freezing steel table, the leather straps suddenly slack as all the fierce, Matriarchal fight completely drained out of her. She was violently, ruthlessly pulled back down into the absolute, silent dark, leaving her completely at his mercy.
The Hunt Above
Fifty feet above her, the suffocating, impenetrable wall of the ancient Blackwood forest didn't stand a goddamn chance against the absolute, world-ending panic of the Alpha King.
Fennigan completely and utterly abandoned the meticulous, calculated tactical grid search. He ceased to be a military commander and became a force of pure, untethered, destructive nature. His massive, bloodied hands clamped aggressively around the thick, rotting trunk of a dead pine tree blocking his path. With a feral, agonizing roar that shook the very canopy, he violently ripped the entire tree straight out of the frozen earth—snapping thick roots like brittle twigs—and hurled the massive trunk blindly into the dark.
He immediately lunged into the newly cleared space, his bare hands violently tearing through a ten-foot wall of iron-thick, razor-sharp thorns. The inch-long briars mercilessly shredded the pale skin of his chest and muscular arms, leaving dark, actively weeping lines of blood over his old battle scars, but Fennigan didn't even flinch. He couldn't feel it. He just kept ripping, tearing, and aggressively digging blindly into the freezing dirt, driven entirely by a blinding, frantic, animalistic need to get under the ground.
"Fenn, stop!"
Jax aggressively shoved his way through the falling, violently displaced debris, his glowing golden eyes wide as he watched his brother literally, physically tearing himself apart. The fiercely loyal Beta stepped directly into the Alpha's destructive, lethal path, throwing his heavy hands up to physically block Fennigan from diving bare-chested into yet another wall of razor-sharp briars.
"Fennigan, back off!" Jax ordered, his voice cracking with a desperate, heavy fraternal authority. "You are tearing yourself to shreds! You have to calm down. You're not going to be any damn good to her, or your pup, if you burn out or get yourself killed before we even find the goddamn door!"
Fennigan completely froze.
For a split second, the violently abused woods went dead silent, save for the ragged, heavy, wet heaving of the Alpha King's massive chest.
Then, Fennigan snapped.
He lunged. Moving with terrifying, blinding, apex-predator speed, Fennigan grabbed the thick, reinforced Kevlar collar of Jax's tactical vest in both of his massive, blood-slicked fists. With a guttural snarl, he violently hoisted his Beta—a man who easily weighed well over two hundred pounds of solid, highly trained muscle—an entire inch off the dirt, aggressively slamming his brother backward against the unyielding trunk of a massive oak tree.
"YOU DON'T GET IT!" Fennigan roared. The agonizing sound didn't just tear from his throat; it carried such a visceral, world-shattering agony that it made Marcus, a hardened killer, freeze completely completely still ten yards away.
Jax didn't flinch. Blood trickled from his split lip where his teeth had bitten through flesh from the impact against the oak, but his golden eyes—identical to his brother’s—never wavered. "Then make me," he gritted out, voice raw but steady.
The air between them thickened, electric with the scent of iron and ozone, the forest itself holding its breath. Marcus finally exhaled, realizing his fingers had curled around the hilt of his dagger without conscious thought. Every instinct screamed to intervene, but some deeper, primal understanding kept him rooted—this wasn't his fight.
Fennigan’s liquid-mercury eyes weren't just glowing in the dark; they were wide, wild, and heartbreakingly swimming with unshed tears of absolute, blinding terror. He physically shook his brother, his white-knuckled iron grip trembling violently against the Kevlar.
"For just a blink, Jax..." Fennigan's booming, lethal voice suddenly cracked, breaking entirely into a devastated, hollow, rattling rasp. "For just a single, agonizing second... I felt her. She woke up. I felt her, Jax, and she was absolutely terrified."
Fennigan’s massive chest heaved, his breathing jagged, shallow, and completely out of his control. He dropped his heavy head, pressing his forehead hard against Jax's, the unshakeable, untouchable King of the Blackwoods completely broken open in the dark.
"But now... now she's not there again," Fennigan choked out, his voice dropping to a desperate whisper as he stared directly into his brother's golden eyes. "There's no chemical fog hiding her this time. The bond didn't just get muddy. It violently slammed shut. She is just not there."
Jax didn't fight the aggressive grab. He didn't bare his teeth, flash his eyes, or rise to the physical challenge of his Alpha. The fiercely tactical, lethal Beta simply let his brother hold him pinned against the rough bark, his own heart completely shattering at the sheer, unadulterated devastation radiating in waves from his King. If Leela's end of the mate bond had vanished entirely right after a massive spike of absolute terror, it meant whoever had her down in the dark had just pushed her so incredibly deep into the void that her soul couldn't even reach him anymore.