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Home / Werewolf / Caged By The Cruel Alpha / Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

All Chapters of Caged By The Cruel Alpha : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

140 Chapters

Chapter 1

"Get up, runt. The hall won't scrub itself." The boot connected with Wren's ribs before she was fully conscious — a sharp, practiced blow that told her exactly what kind of morning this would be. She didn't gasp. She'd learned not to gasp. Instead she rolled to her knees on the cold stone floor, pressed one hand flat against the wall for balance, and breathed through it: four counts in, four counts out, the way she'd trained herself in the first weeks of captivity when every morning brought new reasons to make noise. She didn't make noise anymore. Mara stood over her with her arms crossed and her lip already curling — a large woman with iron-grey hair and eyes the colour of old bruises. Head omega of the Blood Moon pack. Wren's personal architect of misery for the past five years. "I said get up." "I'm up," Wren said, and stood. Mara surveyed her the way she always did — that slow, contemptuous sweep from bare feet to unwashed hair, cataloguing every flaw with the satisfaction of

Chapter 2

"You stupid, useless girl. Do you have any idea what you've done?" Mara's hand connected with the side of Wren's face before the door to the servants' corridor had fully swung shut. The blow snapped her head sideways and sent a bright spray of pain from her cheekbone to her temple, and she stumbled back into the wall and held herself there, pressing her palm flat against the stone, riding the wave of it until her vision cleared. She'd been hit harder. She breathed. "My Lydia." Mara's voice shook with a fury so genuine it had stripped all her usual cold efficiency away. "She's been prepared for this for months. Months. Everything in place, everything arranged, and then you — a nothing, a slave, a cursed Ashford — stand in the back of that room like you belong there and he walks past every worthy woman in this pack to pick you." She grabbed Wren's hair and wrenched her head back, forcing their eyes to meet. "What did you do? What did you say to him?" "Nothing," Wren said steadily. "H

Chapter 3

"Who hit you?" The courtyard was grey with early light. Wren had expected to be collected by warriors and marched to the horses with the same disregard with which everything had always happened to her. Instead she stepped outside and found Cain Voss standing very still in the middle of the yard, and Mara three feet in front of him, and the question hanging in the cold air between them like a dropped blade. Mara hadn't heard her come out. Nobody had. Wren pressed herself against the door frame and watched. "Alpha Voss." Kaine's voice came from somewhere to the left, strained with diplomatic urgency. "Our head omega was simply — there was a misunderstanding this morning, entirely routine —" Cain didn't look at Kaine. His silver eyes were on Wren's face and had been since the moment she appeared, and they had identified the bruise on her cheekbone with a speed that told her it was the first thing he'd looked for. "I'll ask once more," Cain said. The words were perfectly quiet. Someho

Chapter 4

"You're watching him again." Wren didn't startle — she'd trained herself out of startling years ago — but she did look away from the far side of the camp, where Cain stood with his warriors in the grey morning light, and found Thorne watching her from two feet away with the mild, knowing expression of a man who had been observing people for a very long time. "I'm watching the camp," she said. "You've been watching the camp for two days." Thorne crouched beside the fire and poured water from a battered kettle into two cups. He handed her one. "I've been watching you watch it." He settled back on his heels. "You've counted the watch rotation twice. You know every name but Fen's — the younger one, on the eastern side — and you've assessed at least four potential escape routes and discarded three of them." Wren looked at him over the rim of her cup. "You're right about which one to keep," Thorne said. "For the record. The creek route, angling northwest. That's the cleanest." He met he

Chapter 5

"You can feel it, can't you?" Wren had not moved from the doorway. She wasn't sure how long she'd been standing there — long enough for the pale young woman in the bed to open her eyes, long enough for those eyes to find her with an alertness that was startling in a face that showed so little life. Sera's voice was thin, worn down to its essentials, but there was something precise in it. Something that paid attention. "The wrongness," Sera said. "Whatever it is that healers feel. You felt it." She watched Wren's face with clear, direct eyes. "You don't have to pretend you didn't." Cain stood to Wren's left, very still. She could feel his restraint as a physical thing — the effort it cost him not to prompt, not to pressure, not to fill the silence with all the desperation he was keeping carefully out of his voice. "I felt something," Wren said neutrally. "That's more than anyone else has." A ghost of a smile moved across Sera's face. "The last healer who came — Cain tracked her do

