Chapter 85

Chapter 85: Chapter 85

I must have fallen asleep sometime between fear and exhaustion. One moment I was staring at the ceiling, counting the shadows that looked like eyes, and the next, the world had shifted beneath me.

At first, there was only mist. Thick and cold, curling around my ankles like smoke. My body felt light, too light like it didn’t belong to me anymore. I tried to move, but every sound was swallowed by the fog. Somewhere in the distance, a low whisper carried my name.

"Ellie."

The voice was old, ancient, even. It wasn’t cruel, but it was heavy with something that felt like warning. I turned toward it, though I couldn’t see anything beyond the veil of grey.

"Who’s there?" My voice echoed oddly, bouncing back to me as if the mist itself were mocking my question.

"Do you wish to go home?" the voice asked again, closer this time.

My breath caught. "Home?"

The mist thinned slightly, revealing a shape a hunched silhouette wrapped in a cloak made of shadow and light. As she came forward, I saw her face: lines like dry riverbeds across pale skin, eyes clouded with white but seeing everything. Her hair, silver as moonlight, hung long and tangled. And yet... there was power in her. The air around her trembled with it.

"You’ve wandered far from where you belong," she murmured. "But the threads that pulled you here can still be unwoven."

I took a step closer. "Who are you? Can you help me get back?"

The witch smiled a small, almost pitying curve of her lips. "Help you? Perhaps. But not without a price."

I hesitated, every instinct screaming that nothing in this world came without one. "What do I have to do?"

She lifted one gnarled finger and pointed upward. The mist parted just enough for me to see a vision shimmering above us: the psycho Alpha, his eyes burning like dying embers, his expression unreadable. He stood in the center of what looked like a cage of light.

"Your fate is bound to his," she said. "The only doorway that leads back to your world lies within his heart."

I blinked. "His heart?"

The witch nodded. "To return, you must make him love you. Not pretend, not act, not deceive. Real love the kind that breaks chains, not forges them."

I felt my stomach twist. "That’s impossible. He’s-he’s not even capable of that. You’ve seen what he does."

The witch’s eyes gleamed faintly. "Even monsters can love, child. It is the rarest curse of all."

My knees felt weak. "And if I can’t?"

She tilted her head, listening to something I couldn’t hear. "Then you will stay. Forever. Between worlds, never belonging to either. A shadow in his house, a memory in your own."

The mist around her began to swirl faster, as if time itself were unraveling. I reached toward her. "Wait how? How do I do that? How can I make him"

But she was already fading. "You already have what he craves most," she whispered. "You just don’t know what it is yet."

The fog swallowed her whole. Darkness pressed in again, thick and suffocating. Then I was falling down, down, through a void that tasted like ash and moonlight. I screamed, but the sound went nowhere.

I jolted awake with a gasp, heart hammering so hard it hurt. Sweat clung to my skin. The dorm was still dark, the air still heavy. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if I was still dreaming.

Joan stirred in her bed across from me but didn’t wake. Everyone else was asleep, breathing evenly, unaware that the world had just shifted again.

I sat up slowly, hugging my knees to my chest. My hands were trembling. "Make him love me..." I whispered the words, and they sounded insane out loud. The psycho Alpha love? The same man who terrified the entire pack, who smiled at pain, who looked at me as if I were both a puzzle and a mistake?

But the dream had felt real. The witch’s eyes had seen through me. I could still smell the fog, still hear her fading words: You already have what he craves most.

"What could that even mean?" I murmured.

A sound drifted through the hall. A floorboard creaked just once. My head snapped up. No footsteps followed, but I felt it again: that familiar weight of being watched.

I pulled my blanket tighter, pressing my face into the fabric to muffle my shaky breathing. I didn’t know what scared me more that the witch had been real or that she might have been right.

And somewhere deep inside, beneath all the fear, something else stirred something like defiance, or maybe madness. Because if the only way out of this nightmare was through him, then I had to find a way to do the impossible.

I couldn’t sleep again after that dream.

The witch’s words kept replaying in my head like a broken record haunting, absurd, yet somehow terrifyingly real.

"The only way to go back... is to make the Alpha fall in love with you."

