The Night Before

REINASofia called at nine.I'd been sitting on my bed staring at the wall and not thinking about any of the things I was thinking about, and her name on my screen felt like a rope thrown into deep water.I picked up before the second ring."Hey." Her voice was warm"Hey," I said."You sound tired.""I'm fine.""Reina.""I'm a little tired."She made a sound that meant she didn't believe me and was choosing to let it go, which was its own kind of kindness.Then she told me about her week, the university program, a professor she found annoying, a girl in her cohort who'd become something more than a study partner, the way the city looked at night from her window.I lay back on my pillow and listened and let her voice fill the room."You're not talking," she said after a while."I'm listening.""You're being weird.""I'm always weird.""You're being a different kind of weird." A pause. She had good instincts, Sofia. Always had. "Are you okay?I thought about the honest answer. About the

Exposed

ZADENI gave them until morning.Damian thought I should move immediately. I told him no. I wanted them to sleep in their beds one last night believing they were safe. I wanted them to come down to breakfast and sit at the table and pour their coffee and feel completely, entirely untouchable.And then I wanted to take that from them.I called the full pack at nine.Not a meeting. A gathering.Callum and Tobias both came.Callum came in talking, easy, relaxed, making a comment to one of the warriors near the door. He scanned the room with the particular casualness of a man who has learned to perform relaxed as a survival skill. His eyes moved over Damian. Moved over me. Found nothing on either of our faces and took that as good news.It wasn't.Tobias came in quieter. He stood near the back. He didn't look for exits…that was interesting. He looked at me directly, just once, and then looked at the floor. A man who has decided something.Reina was there. She stood with Lena near the far

Aftermath

REINAThe house felt different the next morning.Not quieter exactly. More careful. Like everyone had agreed without speaking to move a little slower and talk a little lessI noticed it the moment I came downstairs.Pack members who usually moved through the corridors without looking at me glanced up when I passed. Like I'd become something they were recalibrating around.I didn't know what to do with that so I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and looked at the garden and didn't think about Callum.I thought about Callum.That was the thing nobody warns you about betrayal. It's not the anger that gets you. The anger is cleanIt's the smaller things.The memory of laughing at something he said. The easy way he'd talked to me in those early weeks when almost nobody else would, when I was still mapping this place and figuring out who was safe and he'd seemed so uncomplicated, so genuinely warm. The specific comfort of thinking you've read someone correctly.That's what it cost

What Elias Wants

ZADENThe letter arrived on a Tuesday.Official channels. Pack seal, courier, the kind of formal delivery that announces itself as deliberate. Elias Blackthorn didn't do anything by accident and he certainly didn't send letters by accident. Every word of it would have been chosen. Every implication placed exactly where he wanted it.I read it three times.Then I set it on my desk and looked at it for a while without touching it, the way you look at something you're still deciding how to handle.The language was diplomatic. Of course it was. Elias was too intelligent for anything else, direct aggression leaves evidence, direct aggression can be answered with direct aggression, and Elias preferred games where the board wasn't visible to everyone in the room.What he was proposing was a meeting. On Blackthorn territory. Framed as a gesture of goodwill, a chance to resolve the border tensions before they escalated further, an opportunity for two Alpha families to come to a mutual understa

All Chapters of Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His: Chapter 71 - Chapter 74

The Night Before

Exposed

Aftermath

What Elias Wants