Chapter 6

"You didn't sleep." Wren looked up from the worktable. Thorne stood in the workshop doorway with two cups and an expression that had given up on pretending to be neutral. "I slept," she said. "On the floor," he said. "Against that table leg. For possibly three hours." He set the cups down. "I'm not criticising. I'm stating what I observed." She straightened in the chair — she'd moved to the chair at some point in the middle of the night, which represented progress — and rolled her neck carefully, taking inventory of what ached. Her back. Her hands, cramped from holding a journal for hours. Her eyes, which had read until the lamp burned low and then read in the growing grey of dawn when the light came back. She'd read every journal on the shelf. Not thoroughly — some of the older entries were in a shorthand that would take time to decode. But the shape of them was in her now, the overall architecture: fifteen years of Elara Ashford's work, her methods, her patients, her thinking.

Chapter 7

"Stop," Wren said. "Right now. Stop." She pressed her palms flat on her thighs and shut her eyes and breathed. The warm gold light faded, retreating back into her skin the way heat retreats from a hand pulled from a fire, leaving the faint afterimage of itself behind her eyelids. Sera was very quiet. When Wren opened her eyes, Sera was watching her with the careful stillness of someone who'd spent six months learning not to make sudden movements around things that might go wrong. "Was that bad?" Sera asked. "No." Wren turned her hands over. Her palms looked normal — just the familiar cracked skin and work-roughened knuckles. "It wasn't bad. It was just — more than I expected." She exhaled slowly. "I haven't felt that in a very long time." "What did it feel like?" Wren considered the question honestly, because Sera had earned honesty. "Like putting weight on a leg that's been injured," she said. "The capacity is there. The structure is intact. But there are nine years of disuse t

Chapter 8

"You're not reading," Sera said. "You've been staring at that same page for six minutes." Wren looked up from the journal. The morning light was grey and steady through Sera's carefully cracked curtains, and Sera herself was sitting up higher than usual today — a good day, or at least a better one. She had colour in her cheeks that hadn't been there four days ago. Not much. Enough to notice. "I was thinking," Wren said. "About what?" "The curse." She set the journal down on the bed between them, open to the page she'd been studying. "My aunt's final theory — she believed it couldn't be removed, only displaced. Crowded out. The healer's gift essentially has to fill the space the curse has been occupying, a little more each session, over weeks or months. Until there's no room left for the curse to sustain itself." She tapped the page. "The technique is there. But it requires the sessions to be consistent — each one building on the last. Interrupt the sequence and you start over." "A

Chapter 9

"All non-essential personnel, back to quarters. Now." The command came from Cain's voice in the corridor below — not loud, never loud, but carrying through the walls with the particular authority of a sound that expected to be obeyed. Wren was already dressed. She'd been dressed for ten minutes, since the guard's face changed at the door and she'd read the shape of what was coming. She went out into the corridor. The pack house was controlled chaos — warriors moving with the tight efficiency of people who'd drilled for this, senior staff appearing from doorways, Thorne already at Cain's shoulder with a map unfolded in his hands. No one was running, which meant it wasn't an active attack. But no one was unhurried either. She pressed herself to the wall to let them pass, watching. Cain moved through the centre of it with the stillness that anchored everyone else's movement, absorbing information from the reports coming in on his left, giving instructions on his right, his face doing

Chapter 10

"The warrior's name is Dren. He's been with us for two years." Thorne said it in Cain's study, low-voiced, the way bad news was best delivered — without preamble, without softening, just the fact placed in the room and allowed to be what it was. Wren sat in the chair by the window and let them have the first moments of the conversation, because she understood the architecture of it was between two men and their shared understanding of what this meant for the pack. Cain hadn't moved from his position near the fireplace. He had the stillness of a man who was using every available resource on not reacting. "How long has he been communicating with Shadow Fang?" he asked. "Unknown. Possibly the full two years, possibly recent — we don't know when Vorik learned you'd gone looking for an Ashford, or when he began positioning people accordingly." Thorne paused. "He's currently at the eastern watch post. He doesn't know we've noticed." "Keep it that way." Cain's voice was level. "I want to

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