Revenge to the Alpha Mate - Chapter 230

Chapter 230: Chapter 230
Jacob’s Perspective

Letting Celena be the one to expose those bastards first was a blow to my pride. Damn it, I’d almost bought their “regular worker” act. But hot on the heels of that embarrassment came a surge of fierce pride—that’s my girl. Sharp, cool-headed, always seeing through the disguise when it counts. Standing there in the cold white light, a smear of the Hunter’s blood on her fingertip, her eyes as cold and piercing as a frozen lake… she was damn mesmerizing.

Pride aside, we had work to do. The fury of being deceived and the anxiety of what was being hidden made my hands less than gentle.

The wet thud of fist on flesh, the subtle crack of bone shifting, sounded unnaturally loud in the icy room. The Hunters held out at first, cursing us with venom in their eyes. But when I bent one man’s wrist back to a sickening angle and calmly asked if he wanted to be a cripple for life or start talking, fear finally outweighed their precious “Hunter’s honor.”

“Below… the entrance is below…” the one with several missing teeth slurred through a mouthful of blood, his eyes flicking toward a section of ordinary-looking concrete floor in the corner.

Following his gaze, I scraped away some deliberately scattered debris and grime with my boot, revealing a metal plate almost flush with the floor, its edges betraying thin seams. On the nearby wall was an inconspicuous switch, disguised as an old circuit breaker.

I threw the switch without hesitation. A low electric hum vibrated through the floor as the metal plate slid sideways, revealing a dark staircase descending into blackness. A wave of even colder air rushed up, carrying a complex cocktail of antiseptic and an indescribable metallic-chemical scent. This was it.

“Thanks,” I said coldly. Then I delivered a precise, measured blow to the side of each man’s neck, ensuring they’d be out for hours. We used plastic zip ties and duct tape we found to truss them up like holiday geese, gag them, and dump them in the corner.

“Let’s go,” I said to Celena, leading the way down the stairs.

It was colder below than in the freezer above—a deep, bone-seeping chill that felt inherently wrong. The stairs were short, opening into a rough concrete corridor, its walls sheathed in white frost. The lighting was dim, provided only by a few sickly emergency lamps. I grabbed two greasy, thick work coats from a hook by the entrance and tossed one to Celena. “Put it on. Don’t freeze.”

The corridor ran straight for several dozen twisting meters before forking. The problem was the spherical security cameras mounted above the junction, their red LEDs blinking faintly.

“Head down. Don’t face them,” I muttered, pulling the slaughterhouse coat’s hood up to shadow my face. I hunched my shoulders, mimicking the weary slump of a worker, and moved quickly beneath the camera’s gaze. Celena followed my lead. Once we were out of its main field of view, I found a cluster of cables on the wall, fumbled for the right ones, and yanked. The camera’s red light died.

“Clear.”

We stood at the junction. Two identical, frost-lined concrete tunnels stretched into unknown darkness. The air was a chaotic soup of smells: antiseptic, chemicals, a faint tang of old blood, and something else… the residual scent of living things—suppressed fear and pain. It was faint, washed thin by the cold and chemical reek. Even my nose was struggling; everything here smelled frozen.

“Which way?” I asked Celena.

She closed her eyes, drawing in a deep breath, her brow furrowed in intense concentration, trying to latch onto the faintest thread.

After a moment, she opened her eyes. Uncertainty lingered there, but her finger pointed decisively left. “This way… feels… stronger. I can’t explain it.”

“I trust you,” I said, turning left without hesitation.

The corridor began to feature heavy metal doors. Some were shut tight with rusting locks, others slightly ajar. We carefully pushed a few open to find storage rooms cluttered with discarded machine parts or empty shelves, everything thick with dust. As we went deeper, the environment changed. Rough concrete gave way to smooth, easy-to-clean synthetic paneling. Then, we passed the first room with a window.

The glass was thick and foggy, but the shapes inside were discernible: a stainless-steel operating table, a surgical lamp, a trolley beside it laden with glinting instruments and glassware. The table and floor bore dark, stubborn stains—old blood. But the room was empty. No living thing. No corpse.

I knocked on the glass. A dull, solid thud. It was incredibly thick, probably bulletproof. A chill deeper than the ambient cold settled in my gut. This place was wrong. Deeply wrong.

