Todos os capítulos de The Alpha's Regret: His Secret Hybrid Heir: Capítulo 81 - Capítulo 90

The hotel kitchen had been emptied of anything useful decades ago, which made it private without being comfortable, which was exactly the kind of space Xander and Elena needed at 5 AM after the kind of night they'd had.Elena was sitting on the counter because the chairs were gone. Xander was leaning against the opposite wall. There was no light except what came through the gap under the door from the lobby, and neither of them had reached for a flashlight, which was partly tactical and partly the particular comfort of darkness when you needed to say difficult things without your face being an additional variable."Tell me what you know about the Archive," Xander said.Elena had been quiet since he'd come inside and found her in the kitchen, which meant she'd been thinking rather than resting, which was not surprising but was noted."Not much," she said. "They're not in Council documentation — not the public kind. There are references in older Silver Wolf oral history. My grandmother

The three of them were already inside the lobby when Xander came up from the basement.Not far inside — they'd stopped just past the threshold, which was either courtesy or tactical positioning and Xander suspected both. The Carrow Ridge wolves were arranged in a loose arc behind them, Kaelen at the center, and the tension in the room had the particular quality of wolves who were ready and were holding because their Alpha was holding and they were waiting for that to change.The Collectors — that was the word that arrived in Xander's mind immediately, before he'd consciously chosen it — were not what he'd expected. He wasn't sure what he'd expected. Not this.Clean grey coats, the kind of grey that had been selected rather than defaulted to. The lead one was male, forties, hair that had gone silver early and been left alone. Behind him, two others — a woman and a younger man — who stood with the precise spacing of people who had done this enough times to have developed an unconscious

The Carrow Ridge forest was old in the way that some forests were old — not just the age of the individual trees but the accumulated weight of a place that had been left alone long enough to develop its own logic. The canopy was dense enough to break the rain into mist before it reached ground level. The undergrowth had its own layer of quiet. Sound moved differently here, absorbed rather than echoed.Sterling's drums had stopped at the tree line.That was the first useful thing. Kaelen's people knew this forest and Sterling's didn't, and the drums stopping meant the advance had stopped, which gave them distance. Not enough distance — not with the Archive walking in on foot behind them — but the kind of distance that was better than nothing and worse than comfortable.Xander found the limestone ravine from Kaelen's description and made the call to stop.No fires. Cold camp, which was the term for the specific misery of sitting still in the cold and wet without the option of addressing

The first Hound moved into the ravine like it was solving a problem.That was the accurate way to describe it — not hunting, not attacking, processing. It navigated the limestone slope with the fluid efficiency of something that had been built for exactly this terrain, and it was fast in the way that things without hesitation were fast, each movement a committed answer to a committed question.It was tracking the silver ring in Maya's eyes.Xander understood that in the first five seconds, watching the Hound's orientation — it wasn't responding to movement or sound or heat, the way trained trackers responded. Its head was fixed on a point, and the point was Maya, and when Maya moved two steps to the left it adjusted its bearing with the immediate certainty of a compass needle finding north."It's locked on her," he said."On both of us," Silas said. He was watching the second Hound enter the ravine from the upper lip, tracking along the limestone wall with the same unhurried precision

Xander was moving before Sarah finished the sentence.Not toward the entrance, not toward Sterling — toward the rubble, toward the hand visible at the debris edge, toward the specific section of collapsed limestone that Silas had been standing near when the wall came down.Marcus was a step behind him.They didn't coordinate out loud. They'd been working alongside each other long enough that the coordination happened in the reading of position and momentum, Marcus taking the larger slab on the right while Xander went for the angled piece that was bearing load from above, and the first thing they learned about the debris field was that the limestone had come down in interlocking layers rather than a pile, which meant removing one piece shifted the load to adjacent pieces and required continuous reassessment as they worked.They did the reassessment. They kept working.Elena was at the medical perimeter she'd established at the debris edge, which was the right position — close enough to