Chapter 247 Grown Men
Fennigan didn't say another word at first. He simply reached out, flipped open the heavy, leather-bound covers of the ledgers, and slid them down the center of the long oak table.
The silence in the room grew suffocating as the books were passed from hand to hand. The visiting Alphas leaned in, their expressions morphing from guarded curiosity to absolute, stomach-churning horror as their eyes scanned the meticulous, clinical handwriting detailing decades of slaughter.
Alpha Maxon, a grizzled leader from the eastern territories, abruptly pushed the ledger away, his face pale beneath his beard. He looked up at Fennigan, his brow furrowed in a mixture of disbelief and deep, existential dread.
"So you're saying your father built this entire, elaborate life based on a lie?" Maxon asked, his voice rough. He glanced toward Leela, fully aware of the rumors surrounding the Blackwood Matriarch's immense abilities. "How did he hide from your Luna, if she has the power you say she has? For that matter, how come the Goddess herself didn't step in and stop these tragedies from happening?"
Fennigan met Maxon’s gaze without flinching, absorbing the valid, heavy questions.
"The Goddess gave all werewolves free will, Maxon," Fennigan answered, his deep voice carrying a hard, bitter edge. "And that is exactly how the High Council got around Her judgment. They kept their own hands clean by acting as the shadow benefactors. They only funded Vane and Damon, letting them do the actual slaughtering."
Fennigan picked up a separate, heavily sealed folder from his desk and tossed it down the table. It landed in front of Maxon with a heavy thud.
"As for how they hid it all," Fennigan continued, his silver eyes flashing with dark, contained fury. "Look at the files. It explains exactly how Vane was able to keep an entire, fully operational laboratory hidden right under our noses, and how my father kept his own private slaughterhouse a secret."
Maxon slowly opened the folder. The other Alphas leaned in to look. What they saw made the blood drain entirely from the room.
The files were filled with clinical graphs and sickeningly precise medical notes documenting the absolute atrocities committed against the elementals. The pages detailed how Vane and Damon systematically harvested bones from elemental boys while they were still alive, treating them as nothing more than livestock. It coldly outlined their brutal attempts to force the female elementals into breeding programs.
Leela stepped closer to the table, her silver eyes burning with a fierce, protective light.
"Everything they wore, everything they used to restrain their victims that we thought was carved ivory or mother of pearl," Leela explained, her voice slicing through the horrified silence like a silver blade. "It was elemental bone. Vane figured out how to charge the harvested bone with elemental energy, using their own magic to create an invisible, impenetrable cloak."
She looked directly at Maxon, answering his first question. "That is how Damon was able to hide his true nature and his twisted mind from me even after I arrived. He was shielded by elemental magic. He did it by wearing that large 'ivory' ring he always kept on his finger."
A heavy, deathly quiet settled over the fifteen Alphas as the sheer magnitude of the High Council's depravity—and Damon's brilliant, sick deception—truly set in. They hadn't just murdered innocents; they had weaponized the very bones of their victims to hide from the Goddess and the Matriarch.
This wasn't just a political disagreement anymore. It was a holy war.
The heavy, deathly quiet in the study was suddenly broken by the harsh scrape of leather against wood.
Alpha Maxon, still visibly shaken by the elemental files, reached out and pulled the final, thickest ledger from the bottom of the stack. It was the one book Fennigan had intentionally kept closer to his side of the desk.
Fennigan’s massive hand shot out to slam the cover shut, his reflexes lightning-fast, but he was a fraction of a second too late.
The heavy parchment fell open, and Leela’s sharp, silver eyes instantly caught the glossy photograph taped to the very first page.
It wasn't a sketch or a blueprint this time. It was a terrifyingly real photograph taken inside Damon’s private underground bunker, showing a long, sterile row of fluid-filled glass tubs.
Suspended inside those tubs were chilling replicas of her babies.
They had cloned the twins. Damon had cloned them at different, earlier stages of their short lives—tiny, fragile infants and newborns. Damon's sickening notes detailed how he was trying to engineer them to naturally generate their own elemental magic. But the true, paralyzing nightmare of the image was their faces. The clones' eyes were wide open, staring out through the glass—but they were milky, empty, and entirely soulless. They were nothing but manufactured, living shells that could do nothing but breathe.
The sheer, visceral horror of seeing her sweet, innocent babies' faces looking back at her from those tiny, lifeless vessels hit Leela with the force of a freight train.
All the air vanished from her lungs. The blood rushed entirely out of her head.
Leela violently spun away from the desk, dropping to her knees as she grabbed the heavy brass wastebasket beside Fennigan’s chair. Her stomach heaved, and she threw up violently, her body physically rejecting the absolute, sickening evil of what she had just seen.
The fifteen Alphas instantly shot to their feet in alarm, their chairs scraping harshly against the floor. Jax took a massive, threatening step forward from the door, his jaw locked tight enough to crack his own teeth.
Fennigan didn't move to comfort her right away; he stood frozen, staring down at the open ledger. A single, hot tear slipped free, cutting a glistening path down his scarred cheek. He and Jax had found this bunker three nights ago. They had incinerated the tanks and the unholy abominations inside them, and he had sworn to himself he would take this specific, paralyzing nightmare to his grave so the mother of his children would never have to see it.
But the truth was out now.
Leela gasped for air, her hands trembling as she wiped her mouth. The paralyzing shock only lasted a few seconds before it was entirely incinerated by pure, unadulterated Matriarchal fury.
She pushed herself up from the floor, ignoring Fennigan's outstretched hand. She stepped right back up to the desk, her silver eyes burning with a blinding, lethal light, and grabbed the edges of the ledger.
She began flipping frantically through the pages. "No," Leela breathed, her voice shaking with rage as the pages turned. "No, no, no—"
Her breath hitched, stopping dead on a new page. The blood drained from her face all over again.
The next set of photographs wasn't of the babies. It was of another room in the bunker. The floor was stained dark. Lined up against the cold concrete wall were rows of dead bodies. Grown men.