Fated to My Forbidden Alpha – Episode 20
The infirmary door opened, releasing a wave of silver energy into the corridor. It rolled over Jackson, Alexander, and Ethel like a living force, carrying grief, power, and memories too old to belong to one lifetime. Luke and Drake braced against opposite walls while the waiting guards lowered their eyes without understanding why.
Selene stood at the center of the room. Her posture had changed, shoulders straight beneath the plain infirmary gown, and the air around her felt ancient and unstable. Silver runes faded slowly along her arms, visible beneath skin that still bore a servant’s old scars. One eye shone silver while the other remained dark.
“Selene,” Jackson whispered. She looked toward him without fully responding. Lyla still lived inside her, but another presence now shared her gaze—ancestral power awakened by blood and memory.
Inside Selene’s mind, everything collapsed and reformed at once. Visions arrived without order: a battlefield under a red moon, a dying Alpha kneeling before a silver crest, and a child hidden beneath blankets while adults swore a vow in blood. She could not tell which memories belonged to her childhood and which came from the ancestral consciousness now awake.
“I am not just the Selene you knew,” she said. Her voice carried a faint echo, as if generations spoke beneath it. Ethel moved one careful step forward, his hands trembling.
Selene turned toward him. For a brief instant, the weathered Alpha’s face became younger in her sight. She saw him bending over a nursery cradle, moonlight on his hair and laughter warming his eyes.
“Father.” The word escaped before conscious memory could stop it. Silence struck the corridor harder than the earlier shockwave. Alexander’s eyes narrowed, Jackson froze, and Ethel ceased breathing.
Hope transformed the older Alpha’s face. For fifteen years he had imagined hearing that word again, but no imagined reunion had prepared him for its fragile uncertainty. He did not rush toward her, though every part of him longed to. One wrong movement might frighten the daughter whose body remembered him before her mind did.
“No,” Jackson said, his voice low and dangerous. Denial was easier than accepting Blood Moon had enslaved an Alpha’s heir and that Ethel possessed a claim older than Jackson’s authority. “You don’t know what you’re saying.” His wolf recoiled from the attempt to deny Selene’s own memory.
Selene blinked as if waking. “I didn’t—” Another memory struck before she could finish: a silver pendant swinging over a crying child, a woman’s blood on white sleeves, and a promise shouted through flames.
Her knees buckled. Alexander reached her first and caught her against him. This time Jackson did not interfere. Selene’s face had gone pale, and silver light trembled uncontrollably along her hands. Even Jackson could see she was not responding to attraction but enduring the return of a life violently taken from her.
Lyla spoke urgently. You must stabilize. Selene clung to Alexander’s sleeve. “I don’t understand what is happening.” The wolf explained that their present self was merging with the bloodline consciousness that had guarded her sealed memories.
The ancient voice returned, calm and commanding. You are Bloodwind, last daughter of the guarded line. Power pulsed outward with the words, vibrating through the floor and opening hairline cracks along the walls. Somewhere below, the manor’s alarm bells began ringing without human hands.
Drake stepped back. “This is not a normal wolf awakening.” The pressure rolling from Selene rivaled an experienced Alpha’s aura despite her lack of training. Alexander tightened his supporting hold without restraining her. “Her power is expanding faster than she can control it, and fighting it will only make the surge worse.”
Jackson took a step forward. “Let her go.” Alexander did not look at him. “No.” The single answer carried absolute authority, but its purpose was protection rather than dominance.
For once, Jackson did not immediately challenge him. Selene was not safe in anyone’s control, least of all the man whose years of denial had helped destabilize her first bond. Jackson remembered every time he had used dominance to force her compliance and realized the same approach could shatter her now. His wolf knew it even if his pride resisted.
Ethel approached as though nearing something sacred and wounded. “You are my daughter,” he said softly. Selene looked at him, tears gathering for reasons her conscious mind could not fully name.
“I don’t remember you.” The admission cut him, but Ethel accepted it without protest. “I know. I lost you before you were old enough to hold every memory. None of that is your fault.” He did not demand that she call him father again; the first word had been a gift, not a debt.
His voice awakened another buried image: strong arms lifting her toward the moon and calling her little moon. Selene reached for it, but the memory vanished behind a wall built from trauma, old magic, and time.
“Someone locked it away,” she whispered. Ethel’s grief hardened. Whoever stole her had not only changed records; they had sealed the child’s mind so blood and family could not guide her home. The spell had likely suppressed Lyla as well, explaining why Selene seemed wolfless until the protections began to fail.
