All Chapters of Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

REINAI've been keeping a list… not a physical one actually, I'm not writing anything down in this house, not until I know more about who has access to what. But a mental one. Running, updated daily, filed in the part of my brain that has always been better at collecting information than most people give it credit for.Here is what I know about wolves so far.One. The hierarchy is everything.I don't mean that loosely. I mean it in the way that oxygen is everything, not a preference, not a cultural quirk, just the fundamental structure that everything else is built on top of. Alpha at the top. Beta directly below. Then the elders, then the senior pack members, then everyone else in an order that I'm still working out but that every wolf in this house seems to understand instinctively without anyone having to explain it.Where does a human Luna fit in that structure?Great question. Nobody seems to know. Or nobody wants to say.The looks I get when I walk into a room range from open ho

REINAI found out about some of the laws by accident.Damian left a pack document on the kitchen counter, I don't know if it was intentional or not, I genuinely cannot tell with Damian, he operates on a level of deliberate that makes everything look accidental and I read it because it was there and information is information and I stopped apologising for wanting to understand my own situation about a week into this marriage.Most of it was administrative. Pack governance, territory boundaries, protocols for external relations, blah blah blah. The kind of document that reads like it was written by someone who genuinely enjoys paperwork, which is fine. Every organisation needs that person.Then I hit page nine.Page nine is where they keep the rules about human mates.And page nine is… look, I'm going to be honest, page nine made me sit down at the kitchen counter and read it three times to make sure I was understanding it correctly because surely, surely nobody actually operates like t

REINAThree things happened on my sixteenth day in Zaden Cole's house.I made a friend and I made an enemy.And I decided firmly that I was done being furniture.It started with the coffee machine.I'd been losing the war with it every morning for two weeks. Every morning I stood in front of it like it had personally wronged me and every morning it won.This particular morning I was in the middle of pressing buttons that did absolutely nothing useful when someone came in behind me and said…"Third button on the left. Then the sun one. Wait for green."I turned around.She was around my age. Close cropped natural hair. The kind of face that kept its cards close but had warmth underneath if you looked for it. Running gear. The easy posture of someone who covers ground for a living.I followed her instructions. The machine hummed to life immediately"Thank you," I said. "I've been fighting this thing for two weeks.""I know," she said. "I've watched you fight it."I looked at her. "And y

REINAI should have gone straight to my room after the kitchen.That's the thing about hindsight. It's always so clean. So obvious. You should have gone left instead of right. You should have taken the other hallway. You should have done the sensible thing and gone upstairs and locked your door and stayed there until morning.But I didn't know yet. I didn't know that this house had specific corners that belonged to specific people, and that wandering into the wrong one at the wrong time was the kind of mistake that only needed to happen once.I was coming back from the kitchen with a glass of water I didn't particularly want. It was late. The house was quiet in that heavy way it got at night, all that space and silence pressing in from every direction. I had learned to move through it without making noise.I was halfway down the east corridor when I heard her."You're still up."I stopped.Kira was leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor. Arms crossed. Red hair loose aroun

REINAI wasn't trying to eavesdrop.I want that on record, even if the only person keeping record is me. I was not standing outside Zaden's office with my ear pressed to the door like some desperate, lovesick girl with nothing better to do. I was walking past. That's all. I was walking past and the door was not fully closed, what was I supposed to do…cover my ears?I kept walking.I just... walked slowly.It was Damian's voice first. Low, the way it always was, like a man who had learned very early that how you said something mattered as much as what you said."The investigator came back with nothing again," he said. "Third time this month."A pause. Then Zaden's voice, and something in the tone of it was different from the flat, cold authority I was used to hearing from him."There has to be something," he said. "She was on the western boundary. Someone should have seen her. Someone should know something.""It’s been weeks," Damian said carefully. "And she was human. No pack connecti