Underwater: The Silent Luna novel Chapter 156

Chapter 156

Malcolm answered after two rings.

“McCloud.”

The man sounded exhausted. Deeply so. Not merely tired, but worn in a way that sat under the voice itself. Joseph caught it immediately and wondered if he had called at the wrong time.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“Not at all, Joseph. In fact, we are still cleaning up the mess of the attack on my pack.”

Joseph straightened slightly.

“An attack?”

“A takeover, actually.”

That correction changed everything.

Joseph went still and listened harder.

Malcolm went on, his words roughened by strain and something dangerously close to despair. He said he had called Ethan a few days earlier to apologise for his behaviour and plead his case, but Ethan had refused to be bothered while on vacation. Then Malcolm spoke of what had happened to him. What he had feared. What had finally come.

He had lost his pack that night.

Not in the abstract sense. Not politically. Not through some minor shift in alliance. Lost it. Men had been compromised. Territory signed over. Power stripped out from under him while he was forced to watch and choose survival over pride. Joseph listened in disbelief as Malcolm said they made him sign away his territories to some anonymous Alpha. He had done it because his men were compromised and refusing would have meant the slaughter of his family and the people with him. He said he was lucky they had not killed him too. That the best part of his life, his pack, was gone. That most of his people were now with them. That whoever led the attack had said their Alpha would install his preferred Alpha over Malcolm in time. Malcolm’s days as a true Alpha were over.

Joseph could barely process it.

“What?”

He heard the word leave his own mouth and knew it sounded insufficient.

Malcolm repeated himself more clearly, as though Joseph’s disbelief needed spelling out. They had attacked. The men inside had been compromised. Malcolm had signed it over to save lives. He still technically ran Ceenas, but now he answered to a nameless, faceless Alpha, and even that arrangement would likely not last. Whoever betrayed him from within would probably be raised above

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Chapter 156

him in time.

“This is terrible.”

Joseph said it because there was nothing better to say in that moment.

Malcolm gave a humourless little sound on the other end of the line.

“You think? I will just advise you to watch your back. People have serious ambitions. There is no way they won’t come from your pack. I hope you have trustworthy men and your warriors will stand by you, or they might end up giving you the same deal they gave me.”

The warning sank deep.

Then Malcolm said he had to go.

Joseph excused him because what else could he do? Malcolm was clearly not in a good state, and Joseph could not drag more from him while the man stood in the wreckage of his own authority.

When the line went dead, Joseph sat there at his desk and stared.

Dumbfounded.

He could not fully process what he had just heard. If the situation had not sounded so dire, he might almost have laughed at the bitter irony of it. Malcolm had been given the same kind of deal he himself had once tried to force on them when they went to discuss union. A signature. A surrender. Territory made transferable by paper no matter how much blood and history stood underneath it. If Malcolm had allowed that earlier deal to succeed differently, perhaps none of this would have happened to him now. But that thought did not bring Joseph satisfaction. Only a cold awareness of how easily things could turn once power-hungry people started moving.

He leaned back and stared at nothing for a moment.

Why would anyone take over people’s packs like that? Why force signatures and ownership transfers? The question had one answer of course. Power. Territory. Resources. Control. But the scale of it unsettled him. This was not a petty rivalry. This was someone building something and doing it with patience and reach.

No matter how long a family had owned a pack, a signature on paper could strip it all away. Whether coerced or not, the law would still recognise it. That was why packs attacked one another. That was why strong defences mattered. That was why betrayal from within could destroy more cleanly than an enemy at the gate.

And Joseph knew, with a grimness tightening through him, that there were cracks in their own defence.

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Underwater: The Silent Luna