All Chapters of Alpha’s Forbidden Mate: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The wind off the canal cut her face, but it wasn’t the kind of cold that ever stopped Carolina. She and Xander crossed the frozen slab of street together, boots making that frozen-hollow knock that sounded at once so present and so far away. Past the last fire barrel, past the two kids huddled in the wreckage of an upturned bus, right into the winter-gutted shell of what used to be a library. The city was always a palimpsest, one ruined past scribbled over another.They tracked the footprint code Wyn had left: stripes of chalk on a mailbox, a tangle of colored flag tape low on a hydrant, a spiral of broken glass under the stoop. The entrance to the stash was through a hollowed-out book drop, the inside slicked with someone’s old blood, too dried to worry about.Xander held the lid for her. “After you, boss,” he said, grinning even as his knuckles whitened on the handle.She dropped down, landing bad on her right ankle, but barely flinched. The air below stank of mildew and mold, the g

Morgan found her halfway down the narrow midship corridor, crouched with her knees drawn up, hands working a strip of sailcloth into knots. The air was layered: tinned tomatoes and boot rot, the spicy bite of riverweed burning in the makeshift stove below. “If you want space,” Morgan said, “don’t pick the only passageway everybody uses to piss.”Carolina grunted, let the knot hold. “Just thinking.”“Don’t waste it on us. We’re not going to be interesting for at least another day.” Morgan sat, stretching her legs out until their boots collided. “Lyra’s fever broke. Wyn’s scamming the pantry. And Xander,” she dropped her voice, “wants to talk to you.”Carolina didn’t look up. “About what?”Morgan shrugged. “You, I guess. Or maybe him. He’s never been clear on the distinction.” A flicker of something crossed her face. “He says you’ll know.”She did. But she wasn’t ready for it, not even after everything. Not after last night’s tangle of hope and desire and the kind of hunger that didn’t

For days, the crew hovered at the edge of remembrance and forgetting, cobbling a steady existence from the leftover currents of Siphon’s chaos. With Ember’s protection tacit, nobody came for them. Wyn started organizing poetry nights in the shell of an abandoned freezer vault, drawing crowds of basement dwellers and exiles who brought their own liquor and, sometimes, their own pain. Xander found himself promoted: from bruiser to engineer, fixing the battered scuffleships and, on occasion, the bodies mangled in dock-fights. Even Lyra’s restlessness, once the tempo of the whole city, seemed to slow, her errands returning with more laughter, less blood on her sleeve.And Carolina—Carolina built a life. By accident. She ran a clinic from a gutted windmill, its sails snapped from an old brawl but its floors swept and sun-bright come morning. At first, the patients were familiar: stabbed junkies, union kids with pneumonia, sometimes even the sanctum guards, faces hidden under cheap masks. B

Somewhere past midnight, when the city’s shouting dulled to the background, Carolina descended the winding stairs and found Xander in the wetroom, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands black with engine grease. He was coaxing life from a burnt-out circuit, head bent, grin flickering in time with the arc lamp’s buzz.“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” she said, settling on the slop-sink beside the workbench.Xander made a performance of considering. “Is this… concern?” he teased, not looking up.Carolina shrugged, but there was an unfamiliar, pleasant ache under her breastbone. “You’re a mess.”He wiped his fingers on a rag, then ran them absentmindedly through his own hair, leaving a streak of soot in the silver. “Been up for hours, actually. Needed something to fix.”There was a softness in his voice, something she’d only heard once before—the day she’d found him collapsed outside the windmill, blood soaking his shirt, pride worse off than the wound.She nudged his knee with hers. “Doesn’t the

There were days, now, when Carolina woke with the weight of sunlight already warm on her back. She would stretch, catlike, along the fresh sheets, the move jostling Xander into a rumble of protest. Since the armistice, they’d taken up the habit of sleeping in, or, more truthfully, refusing to leave the bed until they’d mapped each other’s curves and scars and the shape of the morning’s every hunger. She’d learned the art of slow, selfish sex: the drag of nails up his flanks, the taste of his pulse pressed beneath her tongue. Sometimes they fucked in near silence, gentled and dazy, sometimes with the old desperation, as if they could outpace the memory of a thousand bloody dawns.After, they would share the shower—gin-colored sunlight steaming through cracked tile, the water running in sticky red streaks some mornings, antiseptic on others, and sometimes, when the city slept, only clean and hot.She’d never been the sentimental sort, but the simple acts of being alive—breaking bread, b