Chapter 128: The Black Lycan

Prague — The Shadow Hill Pack House

Outside, the cold Bohemian mist clung to the gothic gargoyles lining the slate roof of the ancient stone manor. Inside, the quiet was absolute, heavy, and drenched in the metallic tang of fresh blood.

“Please, sir… have mercy. I beg of you…”

The man’s voice trembled, raw and fractured, punctuated by harsh, shuddering breaths. He was lying on the cold marble floor of the pack house hall, his once-immaculate velvet suit torn, stained, and thoroughly soaked in blood that wasn’t entirely his own.

He could barely recognise the man he had once been. His clothes were torn and soaked with blood, his face swollen, and one of his legs was twisted at an unnatural angle. Every attempt to move sent a fresh wave of pain through his body, but the terror pursuing him was far greater than the agony in his injured limbs.

He was frantically dragging himself backward,

leaving a dark trail across the marble. His fingernails scraping uselessly against the stone as he tried to put distance between himself and the figure sitting in the dim shadows at the end of the hall. A brutal, compound fracture tore through his right thigh—a gruesome injury that rendered standing impossible, leaving him to crawl like an animal through the carnage of his own household.

“Give me another chance to redeem myself… my liege. Please!” he sobbed, his voice cracking against the soaring vaulted ceiling.

This broken, shivering man was none other than Bruce Shadowhill, the feared Alpha of the Shadow Hill pack—a man who had ruled this territory with an iron fist for over seven decades.

Yet now, every warrior, enforcer, and lieutenant who had once sworn allegiance to his bloodline lay motionless across the hall, their bodies silent and discarded like autumn leaves. Save for their Alpha, the Shadow Hill pack had ceased to exist within the span of twenty minutes.

From the shadowed alcove at the end of the room, a low, smooth voice drifted forward—cultured, remarkably calm, and dripping with an effortless, terrifying authority.

“I have lived for three thousand years, Bruce,” the voice remarked, the tone carrying the quiet, polite reflection of an aristocrat enjoying an evening tea. “And in all that time, I have never been particularly known for my forgiveness. Nor do I possess the habit of offering second chances to rabid dogs.”

The figure remained comfortably seated on a high-backed leather armchair, one long leg casually crossed over the other. The warm, pale light filtering through the stained-glass windows caught the polished leather of his bespoke black shoes. Despite the absolute slaughter that filled the room, he remained impeccably, miraculously immaculate.

Standing a few feet behind the armchair was his Beta—a towering, sharp-visaged werewolf dressed in a dark suit. Unlike the man in the chair, the Beta’s sleeves were rolled up, his knuckles and cuffs bearing the dark, wet evidence of the hand he had played in clearing the hall.

“It genuinely strikes me as a profound philosophical puzzle, Bruce,” the voice continued smoothly, a faint, curious lilt warming the words. “Why a man born of privilege, commanding a pack that bears the direct mark of my ancestry, would choose to sell his own soul to the dirt.”

Bruce drew in a ragged, gasping breath, pressing his back against the base of a carved stone pillar as he stared into the shadows with eyes wide with pure terror.

“My pack… we ran into severe financial ruin a few years ago,” Bruce stammered, blood dripping from his split lip onto his collar. “The timber markets collapsed, the human authorities seized our holdings… we lost everything. We needed capital to keep the pack structure afloat, my liege. We were desperate…”

“So…” the man in the shadows interrupted, his voice dropping an octave, soft as velvet and sharp as a razor. “So, you solved your financial insolvency by offering your spine to Aegis. You willingly handed your own people over to a squad of human mercenaries, allowing them to dissect your body so they could engineer more efficient methods to exterminate our kind. You didn’t merely fail as an Alpha, Bruce. You proved yourself to be a pathetic, sniveling traitor.”

“I am sorry, sire! Please… I beg for your mercy!” Bruce wept, bowing his forehead until it pressed directly into the blood on the floor.

“I must admit, it bothered me for months,” the voice mused, entirely ignoring the Alpha’s pathetic writhing. “When news reached me that the Berserk Pride pack was wiped out in a single evening by an Aegis strike team, I found myself mildly perplexed. The Berserk Pride were seasoned warriors. It shouldn’t have been a fight… it should have been a stalemate at worst. Yet it was a swift, silent massacre.”

The man in the chair paused, lightly resting his chin against his hand. “And they—just like you, Bruce—were descended from my direct bloodline. It was utterly baffling how Aegis had suddenly managed to leap decades ahead in their bio-weapons research. You see, when my brothers and I personally razed their central research facilities to ash three centuries ago, we burned their laboratories and slaughtered their prized scientists. Their experimental programs were set back by generations. For hundreds of years, the biochemical weapons engineered to target werewolf physiology remained stagnant.”

