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Home / Werewolf / BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA / Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

All Chapters of BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

190 Chapters

Episode 181

The face on the other side of the viewing port was mine, but the story written in her eyes was a horror I had only ever glimpsed in my deepest fears. This Lily’s gaze wasn’t weary or hopeful. It was hungry. A deep, cosmic hunger that had consumed everything in its path. And behind her, standing with the same rigid, sorrowful posture as our Warden, was Arthur.Her Arthur.But his eyes… his eyes were the same as the day he died in my arms. A bottomless, accepting sorrow. He was the Warden of this other Cage. His purpose: to contain the Devourer. To hold the woman he loved in a perfect, eternal, and tragic balance.I was staring into the eyes of the monster I could have been. He was staring at the man he might have become.The two Cages, perfect mirror images of struggle and choice, began to hum. A sympathetic vibration. The structures of our realities, so alike yet inverted, recognized each other. The air in our Sanctuary thickened, the light warping. The fledgling worlds we’d protected

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 182

The question hung in the air between our Cages, a hook in my heart. Is it better on your side?Before I could form an answer, a new thought-projection came from the Devourer. Sharper. A transaction.A trade, her mind-voice was a blade of polished obsidian. One day. I give you my power. You give me… this. She didn’t mean our world. She meant the feeling of it. The quiet. The simple, weary love. A single day of peace.The temptation was a physical force. I felt it, a dizzying rush—the memory of all the times I’d been powerless, afraid, brought to my knees. The promise of being the Devourer, even for a day, was a dark star igniting in my soul. To be the fear, not the afraid. To be the answer, not the question.And for her… to give that tormented, hungry soul a single day of rest in our garden? The compassion was a pain all its own.“No.” Arthur’s voice was a gunshot in the silent room. He was trembling. “Absolutely not. It’s a trick. She’ll consume everything. You felt her, Lily. You fel

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 183

The silence after the Mirror Cage drifted away was the heaviest I have ever known. It wasn’t peaceful. It was saturated. Soaked through with the echoes of a billion billion other lives, other choices, other pains. We had won. We were safe. Our Sanctuary was secure.And I couldn’t get out of bed.The point had evaporated. What was our small, messy happiness against the infinite, grinding sorrow of the multiverse? I had felt the Devourer’s hunger, yes, but worse, I had felt her relief at that single day of peace. And I had felt the utter, eternal tragedy of its removal. I had seen the Arthur over there, a Warden by choice, his love a chain. I had seen a version of my son that was a hollow, fated thing. Every happy memory I had was now shadowed by its negative image. Every laugh was echoed by a sob from another reality.The weight of cosmic empathy was a physical pressure on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.Arthur tried. He brought me food I couldn’t eat. He spoke words tha

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 184

He finds me in the garden, where he always does. But this time, his form is softer at the edges, like a photograph left in the sun. He doesn’t look at the roses. He looks at me, and his smile is tired. So tired.“I think I’m done, Lily,” he says. His voice is a whisper, the sound of pages turning in a book you’re about to close. “The story’s over. It’s time to let the echo fade.”The words should hurt. They don’t. They just… settle. A final, quiet truth. The ghost of my first love is retiring.There’s no anger left. It was burned away by years of shared patrols, of stilted dinners, of watching him protect the life I built without him. The complex sadness is a gentle weight, like a shroud of old velvet.Arthur is the one who insists. “We’ll send him off properly,” he says, his voice gruff. “A party.”It’s the most surreal, necessary thing we’ve ever done.We don’t hold it in the grand hall. We hold it in the kitchen. The heart of the house. The Warden brings a perfectly calibrated, non

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 185

He finds us in the garden, of course. He always does. But he isn’t carrying a new, strange beetle or a shimmering problem for us to solve. His hands are empty. His face, once so open, is now a map of quiet resolve. Our son. Our god-child. A man.“I have to go,” he says. No preamble. No softening. Just the truth, laid between us like a stone.The world tilts. The air leaves my lungs. I always knew this day would come. He was never just ours. He was the universe’s. But knowing it and hearing it are two different kinds of gravity.Arthur goes still beside me. I feel the jolt through our Shared Solitude, a sharp crack of fear and understanding. This is the last lesson. The ultimate act of parenting. Not teaching, not protecting. Letting go.“The Sanctuary is complete,” he continues, his voice calm, too calm for the earthquake he’s causing. “It’s stable. It has its guardians. Its purpose.” He looks from me to Arthur, his eyes holding a depth of love and a vast, terrifying distance. “I need

