Chapter 168 Fracturing

Chapter 168 Fracturing

Riven's POV

Amaya’s strategy of “waiting and watching” sounded perfectly rational on paper. In the quiet, amber-lit sanctuary of our Alpha suite, surrounded by the translated ancient scrolls and thick, reinforced oak doors, her cold, analytical logic had held a fleeting, desperate kind of sense.

But a rogue demon from the first era didn’t care about our tactical patience. And it certainly didn’t give us the luxury of waiting.

Amaya’s plan crumbled into absolute ash less than three hours after she walked out of our heavy iron door.

I was sitting at the edge of the dining table, my elbows resting on the dark wood, my head buried in my hands as I tried to force my brain to absorb the jagged Latin translations Amaya had left behind.

Across the room, Zayden was pacing a slow, relentless track in front of the hearth, his heavy boots making a rhythmic, agitated thud against the floorboards.

His golden eyes were fixed on the dying embers of the fire, his jaw locked in a permanent, tight line. Neither of us had spoken a word in over an hour. The silence in the suite was suffocating, thick with the unyielding tension of two apex predators trapped in a cage.

Then, the temperature in the room plummeted.

It didn't just grow cold; the heat was instantly and violently sucked out of the air, replaced by a sub-zero, bone-chilling draft that tasted of ozone, copper, and stagnant water.

The gas lamps flickering along the stone walls didn't just dim—they snapped out completely, plunging the living space into a deep, heavy shadow.

My wolf slammed violently against the front of my ribs, a sharp, instinctual snarl vibrating through my chest.

“Riven,” Zayden rasped, his voice dropping into a lethal, defensive register as he stopped dead in his tracks.

Before I could even process the shift in the atmosphere, a sound tore through the silence of the suite.

It wasn't a word, and it wasn't a standard cry of pain. It was a raw, blood-curdling shriek of absolute, unfiltered agony that ripped straight from the bedroom down the hall.

My chair hit the floorboards with a loud crash as I lunged forward, crossing the distance of the corridor in a fraction of a second.

I didn't bother with the heavy brass handle; I hit the timber door with my shoulder, using a fraction of my alpha mass to blow it completely off its hinges. The heavy wood splintered inward, crashing against the wall.

The blast of freezing air that hit my face was so intense it actually burned my lungs. But it was the frequency hitting my senses that made my knees lock.

It was completely warped. In its place was a chaotic, screeching static—a dark, heavy, metallic resonance that felt like hundreds of rusted iron needles dragging across my brainpan. It was the scent of the void.

“Kathy!” I yelled, my amber eyes instantly adjusting to the gloom.

She was huddled in the dead center of my bed, but she wasn't the girl I had tucked under those heavy wool blankets hours ago.

The blankets were thrown aside, and she was backed up against the heavy mahogany headboard, her knees pulled tight to her chest, her fingers clawing frantically at the sides of her own skull.

The dark, pitch-black veins had returned. But this time, they weren't just faint lines mapping across her collarbone.

They were thick, raised, and violently pulsing, spreading up the pale column of her throat and branching out across her jawline like spilled ink moving with its own malicious heartbeat.

The dark corruption was physically pumping through her circulatory system, visibly warring with her human biology.

“Kathy, look at me!” I pleaded, stepping over the splintered remains of the door and rushing to the edge of the mattress.

Her head snapped up, and the breath completely left my lungs. Her eyes were wide, frantic, and filled with a terror so profound it made my own chest ache.

But there was no recognition in them. The soft, gentle gray irises I loved were drowned in a swirling, hazy crimson fog.

“Get away from me!” she screamed, her voice distorting, overlapping with a second, metallic hum that vibrated from the very back of her throat. She lashed out, throwing her hand forward.

A wave of raw, kinetic force blasted from her palm. It caught me square in the chest, carrying the weight of a freight train.

I was thrown backward, my boots sliding across the floorboards until my spine slammed hard against the stone casing of the doorway.

