Chapter 221 Not Today
Fennigan headed back upstairs to the fortified office to be with Leela, leaving Jax to drag the weeping tech expert deep into the subterranean dungeon levels of the packhouse.
Jax didn't say a single word as he shoved Miller roughly into the heavy, reinforced iron cell. The Beta slammed the barred door shut, the metallic clang echoing violently down the damp stone corridor. He turned the heavy deadbolt, locking the traitor inside.
Jax turned on his heel to leave, his mind already shifting to the warm, grounding thought of Ginny and little Iggy waiting for him upstairs.
"Remember how Vane did it, Beta," Miller suddenly whispered from the shadows of the cell, his voice raspy and broken, yet sickeningly eager to plant one last seed of horror.
Jax paused, his back stiffening, but he didn't turn around.
"Remember how Vane kept the Goddess from seeing his heart's true atrocities," Miller wheezed, his hands gripping the iron bars. "He used the bones of the innocent to cloak his magic. Your father didn't just share Vane's ledgers, Jax. He shared his methods. Ask yourself... how did an Alpha hide a slaughterhouse from a Luna with elemental blood for thirty years?"
Jax’s jaw clenched. He took a heavy step away.
"Your father's ring, Jax," Miller whispered into the dark.
Jax's broad shoulders instantly dropped. The air completely left his lungs.
He forced his legs to move, walking away from the holding cell, leaving Miller’s raspy, pathetic breathing behind him. He navigated the winding, stone corridors of the basement, heading back toward the stairs that led to his mother’s office.
But halfway down the dimly lit hall, Jax's boots faltered. He stopped dead in his tracks.
The memory hit him with the physical force of a freight train.
The ring. Damon had worn it every single day. A thick, heavy band of silver set with a smooth, pale, iridescent white stone, worn permanently on the middle finger of his right hand.
“What is it, Papa?” a young Jax had asked decades ago, sitting on Damon’s knee. “Mother of pearl, my boy,” Damon had smiled, ruffling his hair with that exact hand. “A rare, beautiful thing.”
Jax braced his massive hand against the cold stone wall of the corridor, his stomach violently heaving as the horrifying realization finally clicked into place. The smooth, white, iridescent sheen. The way it seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it.
It wasn't shell. It was bone.
Damon had been walking around for thirty years, holding his mother's hand, signing pack treaties, and petting his children's heads, while wearing a polished piece of skull or spine carved from one of the murdered, soulless boys he had grown in a tank. He had literally worn his slaughtered sons on his hand to cloak his atrocities from the Goddess.
Jax squeezed his eyes shut, a ragged, devastated breath tearing through his chest as the sheer, unadulterated evil of it threatened to drag him right into the dark.
Jax’s massive hand pressed flat against the cold, damp stone of the corridor, his broad shoulders heaving as he fought back the violent urge to be sick.
The smooth, iridescent white stone. Mother of pearl, Damon had called it.
At first, the horrifying thought was that Damon had carved it from one of the soulless, silver-haired boys he had grown in the dark. But as Jax stood there in the freezing hallway, his sharp, analytical Beta mind violently rejected the theory, piecing together the sick, twisted science of it all.
It couldn't have been from the clones.
Magic—true, pure, elemental power capable of blinding the Goddess herself—was tied to the spirit. It required a living spark. And that was the one thing Damon had never been able to manufacture. No matter how many embryos he engineered, no matter how many suspension tanks he filled, he could never force a soul into those empty, milky-eyed shells. Without a soul, there was no magic to harvest. The clones were just biological flesh. Useless.
The air in Jax's lungs turned completely to ice.
If the bone didn't come from Damon's failed experiments... it had to have come from his partner's successful ones.
It came from Vane.
The realization hit Jax with a devastating, sickening finality. The ring wasn't a Blackwood clone. It was carved from the bones of a true elemental child. One of the innocent, living, breathing children Vane had hunted down, tortured, and butchered in his own labs to steal their power. Vane had shared his gruesome spoils, gifting his financial partner a piece of a slaughtered child to wear as a magical cloak, hiding Damon's atrocities from the Luna's intuition and the Goddess's sight.
That was why Damon had been so utterly obsessed with Elana and her dormant bloodline. He was tired of relying on Vane's scraps. He wanted to breed his very own true elemental so he could harvest the magic for himself.
Jax let out a ragged, agonizing breath, his forehead dropping to rest against the unforgiving stone wall. The sheer, unfathomable depravity of the men who had orchestrated their lives was a bottomless abyss.
He stood there in the dim light for a long moment, letting the horror wash over him, letting it harden his heart into absolute, impenetrable steel. He couldn't let the darkness drag him under. Not today.
Today, his son had taken his first breath.
Jax violently pushed himself off the stone wall. He wiped his face roughly with the back of his sleeve, burying the trauma deep down where Damon could no longer use it against him. He squared his massive shoulders, turning his steps toward the stairs that led to the fortified, heavily guarded sanctuary of his mother's office. He needed to see Ginny. He needed to hold the pure, untainted life of little Iggy in his arms to wash the stench of death from his soul.
Jax pushed open the heavy oak door to his mother’s office, stepping out of the freezing, suffocating nightmare of the corridor and into the warm, fiercely guarded sanctuary of his family.
The room was quiet. Fennigan and Leela were huddled near the desk with Elana, while Toby and Sarah stood silent watch near the windows. But Jax didn't see any of them. His eyes instantly bypassed the war council and locked onto the small, plush couch in the corner.