We moved on, passing more of these glass-walled rooms. Some were empty, others held more complex, unnameable machinery, tangles of pipes and wires. Silence pressed down, broken only by our muted breathing, our footsteps echoing in the icy hall, and the distant, constant hum of ventilation.

Then, we stopped outside a larger room at the end of the corridor.

Through a wide observation window, we could see the center of the room dominated by a massive, coffin-like silver metal unit, connected to banks of blinking lights and monitors. The unit was sealed, but its head section was a transparent canopy of reinforced glass.

A human figure lay inside.

My heart stuttered. Beside me, Celena went rigid; I heard her sharp intake of breath.

It was a man, dressed in simple white garments. His face was hard to make out through the slightly reflective glass, but the build… was familiar. He was utterly still, no visible rise and fall of his chest.

Celena threw herself at the door, frantically twisting the handle. Locked. She started throwing her shoulder against the heavy metal, the impacts producing dull, futile thuds.

“Let me!” I pulled her back, took two steps back, and gathered myself. The wolf’s strength flooded my limbs. I turned my shoulder and drove it with all my force into the door near the lock!

Crash! Bang!

The metal around the lock groaned and buckled inward, and the door sprang open.

We rushed in, straight for the unit.

Up close, through the clearer canopy, the face…

Thick, dark brown hair. A strong jaw. A prominent nose… Even with his eyes closed, his face devoid of all color, I could never mistake him.

“Brett…” I whispered, my throat tight.

It was Brett.

But he looked… strange. His skin showed no signs of decay, not even lividity. It was as if he’d just passed, or more accurately, like he was in the deepest sleep—a sleep that was cold and utterly lifeless. Lights on the unit blinked a steady green. Tubes ran into his arm and chest.

“Oh God… Brett…” Celena’s voice trembled. Her hand hovered over the glass, tracing the outline of the Hunter who had been like a brother to her. Tears spilled down her cheeks unchecked, her mouth twisting with a wild, desperate hope. “It’s him… it’s really him! He’s not dead… he’s not dead, right, Jacob? How do we wake him up? How do we open this… this damn thing?”

Celena’s Perspective

We found him. We actually found him.

At the end of all that cold glass, strange machinery, and unsettling silence, it was him.

I couldn’t smell him. I could barely see his face through the glass. But the surge of recognition came from somewhere deeper than sense—a soul-deep jolt of connection, like the strongest current. It was him. It could only be him.

A tsunami of joy washed over me, drowning all the anxiety, fear, and exhaustion of these past days. I lunged forward, needing to touch him, to confirm he was real, that he was warm. The door wouldn’t open! Why wouldn’t it open? Vines of panic instantly coiled around my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs. No, not like this. We found him. We can’t lose him now!

Jacob broke the door down. We rushed in. We got closer. We saw.

It was Brett. The face from my childhood memories, always with a warm smile, secretly slipping me candy, now lay pale, peaceful, and lifeless. Not decayed. Even “preserved.” But that was worse than seeing a corpse. It made my heart clench in a different, more agonizing way. He was like… like a fairy-tale prince under a spell, sleeping in a glass coffin.

“He’s not dead… he can’t be dead…” I whispered, hot tears tracking down my icy cheeks. I was laughing and crying. I beat my palms against the cold metal shell. “Brett! Wake up! It’s me, Celena!”

No response. The unit hummed silently, its green lights pulsing with a steady, heartless rhythm.

Jacob and I searched like madmen for a way to open it, breaking nails on the cold seams without feeling the pain. Hope was right here, trapped inside this damned metal box.

Then, the voice spoke.

“Step away from him, you mongrel freaks.”

It was like a breath of air from the deepest pit of hell, freezing the blood in my veins and locking my joints.

Stiffly, slowly, I turned my head.

The light from the doorway outlined a silhouette I could never forget. Even aged, bloated, and disheveled, the hatred in his eyes, the way he held the gun… it was etched into my marrow.

Karl.

Brett’s… father.

Also the man who had conducted more experiments on me than any other.

He held a large-bore, well-oiled double-barreled shotgun, its twin muzzles steady and leveled at us.

Those dark circles stared, twin voids promising annihilation.

All sound drained from the world, leaving only the frantic drumbeat of my own heart and the roar of blood in my ears. The wild joy of finding Brett was obliterated, replaced by an ice-cold fear. A deeper, more familiar despair took hold.

We… are in danger.