“Riven!” Zayden was instantly at my side, his large hand gripping my shoulder to steady me, his brilliant golden eyes locked on the girl on the bed in pure horror.

Kathy let out another agonizing shriek, her back arching off the mattress as if an invisible hook was pulling her spine.

Her fingers dug so hard into her own scalp that I could see small drops of blood welling under her fingernails.

The kinetic blast seemed to jar her human consciousness back to the surface for a split second. The crimson fog in her eyes flickered, and for one heartbreaking moment, the true Kathy broke through the demonic static.

“Riven... Riven, please!” she sobbed, tears spilling over her cheeks, cutting clean, wet lines through the blackened veins crawling up her face. “It hurts! Oh god, it hurts so much!”

I pushed off the doorframe, ignoring the bruising ache in my chest, and lunged onto the bed.

I grabbed her wrists, pulling her hands away from her head before she could tear her own skin. Her skin was like ice—so unnaturally cold it felt like holding solid blocks of frozen marble.

“I’ve got you,” I grunted, my voice trembling with a desperate, raw emotion I couldn't hide. “I’ve got you. Look at me. Fight it. Keep your eyes on me.”

“You don't understand!” she frantically screamed, thrashing against my grip with a terrifying, unnatural strength that shouldn't have belonged to her small frame. “It’s tearing my mind apart! It’s clawing at the walls inside my head! It wants to get out, Riven! It wants to kill everything!”

She violently twisted her wrists, her eyes wild with a selfless, absolute panic.

I wrapped my arms entirely around her freezing frame, pulling her back against my chest to physically anchor her to the earth.

I pressed my chin over her shoulder, closing my eyes as I drove my pure alpha resonance straight into her fractured core, desperately trying to build a temporary, external wall of willpower to suppress the demon crawling up her throat.

Fight me, I projected the thought into the chaotic static of her mind, my fangs bared in a silent, internal snarl against the ancient darkness. Come at me. Leave her alone!

For a fraction of a second, it worked. Kathy gasped, her body going momentarily limp against my chest as the demonic frequency hitched.

But a rogue demon from the first era wasn’t a subservient beta wolf. It didn't bow to the alpha command.

It fought back.

The entity inside her recognized the suppression, and it reacted with the fury of a cornered god. Kathy’s eyes snapped wide open, the gray completely swallowed by an oceanic, blinding red light.

A terrifying, inhuman voice layered over her own as she threw her head back and unleashed a deafening, earth-shattering scream.

The latent power within her core didn't just spike; it completely detonated.

A shockwave of pure, black kinetic energy exploded outward from her body. The force was so catastrophic it bypassed our alpha auras entirely, hitting us like a bomb.

I felt my grip instantly shattered. The sheer magnitude of the blast threw Zayden completely off his feet, launching his massive frame backward until he smashed into the heavy oak wardrobe, splitting the timber down the middle.

I was violently thrown off the mattress, hitting the floor so hard the air was permanently knocked from my lungs.

But the energy didn't stop there. The demonic frequency expanded outward in a crushing, visible ripple of dark air. It hit the massive, floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass windows of the Alpha suite.

For a single heartbeat, the thick glass bowed outward under the impossible pressure.

Then, with a sound like a localized artillery strike, every single pane of glass in the suite shattered simultaneously.

Millions of jagged, glittering shards exploded outward into the freezing night air, raining down like silver shrapnel onto the lower courtyard below.

The heavy green velvet curtains were instantly shredded, violently whipping into the room as the freezing mountain wind howled through the newly exposed, gaping wound in the wall.

I rolled onto my side, coughing as the icy wind bit into my skin, my ears ringing with a high-pitched, agonizing whine. I forced my heavy head up, my vision swimming, desperately searching through the swirling dust and freezing wind.

Kathy was still sitting on the bed. But she wasn't crying anymore.

She slowly turned her head toward me, the black veins pulsing thick and heavy against her throat, her eyes burning with an unholy crimson light that promised nothing but the end of the world…