All Chapters of RECLAIMED BY THE ALPHA: THE ALPHA’S HIDDEN HEIR: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The hallway shakes.Not literally. The walls don’t move. But something shifts in the air, the pressure drops the way it does before a storm when the sky goes dark and the birds stop singing at the same time. The two teachers look up from where they’re crouched near the supply closet door and their faces go white.I know he’s here before I turn around. The bond announces him like a weather front, a wall of something enormous and electric that hits me in the chest and keeps going. And he is an Alpha, that speaks for itself.Nick is in the hallway. He’s not walking. Walking is what people do. He is storming through, his anger filling the air. His eyes find me on the floor with Mia and his face does something I will never be able to describe, no matter how many times I replay this moment.The mask rips. What’s underneath is raw and barely human. His wolf is right there, pressing against the inside of his skin, and I can see it in the way his shoulders have shifted forward, the way his han

NICKThe apartment is quiet when I get back. Mason is at Emily’s, fell asleep during the bond session, and she didn’t wake him. She just said, He’s out cold. I put him in Mia’s room.She didn’t ask. She just kept my son.I sit on the couch and I don’t turn the lights on. The city does what the city does outside the window and I sit in the dark with Richard Hale’s blood drying on my knuckles and think about what he said.“I didn’t orchestrate Christmas Eve. I didn’t send Marcus.Someone else led you to her.”I reach into my shirt. The chain is warm from my skin. I pull it over my head and hold it in my palm, the wolf pendant, split down the centre, my half. The metal is dull from six years of wearing it against my chest under every shirt, every suit, every night I slept alone in a house that smelled like Jessica’s perfume and felt like a sentence I was serving.Emily has the other half. Or she did. She was wearing it the night I gave it to her in the cabin, the night I told her I’d cho

NICKJessica’s office is on the thirty-second floor of a building her father bought her when she turned twenty-five. Glass walls. White furniture. The kind of space designed to look like taste but built on someone else’s money.I don’t announce myself at reception. I walk past the desk and the girl behind it stands and says “Sir, you can’t—” and I’m already through the door.Jessica is at her desk. Hair pinned back. Black dress. Red lipstick. Two mood boards behind her on the wall, both covered in fabric swatches and photographs that I recognise immediately because I stood in Emily’s studio this morning and looked at them on three screens.Emily’s work. Her necklines. Her draping. Her colour palette. The coat that took her three weeks to get right, pinned to Jessica’s wall like something she made over the weekend.“Nicholas.” Jessica leans back in her chair. Crosses her legs. The smile she gives me is the one she used to wear at pack dinners — warm for the room, empty behind the teeth

Noon hits, and the sales figures finally refresh.Derek stares at his monitor, blinks, then swivels the screen toward me. "Em. Look."I look.Sales haven't just crept up. They’ve doubled. The *WWD* article didn't just debunk Maison Lune; it blasted my name across the industry. My inbox pings in rapid succession. Nordstrom. Net-a-Porter. Two London stockists who ghosted me last season are suddenly asking for meetings.All because of Nick."We're going to need more production capacity," Derek says, already typing frantically. "Like, yesterday.""I know.""And a bigger studio. And a third coffee machine, because I am not surviving this on two.""Derek.""I'm celebrating. Let me celebrate."I let him. The constant, low-level hum of panic at the base of my skull finally quiets. My shoulders drop. It isn't just relief, relief is what you feel when a disaster misses you. This is the distinct, terrifying thrill of a door kicking wide open.Nick did this.He woke up before dawn, mobilized his

I go to the hallway closet where I stashed the bag from the studio. Navy tissue paper. I’ve been carrying it back and forth for two days, moving it from my desk to the car to the closet, trying to decide if this is too much. If it says something I’m not ready to say.I hand it to Nick. “It’s for Mason.”He opens it. Pulls out the jacket. Navy wool. Single button. Blue silk lining. He holds it up and stares at it and his hands go still and he doesn’t speak.“It’s just a jacket,” I say. “I had extra fabric and—”“You made this.”“It’s not a big deal.”“Emily. You made my son a jacket.” He runs his thumb along the lapel. Feels the lining. Finds the buttonhole, hand-stitched, the kind of detail only a designer would notice. “This is hand-sewn.”“It’s just wool.”“This isn’t just wool. This is—” He stops. Looks at me. Something moves behind his eyes that he doesn’t try to hide and I have to look at the floor because the way he’s holding that tiny jacket is doing something to my chest that