The leather of the armchair creaked faintly as the figure shifted. “Then, suddenly, the killings resumed. First the Berserk Pride, then two secondary packs in the Eastern territories—all bearing my blood. It piqued my curiosity. So I conducted a quiet, methodical investigation… only to discover that you, Bruce, volunteered your own pack members as laboratory specimens in exchange for… what? A few millions in human paper currency?”

A soft, dry scoff echoed through the hall. Then, he stood up. He stepped slowly out of the shadows and into the warm shaft of light, moving with a fluid, terrifying grace that made the air in the room feel heavy, pressurized, and impossibly thin.

This was Damien Blackthorne. The youngest of the three Original Lycans.

He was breathtakingly handsome, possessing the same towering frame, broad shoulders, and flawless, sculpted jawline as Alexander and Lucien. Dark hair fell in soft, elegant waves around his face, perfectly complementing the sharp tailoring of his charcoal-grey suit.

But where Alexander’s eyes burned with the cold blue of a glacial freeze, and Lucien’s shone with a bright, deceptive sky-blue charm, Damien’s eyes were a vivid, striking emerald green—luminous, unpredictable, and dangerously alive.

He looked like a gentleman nobleman straight out of a classic painting, yet he carried an aura of raw, unvarnished ferocity that made every biological instinct in Bruce’s body scream that an apex monster was standing over him. He was charm wrapped in lethality, the legendary warrior known throughout the shadow world as the Black Lycan.

“You are an absolute disgrace to the blood in your veins,” Damien murmured, his voice dropping into an intimate, lethal purr as he stalked toward the crawling Alpha like a lion admiring a broken hare.

“Every warrior in this hall is dead—a meager down payment for the treason you brought upon my bloodline. And to learn that you have been actively kidnapping stray supernaturals across Prague, shipping them off to Aegis facilities like livestock so they could refine their toxins and experiment on them? You deserve to be executed a thousand times over.”

He stopped behind Bruce. “Tell me, did you ever consider what would happen if those experiments succeeded? Did you imagine that Aegis would simply stop after finding a way to kill a few werewolves? That they would politely thank you for your assistance and leave the rest of us alone?”

Bruce’s shoulders shook. “I was wrong. I know I was wrong.”

“How fortunate that you’ve finally discovered it. You deserve to die a thousand times over, Bruce. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet discovered a way to make that arrangement possible.”

Damien stopped right in front of the shivering man, his shadow falling completely over Bruce’s broken form. He stood towering over him, his green eyes burning with a dark, terrifying amusement.

“Forgive me, sire!” Bruce squeaked out, his hands trembling violently as he reached toward Damien’s polished shoes, not daring to make physical contact. “It was done in ignorance! My advisors led me astray! Give me a chance to redeem myself in your eyes, my liege… please!”

Damien slowly folded his trousers at the knee and crouched down, bringing his handsome face inches from Bruce’s bloody, tear-stained mess of a face. The sheer, overwhelming pressure of Damien’s presence made Bruce’s breath seize in his throat.

“Redeem yourself?” Damien asked, tilting his head with a polite, almost curious expression, his voice smooth and gentle.

“And how, precisely, do you propose to achieve that, Bruce? Will your tears revive the three packs that were slaughtered because of the data Aegis extracted from your people? Will your repentance unlock the cages of the supernaturals currently being carved open in underground laboratories? Tell me, Bruce… walk me through your grand strategy for redemption.”

Bruce stared at him, his jaw slack, his throat completely dry. No words came. He knew, with absolute and terrifying certainty, that there was no mercy left in this room.

A quiet, desperate terror consumed him. He had believed his secret was impenetrable—only himself, his chief advisor, a handful of trusted co-conspirators within the pack, and the Aegis directors had known of the arrangement. He couldn’t comprehend how Damien had unraveled a web so carefully constructed.

Damien watched the frantic, pathetic calculations turning behind the Alpha’s eyes, a faint, devastating smile touching his lips.

“You are utterly unworthy of redemption, Bruce,” Damien whispered softly, reaching out with agonizing slowness to gently pat the Alpha’s bloody cheek in a gesture that was mockingly affectionate. “And I am well aware that your pathetic coward of a son managed to slip out through the eastern drainage tunnels ten minutes before I crossed your gates.”

Bruce’s eyes widened to the size of saucers, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Damien stood up smoothly, adjusting his cuffs with effortless poise, his emerald eyes cold as winter ice.

“Do not worry yourself, Bruce,” Damien added, his voice light and conversational as he turned his back on the dying man. “I will track the boy down soon enough. And I will ensure your line is erased from the earth entirely.”