All Chapters of Eyes of the Alpha: Chapter 11 - Chapter 15

I woke up in Michael's bed.Not Kenny's penthouse. Not my own apartment. Michael's bed, in Michael's brownstone, with morning light coming through ordinary curtains and the smell of coffee already brewing somewhere in the apartment.I lay still for a moment and took inventory of how I felt.Different.Not better exactly. Not worse. Just different in the way you feel after something has shifted so fundamentally that the version of yourself from yesterday feels like someone you used to know.Michael was already up. I could hear him moving quietly in the kitchen. No urgency. No 4 am disappearance. Just an ordinary morning unfolding around me like something I'd forgotten was possible.I sat up and looked around his bedroom in the daylight. Books on every surface. A worn wooden desk with papers stacked neatly. A jacket hanging on the back of the door. Evidence of a real life lived quietly and without performance.I pulled on my clothes from yesterday and went to find him.He was at the smal

He found me on a Wednesday afternoon.Not at a supernatural event. Not through Kenny's world or Michael's quiet brownstone or any of the spaces I'd learned to navigate over the past eight months. He found me at a coffee shop two blocks from my apartment, where I went every Wednesday at three pm because I was a creature of habit, and apparently that was information available to people who wanted it.I was sitting at my usual table by the window with my usual order going cold beside me and my phone face down on the table when someone sat across from me without asking.I looked up.He was not what I expected.I don't know what I'd imagined. Something dramatic maybe. Something that announced itself. Kenny's power announced itself. You felt it before he entered a room. Michael's stillness was immediately distinctive. I'd built Dain in my imagination as something you'd recognize immediately as dangerous.He looked ordinary.Late thirties maybe. Dark hair. Pale in the way of someone who spent

Kenny was already inside my apartment when I got home.Not the penthouse. Mine. The West Village apartment he paid for but never spent a night in. The one he didn't have a key to.Except apparently he did.He was sitting on my sofa in the dark with his coat still on and his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes full amber, and the sight of him there, in my space, my real space, the only place that had ever felt like mine, made something cold move through my chest."How did you get in?" I said."I own the building," he said simply.I stood in the doorway. "I didn't know that.""There are things you don't know," he said. "We're finding that out about each other tonight."The air in the apartment was thick with his power. I could feel it pressing against my skin the way it did when he was fully fed, except this wasn't satisfaction. This was something harder. Something with edges.I closed the door behind me and didn't move further into the room."Say what you came to say," I said."