Chapter 70

Third Person POV

The rogue attacks began. Small, outlying villages began to report an uptick in violence along the borders of the Royal pack territory.

First along the northern and western borders. Then the southern, and finally the eastern.

Living anywhere near the deep forest that surrounded the territory was never without risk. The woods were full of rogues, and attacks were known to happen.

But this was different.

This was…systematic.

From every side of the territory, villages reported attacks, missing community members, travelers violently assaulted as they moved between towns, farm animals stolen.

Soon a cry of alarm was ringing from one end of the kingdom to the other. People worried that the realm was descending into the chaos the Royal Alpha had worked so hard to raise it out of when he took the throne.

People were confused, with no clear reason for the attacks. And they were scared about what it all might mean.

And then it got worse.

Royal Alpha POV

I stood, stunned, among the burning remains of what had been a prosperous small town.

Everywhere I looked was absolute devastation.

“Alpha, sir, we’ve completed our sweep of the area,” said Beta Garrett, removing his helmet.

My own Beta, in full armor. For a moment my mind flashed back to the earliest days of my rule, when I also wore armor, and never went anywhere without my sword and a trusted soldier to watch my back.

Towns and villages had burned then, too.

I blinked away the memories of that terrible time, struggling to draw myself into the present.

“Are there any survivors?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

Garrett looked down. “None that we found, sir.”

No survivors.

Again.

It was the same everywhere I went along the border towns I’d visited.

My council had advised against going personally to what was quickly becoming a war front, but I knew I needed to see for myself what was going on.

For weeks now the reports had been coming in, rogue attacks, destruction of property, loss of life.

I’d needed to see. And I’d known it would be bad.

But I didn’t know it was going to be like this.

“Sir…” Beta Garrett was watching me, and I knew he could see the emotions fighting to take control of me.

The grief for the lives lost.

The killing rage now burning to exact its revenge.

“What are we going to do? Our forces are stretched thin, trying to protect the borders on all sides. We can’t take much more.”

A piece of paper fluttering in the dirt caught my eye. I walked closer and saw it was a bit of newspaper.

The bold, all capitalized headline screamed up at me:

INSANE ROYAL ALPHA PAYS ROGUES TO ATTACK OWN PACK?!?

So that was the latest rumor, was it?

I closed my fist around the paper, crumpling it.

“You’re right, Garrett. We can’t do anything else. Not alone.”

I turned to him. “Get everyone ready. We’re going to call on our allies.”

And call on them we did. For two weeks I traveled from pack to pack, visiting the Alphas and Lunas of every territory that shared a border with mine.

“We must band together,” I told them. “These rogues aren’t going to stop with just the Royal pack. Soon enough they’ll be attacking your packs as well.”

I asked for aid - enforcers, food, supplies.

I asked for information, anything to help us solve the mystery of who was actually behind these devastating attacks on my realm.

But everywhere I went, something felt off.

When I met with Alpha Damien of the Ice River pack, our ally to the north, his hard tone and cold stare were the same as they had always been.

But there was something…

“We have no information to give you, sir,” he said. “And we have no aid. Our enforcers and supplies have already been sent to our own borders. We must protect ourselves first.”

He didn’t blink, and his expression never wavered. But I felt it, on an instinctive level.

Alpha Damien was lying about something.

It was the same with the Dark Moon pack, to the west. Alpha Oliver and Luna Danelle received me graciously, welcoming my security team and I with a meal and offering us rooms to rest.

And they claimed to have no information, no resources, to share.

And their faces were so carefully and completely blank.

At the end of the two weeks I had made the rounds to every single neighboring pack, and even a few beyond. And only a few allies had given me anything that might have been useful.

One agreed to send a garrison of their enforcers to the border. Another had promised a few truckloads of food.

I was exhausted from my travels. And I was increasingly suspicious.

Now back at the palace, I sat with Beta Garrett in my office, catching up on the reports I’d missed while we were away.

Our soldiers had succeeded in pushing the rogues back to the east, for a few days, but searches of the woods continued to turn up no sign of them.

Where were they hiding out? Where was their main headquarters?

For attacks this well organized, and coordinated over such a large area, they surely had to have a main camp somewhere.

If we could find that, we’d know where to concentrate our attacks.

But no matter where my soldiers looked, they’d yet to find that main encampment.

I dropped the latest report back onto the desk and rested my head in my hands, my eyes burning from all the reading.

But resting my eyes only felt good for a moment. Then the image of the headline from the destroyed village swam back into view.

I’d been seeing it every time I closed my eyes, for weeks now.

It had been driving me crazy. Why was it bothering me so much?? Rumors like that were to be expected in times like this.

But today, finally, something clicked.

Something finally made sense.

“Garrett,” I said, speaking slowly and carefully, letting the thought forming in my mind develop slowly.

“Yes, sir?”

“Read me the list of the packs we visited.”

Garrett seemed puzzled, but pulled out the list. As he slowly read the names of the different packs I thought of each one’s Alpha and Luna.

And I remembered that deep gut feeling I had when I met with some of them.

I remembered thinking that they were lying about something.

“Some of those packs have been allies of ours for a long time,” I said when he finished reading the list. “Others…”

“Damien of Ice River. Oliver and Danelle of Dark Moon. Half a dozen others. They all fought against me.”

I sat up straighter. “Every single one of those packs is now led by someone who directly tried to overthrow my father, or fight me for the throne.”

Garrett immediately saw where I was going with that line of thought.

“We thought they were just random rogue attacks,” he said.

“But then we realized that they were just too organized to be random. There was some kind of plan at work.”

And now I knew what that plan was.

Someone was trying to take over the Royal pack.

Someone wanted my throne.