All Chapters of Caged By The Cruel Alpha : Chapter 91 - Chapter 98

The scout reports started three days later.Not dramatic—scouts reported things constantly, the border monitoring that Cain had run as standard operations for years. The difference was in the pattern, and she had learned enough to read patterns. Isolated reports of wolf movement in unclaimed territory were ordinary. The same unclaimed territory showing increased traffic, moving in one direction, over four consecutive days was something else."He's not in exile," Kellian said, at the morning briefing that had become a daily fixture since they returned. "Not in the sense of gone." He set the most recent report on the table. "He's in the deep forest between here and what was Shadow Fang territory. Moving camp every two days. Gathering.""How many?" Cain said."Eleven confirmed at last count. Probably more—wolves who haven't been spotted yet." Kellian paused. "They're not all Shadow Fang. There's a mix—pack markings from four different territories, plus some with no

The camp was worse than she had expected and better than she had feared.She could see it from her position in the tree line—three hundred feet back, as agreed, with Drace beside her and clear sight lines to the extraction route. A temporary settlement in the truest sense: rough shelters made from branches and salvaged material, fire pits that had been deliberately kept small to minimize the visible smoke. The kind of camp built by someone who expected to move it soon and had not invested in permanence.The guards were well-positioned for what they were working with. She counted five visible from her angle—probably more out of sight, covering the directions Thorne had flagged as the likely approach routes. Which was why they were approaching from the direction Thorne had flagged as least covered.She watched Thorne's signal move through the team like water moving through a channel—silent, smooth, each wolf reading the next beat without sound. The distraction element

They buried the two who had not come back at dawn.Not from the rescue—the rescue team had all come back, battered and in Thorne's case bleeding but alive. From the village. Two of the twelve hostages had died in Vorik's camp in the days between the raid and the rescue—a man in his fifties with a heart condition that the camp's conditions had aggravated beyond what anyone could have reversed, and a young woman who had tried to escape on the third day and whose injuries had been beyond what eleven days of being a hostage had left anyone in a position to treat.They were already gone when the team reached the holding area. The surviving ten had told Thorne this in the first minutes of the extraction. She had heard it on the road home and had held it since.The dawn burial was small—pack members, family, Cain at the front with the flat, steady quality of an Alpha performing his most essential function. Wren stood beside him. She was not performing anything. She was sim

She had expected ruins and she found ruins.What she had not expected was the feeling of it.The foundation was stone—old construction, built to last, the kind of walls that took generations to lay properly and had survived the burning because stone did not burn the way wood did. The upper structure was gone entirely: collapsed in on itself eighty years ago and since reclaimed by the forest in the patient way that forests reclaimed things, sending up saplings through the rubble, threading root systems through the gaps between stones, slowly returning the material of the building to the material of the ground.She walked through what had been the gate and stood in what had been the courtyard.It was smaller than she had imagined. She had built it large in her mind—the place her family had been before the purge, the home her grandmother had left when the wolves came. It should have been large. Instead it was a modest house on a modest plot, the kind of home where