Lahat ng Kabanata ng Broken by his Luna The Alpha king second chance : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

POV Kristen I see him every morning now.That is the thing nobody tells you about letting someone into your building ..... that you cannot un-let them in. Every morning I take Eli downstairs at seven and every morning, with a reliability that I have stopped pretending to find coincidental, Dylan Cole is somewhere in the process of existing in the same building. Coming down from the third floor. Crossing the lobby. Standing at the mailboxes with the particular stillness of a man who is not checking his mail so much as giving the morning a moment to arrange itself.He nods.I nod.Eli, who has no awareness of the weight two adults can load into a single nod, waves with his whole arm the way children wave ..... enormous, committed, the kind of wave that means I see you and I am genuinely glad about it. Every time. Without fail.Dylan always waves back.The building has adjusted around him.That is the only way I know how to say it. Buildings do this ..... Mr. Petersen on the second floo

POV Kristen Derrik left my apartment without saying goodbye to me.He said goodbye to Eli ..... crouched down, hand on Eli's small shoulder, said something quiet that I could not hear from the doorway. Eli nodded seriously, the way he nods when he has decided something deserves his full agreement. Then Derrik stood up and walked past me in the hallway and the only thing he said was I'll be in touch. The door closed.I stood in the hallway and listened to his footsteps go down the stairs. Eli looked up at me from the kitchen floor. The puzzle was still spread between us ..... the whole world in forty pieces, everything in its right place. "Is he coming back?" "Yes." I says. "Okay." He says And picked up Rex, the Alpha wolf, and went to the couch.Just like that. No drama. No weight. Children move through hard moments the way water moves through fingers ..... completely, and then completely gone. I stood in my hallway and wished, not for the first time, that I knew how to do that.

I see her before she sees me.That is the only advantage I have and it lasts approximately four seconds. She comes through the door of Patsy's at two-fifty, right at the ragged end of my shift when the lunch crowd has cleared and the pre-dinner quiet has settled in ..... that specific hush of a diner between its two busy lives, when the coffee sits too long and the servers move slower and everything feels slightly suspended. She does not pick up a menu.She does not look around.She just sits, with her hands flat on the counter in front of her. I am at the far end of the room with a coffee mug in my hand.And the recognition hits me in the chest like a fist.Not surprise. Worse than surprise. The specific, physical pain of seeing someone who was once the person you called first ..... before your mother, before anyone ..... sitting on the other side of everything that broke.Priya.I set the coffee pot down.Slowly. Carefully. Because my hands need something to do that is not shake. I

POV KristenI tell him before he can find out another way.That is a deliberate choice and I make it the morning after the door handle ..... the morning after I stood in my hallway in my socks and understood that someone has been close enough to touch the entry point of the place where my son sleeps. I make coffee. I get Eli ready. I take him to Mrs. Yun and I say I need an hour. She looks at my face and says take two. Then I text Dylan one line. Courtyard. Twenty minutes.I need him to hear this from me.Not because I owe him information about Priya ..... she is not his story, she is mine, and the history between us belongs to a chapter of my life he has no deed to. But because someone touched my door handle at two in the morning and I have a breathing phone call saved on my phone and Rita still has not come back with a trace and the number of unknowns in my life is growing faster than my ability to manage them alone. Dylan has resources I do not have. He has eyes in networks I canno

POV Kristen He said no and then he left and I sat in my kitchen for a long time after.Not thinking. Not planning.. The coffee between my hands went cold. No.Not I'll try. He is not walking away. He has decided he is not walking away. I understand the difference. I have spent enough of my life receiving feelings dressed up as facts to know the real thing when it arrives without costume.I sat with it for three days.We did not see each other.No agreement was made about this ..... no text, no conversation, no choreographed distance. It was simply understood, the way things between us have increasingly been understood without being said. We passed each other in the lobby once ..... Thursday morning, Eli on my hip, Dylan coming down the stairs with his plain mug ..... and we nodded. The nod. The same nod as every morning except heavier, or maybe I am imagining the weight because I know what the morning before it contained. Eli waved his whole-arm wave. Dylan lifted two fingers. We we