Fated and Claimed by Four Alphas
Chapter 80: Secret Quest

Chapter 80: Secret Quest

****************

Chapter 80

~Spring’s POV~

That did it.

Lilith’s hand moved fast, and she sent a slap across my cheek. My head turned with the force, strands of hair flying over my face.

The sting was instant, but so was my reaction.

My hand moved before my mind could even form a thought, cracking across her face with enough force to make her stumble back into one of the old wooden desks.

Her hand clutched her cheek, red and raw now, and her eyes blazed with unshed tears and hatred.

"You—you hit me!" she screamed.

I stepped forward, calm. "Yes. And I’d do it again."

Lilith in all her forgotten glory, lunged, fingers curled into claws, but I dodged, spinning slightly to shove her shoulder as she came at me. She stumbled again, barely catching herself.

"This school was never yours," I whispered, glaring down at her. "You just borrowed the power. Spring earned it."

"Don’t speak to me like you’re above me!"

"I don’t need to speak like it," I said coolly. "You already know it’s true, and unlike you, I have a chance of getting back up."

She panted, chest rising and falling in sharp jerks. Her mascara was smudged, her pride bleeding out through the corners of her mouth.

And I wasn’t afraid of her anymore.

"You’ll regret this," she spat. "All of you will."

I leaned in, voice low and steady.

"Get your things, Lilith," I said, pulling my curls over my shoulder. "Because come sunrise, the only thing left of you at Noxshade will be your scent in the hall."

And with that, I turned and walked out.

Her wild scream echoed behind me, but I didn’t flinch because, unlike her, I still had a place here.

And I didn’t need a crown to prove it.

***************

~Spring’s POV~

The sound of the heater and the faint rustle of leaves outside my window were the only sounds as I woke at exactly 3:04 a.m., groggy and shivering under the thick comforter.

Someone had covered me up. I didn’t need to guess who.

Rhys.

A smile tugged at my lips. For all his sharp looks and surgeon-like precision, he still remembered the smallest gestures even when I wasn’t awake to see them, well, I guess his profession almost helped make that possible.

But the warmth was short-lived.

Because the moment my eyes adjusted and the memories of yesterday filtered through my mind, the emergency, the secret message, the rare plant, the untraceable herbalist—it was like an internal switch flipped.

I sat up immediately, tossing the blanket aside and reaching for my phone from the bedside drawer.

Then I got up and went to pick up my laptop from my reading desk.

I climbed back onto the bed, legs crossed, hair a wild mess around my face, and booted everything up.

There was definitely no more sleep for me tonight. A new message blinked across my screen after I logged in to the account I created.

It was a message from my brother...

[RHYS / 1:12 a.m.]: Do you really think this could work?The compound... even if it’s what you say it is, we can’t contact him. He’s a ghost. No digital signature in the last six years. And even if we did find him, who’s to say he’d give us anything?

I stared at the blinking cursor for a moment before typing.

[ME]:He will. If you find him, he will.

The response came back almost instantly.

[RHYS]: That’s hard.

I gave it a little thought and then added.

[ME]: And if I find him—and the herb? Will you believe me, then?

Atop the chat was showing typing. I waited for his message and after a minute or two, he responded.

[RHYS]: Yes, I will.

I stared at the last line a little longer before closing the message window and opening a private terminal window.

I needed more than just luck. I needed access.

I dug into everything Eryx had taught me, Spring... two years ago—the late-night pranks, the simulations, the dumb hacker games that once seemed like child’s play.

I remembered his snort when I asked him what VPNs did. The way he rolled his eyes before teaching me how to spoof IPs and scramble log-in trails.

"One day," he’d said, sitting cross-legged beside me in the attic, "you’re gonna need to disappear behind a screen. It’s safer that way."

I didn’t think I’d be using it to track down a ghost herbalist no one else could find.

And yet... here I was.

I changed my DNS settings, masked my metadata, cleared all visible history, and accessed blacklisted medical directories across other cities.

Still, I came up with nothing. I hacked into three travel security logs—still nothing until I found a thread buried deep in a closed herbalist forum on an encrypted server, with a last login timestamp two years ago.

The user name? GreenWolf13.

I tracked the posts.

Photos of withered mountain herbs, notes about hard soil, a tagged location on one image: Hofenthal Ridge, Lunaris.

That was it.

It wasn’t much, but it was more than Rhys had.

I exhaled slowly, the flickering screen casting pale light across my face. I pulled the blanket around my legs again and leaned closer.

Hofenthal Ridge.

From what my search revealed, it was remote, off-grid, and secluded, exactly where someone like him would be hiding.

A soft chime echoed from my phone. Another message. I ignored it for now. My eyes were fixed on a blurry picture of the man standing behind a wild garden of overgrown blue-stemmed plants.

The caption read: "Some things grow better in solitude."

I knew that herb. I’d helped Linnae plant it once under moonlight, its petals warm to the touch even in winter air. The priestess had called it Arisae Root, a nickname for the plant. Why, because my cousin, Nile, had risen, woken up after much difficulty.

One of the four ingredients needed for the Verdant Pulse cure.

My fingers trembled slightly from the possibility.

This was real. It was finally happening.

And I might be the only one alive who knew what to do next.

I sat back against the headboard and stared at the man’s face in the photo: his faint smile, wind-rumpled beard and thick gloves.

I smiled softly because I knew I wasn’t going to fail; someone’s life depended on it.

Then I whispered, "Now to find you, Thorne."