Chapter 32: Something not of this World

Rhydor’s POV

I walked through the stone corridors of the packhouse alone. My footsteps were heavy, echoing off the walls in a steady, slow rhythm. On the outside, I appeared to be in control. On the inside, my head was a mess.

No matter how hard I tried to focus on the pack business, I kept seeing her face.

Azura.

I saw her lying on my bed, her eyes wide and panicked. I kept seeing the way her silk nightgown had twisted, showing off that smooth, pale skin of her thigh in the moonlight. I shook my head hard, trying to knock the image out of my brain.

Stop it, I snapped at myself. Focus.

I had way more important things to worry about than a girl who wasn’t even supposed to be my Luna. My parents had officially lost their minds. Of all the old, dusty traditions they could have brought back, they chose the one that forced me to share a room with her. Now. At all times.

I clenched my jaw so tight my teeth ached. This was temporary. It had to be, I just needed the pack to calm down and stop gossiping. Once things settled, I’d fix this. I’d make Isadora my Luna properly, the way I always planned. This arrangement with Azura meant nothing.

But even as I told myself that lie, her face flashed in my mind again. Uninvited. Unwanted. I huffed a breath of air, irritated that she was taking up so much space in my head.

I turned the corner, heading toward my parents’ mansion to give them a piece of my mind. But before I could take another step, a voice sliced through the link in my brain. It was sharp and urgent.

Alpha. We have a problem.

It was Silas. I stopped dead in my tracks. Where?

Eastern forest. Near the old boundary stones. You need to see this.

I didn’t waste a second. I didn’t care about the mansion anymore. I turned and sprinted toward the exit. As soon as I hit the open air, I leaped, my body twisting and growing until my black fur burst through my clothes. I shifted mid-air into my wolf, landing on all fours as a giant beast.

My family could wait. The pack always came first.

I tore through the trees, reaching the eastern forest in minutes. The woods were thick and ancient here, the branches so crowded that the moonlight barely touched the dirt.

I slowed down when I saw them. Silas and Axel were there, along with four of my warriors. They were standing in a circle, their faces pale and tight. Nobody was talking. The only sound was the wind.

I shifted back into my human form. My shirt and boots were shredded, leaving me in just my torn pants, but I didn’t care about the cold. My blood was hot enough to keep me warm.

"Report," I said. My voice was calm, but I could feel the fear coming off my men in waves.

Silas didn’t look at me. He just pointed at the ground. "We found him like this."

I stepped into the center of the circle and came to a stop. My stomach did a slow roll. The wrongness of it hit me in the gut before my mind could catch up.

A body lay in the dirt. It was a wolf, caught halfway through a shift. His legs were still human, but his torso was twisted in a way that no bone should ever bend. But it was the face that made my blood run cold.

The man’s face was melted.

It wasn’t torn by claws or eaten by a beast. It looked as if it had bubbled and warped, as if someone had held a torch to a wax doll. His eyes were gone, and his mouth was frozen open in a silent, horrific scream.

The smell hit me then. It wasn’t the smell of a dead body. It was scorched flesh and something metallic. Something that smelled... wrong. ℯℯ𝘭.

I crouched down, my eyes searching for a cause. There were no claw marks. No bite wounds. No signs that he had even tried to fight back.

"Who is he?" I asked quietly.

Axel shook his head, looking sick. "We don’t know, Alpha. His face... there’s nothing left to recognize."

I stood up slowly, my heart feeling heavy. This wasn’t a normal rogue kill. Rogues are messy; they tear things apart. They don’t do this.

"Take him to the examination chamber," I ordered. "Be careful with him."

The warriors moved in, lifting the body gently. It looked like it might crumble if they gripped it too hard. Silas and Axel fell into step beside me as we headed back to the packhouse.

****

The examination chamber was deep underground, carved into the very roots of the mountain. It was a circular room filled with ancient runes that glowed with a faint, ghostly blue light. In the center was a stone slab that floated in the air, held up by magic older than our history.

The warriors placed the body on the stone. The moment it touched the surface, the slab rose higher, and the runes on the floor began to pulse with a bright, blinding light.

We stood back, watching in total silence.

"Even rogues aren’t this cruel," Axel muttered, his voice shaking.

"Maybe it wasn’t a rogue," Silas added under his breath.

I felt my whole body go stiff. A memory hit me like a punch to the gut. I remembered the rogue I’d fought the night I found Azura in the woods. I remembered the way its blood had sizzled against my skin. It burned me like acid. I’d thought it was just a freak accident back then. A one-time thing.

"I fought something once," I said, my voice low and dark. Silas and Axel turned to look at me, their expressions sharpening. They knew I didn’t share stories lightly. "Its blood burned. Like acid. I thought it was just an outlier. Just one weird wolf."

I gestured to the body on the slab. "But this... this is something else."

The blue light from the runes began to scan the body, showing us what was beneath the skin. It didn’t just show the surface; it showed the bones and the organs.

Axel stepped forward, his eyes narrowing. "Alpha... look."

I moved closer. The light focused on the dead wolf’s chest. We could see the ribs and the shredded muscle. But there was a giant, dark hole in the center.

The space where the heart should have been was completely empty.

Silas’s voice was a ragged whisper. "His heart..."

"It’s gone," Axel finished.

I stared at the empty chest. It wasn’t torn out by teeth. It was removed. Cleanly. Perfectly. Like someone had reached in with a blade and taken it with precision.

My jaw tightened until it hurt. A wolf didn’t do this. A rogue didn’t do this. This was something else, something new.

"Whatever killed him wasn’t hunting for food," I said, my voice echoing in the cold stone room. I looked at my two best men. "It was collecting something."

The silence that followed was freezing. And somewhere far away, I could hear the wind howling through the trees, sounding like a warning that we were all in terrible danger.