I stared up at the wooden ceiling of the room I’d been locked in, the dim light from the dying lantern casting flickering shadows that looked too much like claws. My chest tightened. "Fall in love?" I whispered into the darkness, my voice trembling with disbelief. "With him? The same man who dragged me through the mud, chained me to a post, and threatened to break my fingers because I touched his noodles?"

I pressed both hands over my face and groaned.

"This has to be a joke," I muttered, rolling onto my side. But no matter how much I tried to convince myself it was just a nightmare, the witch’s wrinkled face lingered in my mind, those glowing red eyes, the eerie calm in her voice, and that smirk that said she knew something I didn’t.

It wasn’t just a dream. I could feel it in my bones. The same way I’d felt the crash that killed me in my old world.

My heart clenched painfully at the memory the blaring horns, the shattering glass, my blood staining the taxi seat, and the desperate thought that flashed through my mind right before everything went dark: I just want to rest.

I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask to wake up in a world full of werewolves, with an unhinged Alpha who alternated between threatening to kill me and staring at me like I was his favorite dish.

"Love," I repeated bitterly, rolling back onto my back. "Right. I’d have a better chance of curing cancer with a potato."

Still what if the witch was right?

What if this was the only way out?

I sat up slowly, hugging my knees, my thoughts spiraling into madness. If love was the key, then I had to, oh Moon God help me make him fall in love with me.

The words alone made me want to puke.

I could barely survive five minutes in his presence without trembling, yet now I had to make him feel something other than bloodlust? How does one make a psychopath fall in love?

I thought back to my old life. I wasn’t exactly relationship material. My idea of romance was eating cold noodles in the hospital break room while dictating patient notes. My longest relationship was with my stethoscope. And now, here I was, in another world, forced into what might be the strangest mission of all time.

Operation: Make the Psycho Alpha Fall in Love.

"Step one," I muttered, trying to sound serious. "Don’t die before step two."

A knock startled me. My heart leapt to my throat. The door creaked open and one of the pack maids peeked in. Her scent, something flowery and mild drifted toward me.

But How was I supposed to make him the monster who made grown men tremble and omegas disappear fall in love with me? The very thought made me want to laugh, but it came out as a choked sob instead.

The dream had felt real. Too real. The witch’s yellow eyes had bored into me as though she saw every secret I’d buried. When I woke up, my heart was pounding, my palms cold and damp, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still somewhere close and watching.

But the longer I sat there, the clearer my thoughts became.

If there was even a chance that she was telling the truth, then I had to try. I had no other way out.

So, I made up my mind.

I was going to the Alpha’s quarters.

Even if my entire body screamed not toThe corridors of the pack house stretched endlessly before me, dimly lit by flickering sconces that threw more shadows than light. I pulled my shawl tight around my shoulders, my bare feet silent on the cold marble floors.

Every step closer made my heart beat louder so loud it drowned out everything else. I could feel my pulse throbbing in my throat, my stomach twisting in on itself.

"Just talk to him," I whispered under my breath. "Just talk. Smile. Say something kind. He’s just a man... just a man."

But I didn’t believe it.

He wasn’t just a man.

He was the psycho Alpha.

The monster with the beautiful face.

The one who spoke with velvet cruelty.

The one who smiled while others begged for mercy.

And I was walking straight into his den.

The Alpha’s wing of the pack house felt different colder, quieter, heavier. The air itself felt thicker here, like it carried the weight of every scream that had ever echoed through those halls.

The closer I got to his door, the more I could feel it the invisible current that always seemed to move around him, like static before lightning.

I stopped at the corner before the long hall that led to his room. The huge double doors stood at the end, carved with the crest of his bloodline. Two guards usually stood there, but today the hall was empty.

That should’ve comforted me. It didn’t. It only made it worse.

My throat was dry, my palms slick. I tried to breathe quietly, to convince myself I wasn’t about to faint. "You can do this," I whispered, pressing a trembling hand against the wall for balance.

I took one step forward. Then another.

The world seemed to slow with each step the sound of my heartbeat roaring in my ears, the faint rustle of my dress against my legs, the cold bite of the floor beneath my feet.

When I reached the door, I hesitated.