Chapter 207 Feast for the Feathered Kind
Fennigan finally pushed off the doorframe, his heavy boots carrying him into the room. He sank down onto the edge of Leela's mattress, the hospital bed groaning slightly under his massive weight. He reached out, his soot-stained hand gently covering Leela’s where it rested protectively over her baby bump.
Across the pushed-together beds, Jax did the exact same, carefully taking a seat beside Ginny and leaning over to press a soft, lingering kiss to the top of baby Iggy’s fuzzy head.
Sitting there in the center of the chaotic, makeshift pack nest, Fennigan was utterly amazed. He looked at his beautiful mate, then over at Ginny. The sheer, terrifying resilience of these women was staggering. They had literally been pulled back from the brink of death, yet here they were, anchoring the entire family with nothing more than soft smiles and absolute love.
His silver eyes then drifted to the foot of the bed, watching Toby and Sarah wrangle his giggling twins. A deep, profound wave of Alpha pride swelled in Fennigan's chest. This young couple had just completed their binding ceremony—supposed to be the happiest, most carefree night of their lives—when all of hell had broken loose. Yet here they were, sitting cross-legged on a hospital bed, playing with the Alpha heirs. They looked bone-tired, their clothes rumpled and their hair a mess, but their bright eyes weren't scarred by the nightmare they had just survived. They were laughing alongside Caspian and Briar.
The sound of their shared laughter was a balm to the warriors' battered souls.
But the warm, healing moment was suddenly interrupted by a sharp rap on the door frame. The heavy wooden door pushed open a little wider.
"I told you, I can do it myself! Let go of the handles, I am perfectly capable of rolling forward!"
The exasperated voice belonged to Elana.
A slightly flustered nurse pushed a sleek hospital wheelchair into the room, expertly ignoring the former Luna's grumbled complaints as Elana swatted half-heartedly at the wheels, trying to take over the propulsion herself.
Despite the chair, Elana sat with her back perfectly, her chin held high. The devastating breakdown from half an hour ago was locked completely away. As soon as the wheelchair cleared the doorway and she saw the massive pack pile on the beds, Elana's face broke into a radiant, genuine beam that lit up the entire room.
"I wanted to see my girls and my grandbabies," Elana announced warmly, her silver eyes crinkling with absolute joy as she took in the sight of Leela, Ginny, the twins, and little Iggy.
She waved a dismissive hand toward Fennigan and Jax, who were both staring at her in stunned silence. "I already seen those two boys of mine. I had to come make sure the rest of you were okay."
Caspian, spotting his grandmother in her new chair, immediately stopped trying to army-crawl away from Toby. He popped up onto his chubby knees, his silver eyes wide, and pointed a tiny finger right at her. "Gramma!" he squealed happily.
Elana’s smile widened, entirely unfazed by the fact that she couldn't stand up to greet him. She just wheeled herself a little closer to the edge of the mattress, opening her arms.
Not to be left out of the sudden, joyous commotion, Briar let out a high-pitched squeal of her own. She scrambled over the tangled white hospital blankets, army-crawling with fierce, single-minded toddler determination right toward the edge of the mattress, her tiny hands reaching out as she called happily for her grandmother.
Elana caught both of the squirming toddlers with practiced ease, using the strength of her arms to pull them right off the bed and safely onto her lap. She wrapped her arms around them, burying her face in their silver-tipped hair. The devastating fact that her legs beneath the thin thermal blanket couldn't move, couldn't feel the weight of her own grandchildren, didn't matter to the twins in the slightest. They didn't see a paralyzed former Luna. They only saw Gramma, and she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Fennigan sat quietly beside Leela, his large, calloused hand still resting gently but protectively over the swell of her baby bump. He watched the twins giggle in his mother's arms, feeling the warm, steady thrum of unborn Zephyr’s heartbeat pulsing through the mate bond. It was an absolutely beautiful, profoundly healing sight—a breathtaking testament to the sheer resilience of his family.
But as the Alpha looked around the crowded, chaotic hospital room—at his fierce, recovering mate, his unbroken mother, his loyal brother, and the innocent next generation of his pack—the warm, comforting relief in his chest began to slowly harden into cold, unbreakable steel.
Because as perfect as this fragile sanctuary was, both Fennigan and Jax knew exactly what was waiting for them the second they stepped out of the medical wing.
They were in for a brutal, bloody reckoning.
The checklist of war was already writing itself in Fennigan's mind, etching into his soul with terrifying clarity. He wasn't just a father and a son; he was the Alpha of the Blackwood pack, and his territory had been violated from the inside out.
First, they had to hunt down Magda. The traitorous healer had slipped through the chaos of the explosion, vanishing into the night after pumping the icy, suffocating Winter's Breath into his family's lungs. She needed to answer for the sheer terror she had caused, and Fennigan intended to make sure that answer was her last.
Second, they needed absolute, undeniable confirmation from Miller and the warriors that every last inch of Damon's subterranean nightmare was completely reduced to ash. Nothing of his father's twisted, psychopathic legacy could be allowed to survive. The bunker needed to be sterilized by fire until the very stone melted.
Then came the money. Damon hadn't built a state-of-the-art laboratory and funded a thirty-year obsession on a standard pack budget. There were decades of encrypted files, hidden ledgers, and shadow accounts that still had to be violently torn open. Someone powerful had paid his father to use the Blackwood bloodline as lab rats, and Fennigan was going to find out exactly whose deep pockets that blood money came from.
And finally, looming over it all, was the High Council from the capital.
The political elite had already descended on his territory under the guise of authority, picking at his family's open wounds while they were still bleeding. They would try to spin this. They would try to call it treason. They would try to frame it as a messy family squabble over a rogue patriarch to justify stripping the pack of its autonomy.
But this wasn't politics. This was a direct, calculated attack on the Blackwood pack—a pack that had done nothing but love, protect, and bleed for their people for generations.
The High Council were nothing but walking vultures, circling the packhouse and waiting for the Blackwoods to finally collapse so they could pick their bones clean. But they had severely underestimated the monster they had woken up.
Alpha Fennigan Blackwood only had one use for walking vultures: turning them into a feast for the feathered kind.