Fated to My Forbidden Alpha – Episode 22
Darkness swallowed Selene, but it was not sleep. She fell through memory carrying heat, scent, and terror with cruel precision. When she opened her eyes, Blood Moon Manor had become a forest consumed by fire beneath a smoke-red sky.
Wolves screamed beyond the trees while blood darkened leaves around her bare feet. Selene felt no heat on her adult skin; she was a witness trapped inside a child’s fear. A familiar woman called her name through the flames.
Three-year-old Selene ran toward silver banners until a masked man seized her from behind. Another figure fought to reach her, but a blade flashed and bodies collided. The child kicked and screamed for her father until drugged cloth covered her mouth.
Her mother fell among the burning trees. A silver wolf crest glowed through soot on a torn banner, identifying the home erased from Selene’s conscious life. The memory did not ask her to believe it; every heartbeat already knew it was real.
Selene returned to the infirmary with a violent gasp. Damp hair clung to her face and her hands had torn the sheet. Her throat tasted of remembered smoke, and the drugged cloth still seemed pressed over her mouth. Jackson watched with fear, Alexander with controlled concern, and Ethel with hope made painful by fifteen years of loss.
Ethel asked whether she saw the attack. Selene stared at her shaking hands and said she had been taken from Bloodwind. Hearing her name the pack herself mattered more to him than any ledger or inherited crest.
Lyla confirmed that no family abandoned her. Someone stole the child and sealed the wolf along with her memories. For years, Lyla surfaced only in dreams when moonlight weakened the prison, never strongly enough to identify the voice behind the ritual.
Jackson claimed the revelation did not change everything. Selene faced him without the fear that once shaped every answer. His pack gave her a false history and servant’s life after accepting a stolen child, yet he still avoided the accusation by declaring her his mate.
Alexander reminded him a bond’s existence did not excuse what had been done with it. His own claim offered no simpler solution. Two Alphas spoke over Selene while the urgent truth of her abduction waited, and anger began replacing her confusion. She had spent a lifetime being discussed in rooms where her voice carried least authority. Awakening royal blood would mean nothing if fate only gave powerful men better language for the same exclusion.
A sharp pulse blurred her vision. Human memories, Lyla’s awakening, Bloodwind inheritance, and both mate bonds demanded different responses. The walls shook, but Selene raised one hand before either Alpha could touch her, determined to remain the center of her own mind.
Alexander called the reaction destabilization. Ethel recognized structured silver patterns beginning to form and corrected him. Pieces forced apart by the seal were attempting integration rather than destruction, though the process could still overwhelm an untrained consciousness.
Selene dropped to her knees and admitted she did not want the power. The ancestral presence answered without demanding worship. Power was not all she was, but denying it would preserve the enemy’s design; choosing how to use it remained entirely hers.
Silver light expanded in ordered rings. Runes formed around Selene’s human memory, Lyla’s instincts, and Bloodwind legacy, aligning each without allowing one to consume the others. The servant’s endurance became as essential as the heir’s authority, while Lyla guarded the boundary between inherited power and personal will. Her body lifted above the floor as the magic learned the shape of wholeness.
“I am Bloodwind.” The statement traveled through the manor as a return rather than a threat. Jackson’s wolf repeated mine, but uncertainty weakened the claim now that Selene carried authority older than Blood Moon’s ruling line.
Alexander’s bond strengthened as she accepted her identity, suggesting truth completed what distance and suppression had obstructed. He felt her first calm breath but did not treat the discovery as ownership. Its meaning belonged to a conversation Selene had not yet chosen.
Ethel sank to his knees in recognition. When he called her his daughter, something softened in Selene’s gaze, though childhood affection remained behind damaged doors. Integration gave her identity, not instant intimacy or an obligation to forgive time neither had controlled.
The light lowered her to the floor. Exhaustion replaced helplessness, and power settled beneath every breath. Control would require training no one in Blood Moon could provide, but Selene no longer mistook inexperience for weakness.
She demanded to know who ordered the abduction. The sealed report proved Blood Moon participation without identifying the mind that coordinated the attack, ritual, false records, and continuing silence across multiple reigns.
Lyla warned the seal was breaking from both sides. Whoever created it could probably feel Selene’s awakening, using the collapsing magic as a signal to locate her. The enemy might already be moving toward Blood Moon before its guards understood the danger. Worse, the spell carried traces of current pack wards, suggesting its creator had maintained access long after the original abduction.
Selene looked from Jackson to Alexander and finally Ethel. “Then we find them before they come for me again.” She would recover the records and memories herself, refusing any plan that used her as bait without consent. Their silence confirmed the worst possibility: the architect of her erasure was still alive.
