Semua Bab Caged By The Cruel Alpha : Bab 31 - Bab 40

"I told you to stay inside the pack house." "You told me to stay inside during the battle," she said. "The battle has moved. I'm outside." She crouched beside him and reached. He was sitting against the base of a large oak at the northern edge of the perimeter, which told her how far the fighting had pushed back — they'd driven the Shadow Fang formation away from the tree line and this was where he'd stopped. Garth was with him, and two warriors she recognised, and the particular careful stillness of the people around him told her more about the severity than anything anyone was going to say out loud. She reached. Ribs — three of them, definitely, possibly four. The fractures had the pattern of impact from something large and fast, and the injury to the tissue around them suggested the impact had been severe. There was also a deep laceration across his left forearm still bleeding more than it should, and underneath all of that, the way his body was holding itself, something in his

"His name before Shadow Fang was Maren Asch. He was born in the Ashenveil territory." Thorne set the report on the table with the careful hands of someone who had been reading it for an hour before he brought it in and was still deciding how much weight to give each piece. Wren was very still. Cain, across the table, was very still. They had not told Thorne yet about what the letters contained. This was the thing that made Wren understand, with sudden and complete certainty, that the universe had a particular sense of timing. "Ashenveil," she said. Keeping her voice level. "The southern territories." "A village about two days' ride from the Shadow Fang border," Thorne said. "Small. Historically associated with a family called Wick who had some kind of craft practice — the records are old and not precise. The village is mostly gone now. It dissolved about fifteen years ago when the population moved or was absorbed into surrounding territories." He paused. "Strand — Maren Asch — left

"You've been very careful not to look tired," Sera said. Wren was in the chair. She'd been in the chair for the past twenty minutes, which was how long it had taken her to admit that she wasn't going to be able to do the session today without at least sitting for a while first. The gift was rebuilding — she could feel it, the slow reassembly of something that had been comprehensively drawn on — but it wasn't ready for the full session that Sera's ongoing recovery required. She'd told Sera this. Sera had told her to sit in the chair, which Wren had done. "I'm fine," Wren said. "You said the same thing in Blood Moon when your ribs were bruised," Sera said. "Or I imagine you did, because that's the sort of thing you'd say." "My ribs weren't bruised. I said I'm fine." "You're also very careful not to let anyone see when you've hit a limit," Sera continued, as though Wren hadn't spoken. "You do this thing where you go very still and your responses get slightly more precise. Like you'r

"He wants the gift," Wren said. "Not to destroy it. To control it." The council room was full. Calix was not in it — he was in a proper room now, still guarded but no longer in the holding room, given the status of a provisional ally that no one was entirely comfortable with but that the information he'd brought had made necessary. She'd spent an hour with Cain going through what Calix had told her before coming to the council, so Cain was able to confirm and build on the summary rather than receiving it fresh. She appreciated this — the difference between an Alpha who received information in council and one who had already processed it was the difference between a room that could move forward and one that was still processing. "Explain what you mean by control," Garth said. He'd been watching her with the full-attention expression since the meeting started, the one she'd come to understand as his version of trust — he didn't ask questions when he was dismissing something. He asked

"He moved up the timeline." Fen came into the council room at a controlled pace that told Wren more than his words — not running, because running was for true emergencies, but the purposeful pace that said this is the kind of news that changes the shape of everything, delivered as quickly as compatible with not alarming the pack house. Cain was already standing. Wren was at the map table. Garth and Brynn were in the room because they were usually in the room these days — the informal council that had emerged over the past week, the core group that had collectively decided it was more efficient to be in the same space than to keep reconvening. "How do you know?" Cain asked. "Because Rissa sent a rider," Fen said. "An hour ago. She got a message — from Vorik, directly, which she forwarded to us as agreed. He's offering the eastern corridor a separate deal. Separate from the conflict with Black Hollow." He looked around the room. "He's offering to leave the eastern corridor entirely a