Fated to My Forbidden Alpha – Episode 22
Darkness swallowed Selene, but it was not the quiet darkness of sleep. She fell through layers of memory sealed for fifteen years, each one carrying heat, scent, and terror with cruel precision.
When she opened her eyes, Blood Moon Manor had vanished. She stood in a forest consumed by fire, beneath a sky stained red with smoke. Wolves screamed beyond the trees, and blood darkened the leaves around her bare feet. Heat blistered the bark, yet Selene felt none of it on her adult skin; she was a witness trapped inside a child’s terror.
“Selene!” A woman called through the flames. The voice felt familiar enough to hurt. Selene turned and saw herself at three years old, small and terrified, running toward silver banners while the battle closed around her.
“Run!” the woman screamed. A masked man seized the child from behind. Another figure fought to reach her, but a blade flashed and bodies collided between them. The child kicked, bit, and screamed for her father until a cloth covered her mouth. Selene watched her younger self disappear into an enemy’s arms while her mother fell among the burning trees.
“This is not real,” she whispered. Yet she smelled the ash and felt the child’s panic inside her own chest. On a fallen banner, a silver wolf crest glowed through soot: Bloodwind.
Selene returned to the infirmary with a violent gasp. She lay on a narrow bed surrounded by Jackson, Alexander, and Ethel. Damp hair clung to her face, her hands had torn the sheet, and the room smelled faintly of scorched magic. Each man watched her differently now—Jackson with fear, Alexander with guarded concern, and Ethel with desperate hope.
Ethel stepped forward first. “You saw it, didn’t you?” His voice broke around the question. Selene stared at her shaking hands. “I was taken.”
The confirmation struck the room like thunder. Jackson’s expression tightened. “Taken from where?” Selene looked at him without the fear that once accompanied every answer. “From Bloodwind.”
The name altered the air. Ethel closed his eyes as relief and pain moved across his face together. Hearing Selene identify Bloodwind herself mattered more than any ledger. Alexander’s wolf reacted to the authority carried in her blood, while Jackson’s claim strained against the truth his pack had kept from her.
Lyla spoke softly inside Selene’s mind. It is real. You were not abandoned. You were stolen. Selene’s breath caught even though the memory had already shown her. Hearing it stated made every lonely year newly painful.
“Who took me?” Lyla could offer only fragments: masked warriors, bitter medicine, and a command spoken beyond the child’s sight. She remembered fighting the seal for years, surfacing in dreams whenever moonlight weakened it. The wolf had been suppressed with Selene’s memory and could not identify the voice, only the cold satisfaction behind it.
Jackson stepped forward. “This does not change everything.” Selene turned to him. “Doesn’t it? Your pack gave me a false name, false history, and a servant’s life after someone brought me here as a stolen child.”
He hesitated, then fell back on instinct. “You are still my mate.” The declaration avoided every accusation she had made. Alexander’s head turned sharply. “That bond is unstable.” Jackson’s wolf growled. “It exists.” Yet existence alone did not absolve him of what he had done with it.
“So does mine,” Alexander replied. Two claims hung over Selene while the far more urgent truth of her abduction waited. She felt anger begin to replace the confusion both men had exploited.
A sharp pulse cut through her chest. Selene winced as her vision blurred. Lyla urged her to stop resisting, but she did not know how to surrender to memories that threatened to tear apart every identity she possessed.
Human experience, Lyla’s awakening, Bloodwind power, and two mate bonds collided inside her. Every part demanded a different response—grief, defense, recognition, or flight. The walls shook in answer, and old cracks widened through the plaster. Alexander moved, but Selene raised one trembling hand to stop him, determined to remain the center of her own mind.
“She is destabilizing again,” he said. Ethel watched the structured pattern forming in the silver light. “No. She is integrating. The pieces forced apart by the seal are trying to become one.”
Selene dropped to her knees. “What does that mean?” Lyla wrapped around her consciousness. It means you are becoming whole. The idea frightened Selene because wholeness felt less familiar than survival.
“I don’t want this power.” The ancestral voice returned, calm and unyielding. Power is not all you are, but you cannot heal by denying what remains. Your enemies relied on you fearing yourself. It did not demand obedience; it refused erasure and reminded Selene that choosing how to use power was different from choosing whether it existed.
Silver light burst outward again, this time in ordered rings. Runes formed above the floor and rebuilt themselves around Selene rather than tearing through the room. Each circle contained another piece of her—human memory, Lyla’s instincts, and Bloodwind inheritance. Her body lifted several inches as the magic aligned them without allowing one to consume the others.