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 186

The quiet is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.It’s not the silence of the Anti-Chorus, that hungry void. It’s not the tense stillness of the balance. It’s the quiet of a machine that has finally finished its work. A soft, humming peace.There are no more crises. No more gods knocking at the door. The Sanctuary runs itself, a self-perpetuating ecosystem of the interesting and strange. Our son is out there, somewhere, building his own story. The house is empty.And we are… bored.I garden. My hands, which once channeled the grief of a million lost loves and wielded power that could sever souls, now spend their days pulling weeds. I feel the sun on my back, a simple, physical warmth. I watch a beetle navigate the stem of a rose. It is mundane. It is a miracle.Arthur writes his memoirs. He sits at the old kitchen table, a datapad before him, his brow furrowed. He’s not writing an epic. He’s trying to remember the exact shade of blue the sky was on the day we first met. He gets stuck fo

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 187

It’s not a battle. It’s a slow tide, and it’s going out.I’ve cheated this so many times. Fought gods, rewound time, grafted souls. But this… this is just a body. His body. The one he was resurrected in, the one that has carried him through all our wars and all our quiet years. It’s worn out. There’s no enemy to fight. No spell to break. Just the slow, inexorable closing of a circle.He’s in our bed. The same bed we’ve shared for decades. His hand in mine is light as a bird’s bone. I can feel every one of his years in the paper-thin skin, the prominent knuckles. I memorize the topography of it. The familiar scars are pale ghosts now.The stakes are not cosmic. They are the size of this room. The size of my heart.The temptation is a snake coiled in my gut. I still have power. I am still a conduit. I could pour energy into him, force his heart to beat, his lungs to draw breath. I could make a puppet of the man I love, drag him behind me for a few more years, a decade, a century of suff

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 188

The world is too bright. Too loud. The Sanctuary thrives around me, a symphony of weird, wonderful life, and I am a dead note in the middle of it. A ghost in the machine I helped build.The Warden comes. They stand beside me as I stare at the blue aster, the one he saw last. Their offer is gentle, born of a logic that has learned compassion.“The grief parameter is destabilizing your core functions,” they say, their voice not cold, but soft. “I can recalibrate it. Suppress the emotional data. You could live in peaceful order. A quiet end to the story.”It would be so easy. To let the sharp edges of this pain be sanded down to a smooth, grey nothing. To be a well-maintained monument.I look at them, this being of order who became a friend, and I shake my head. “No,” I whisper, my voice raw from disuse. “The pain is the proof.”The proof that it was real. That he was real.So I learn to live with it. It’s a slow, brutal education. I tend the blue aster. I water it, talk to it. I tell it

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

EPISODE 166

It is not a single perspective. It is the gentle, patient pressure of root tips against dark, moist soil. It is the dappled pattern of sunlight filtering through the canopy of the Thought-Trees, their leaves whispering secrets in a language of photosynthesis and memory. It is the slow, crystalline growth of the Singing Geodes in the northern caves, their harmonies a geology of sound. I am the rain that falls on the fledgling worlds, and I am the dry stone that waits for the rain. I am the boundary that holds it all, a membrane of remembered love and will.I am the Sanctuary. And the Sanctuary is me.I feel the Warden, often. They walk the paths not as a ruler, but as a steward. Their steps are measured, their presence a quiet hum of order that no longer fights the chaos, but tends it. They prune the branches of the Narrative Vines when they grow too tangled, ensuring the stories don’t choke themselves. They sometimes pause by the patch of blue asters, and I feel a ripple of complex da

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

Episode 190

I was the lakebed, the constant upon which these gentle changes played out. The sharp, personal ache of loss had long since weathered into a smooth stone—a permanent, bearable weight at the center of my being. It was no longer a wound, but a foundation.The Warden came less often now. Their work, too, was largely done. On this day, they found me not in the garden, but in the heart of the Sanctuary, where the light from the oldest, most stable worlds filtered down in soft, cathedral shafts. They did not speak for a long time, simply standing with their hands clasped behind their back, observing the perfect, quiet chaos.“The systems are in optimal equilibrium,” they said finally, their voice not a report, but a meditation. “The deviation rate has fallen to 0.0001 percent. It is… self-sustaining.”I understood. They were not just talking about the weather patterns or the energy flows. They were talking about me.My consciousness, once a bright, specific point of awareness, had diffused

Last Updated : 2025-09-30

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