Semua Bab RECLAIMED BY THE ALPHA: THE ALPHA’S HIDDEN HEIR: Bab 61 - Bab 70

“Or what?” He doesn’t step back. His chin lifts and his wolf presses against the air between us and mine presses back and the hallway hums with the weight of two Alphas refusing to give ground. “You’ll hit me? Go ahead. Hit me, Blackwood. Give me something honest for once instead of the blankets and the eggs and the soft knock at the door.”“You need to leave.”“You had her.” He steps closer until our chests are nearly touching and I can see the broken blood vessels in his eyes. “You had everything. The bond. The girl. The cabin and the promises. And you destroyed her on a Christmas morning because a photograph was easier to believe than her face.”“I know what I did.”“And now you get her back, not because you earned it, not because you grew, but because your blood matches hers and that’s all you have. Biology. Take the bond away and you’re just a man who believed a lie and married the wrong woman and throws tantrums like a little bitch when someone points it out.”My fist hits the w

EMILYNick is making pancakes in my kitchen at 7 AM, and I’m trying very hard to be a functioning adult about it.He showed up for the bond session twenty minutes ago with Mason half-asleep on his hip and a bag of groceries. Walked straight past me into the kitchen like he lived here. Didn’t ask if he could cook. Didn’t check if I’d eaten. Just started pulling out bowls, a whisk, the flour I keep on the top shelf. He reached it without stretching. The man is a tower. My kitchen was not built for towers.Mia is at the table doing homework she was supposed to finish last night. Mason is beside her drawing wolves on the back of her math worksheet. Both in pyjamas. Both acting like this is normal. Like Nick in my kitchen on a Tuesday morning whisking pancake batter is simply how the world works. Maybe for them it already is. The shape of things.For me, it’s a problem. He’s whisking in a white t-shirt and grey sweatpants that sit low on his hips. Every time he reaches for something on the

EMILYAlex walks into my studio at 3 PM on a Thursday carrying a cardboard box and looking like a man who slept in his suit and changed into fresh clothes that fit the same way the old ones did.Derek sees him first. I hear the typing stop and the quiet intake of breath and then Derek says, “I’ll be in the back,” and disappears without waiting for a response because Derek has survival instincts that border on supernatural.Alex sets the box on my cutting table. My grey sweater is folded on top. Mia’s rain boots beside it, the pink ones with the ducks, tucked neatly into each other. A bottle of the wine I like from the shop on his corner. And at the bottom, a framed photo of me and Mia at his apartment, the one from the barbecue last summer where Mia is on his shoulders and I’m laughing at something he said and we look like a family that works.He put the photo in the box. Face up. So I’d see it.“You said you’d mail these,” I say.“I lied.” He puts his hands in his pockets. Rocks back

"File it, Nick. He walked in here in pieces. He told me people leave and the jacket doesn't. He's five years old and he's already learned that objects are safer than people because his mother taught him that. File the motion."He looks at me for a long moment, and the space between us fills with something that has nothing to do with custody or Jessica or torn seams. The studio is quiet. Derek and Mason are gone. The afternoon light comes through the windows in long amber bars and catches the edge of his jaw, the grey of his eyes.He steps toward me. Close enough that I can smell cedar and soap and the warm thing underneath that I've stopped pretending I don't recognize. His hip nearly touches my knee where I'm sitting on the edge of the table."I wish he was yours," he says, and his voice drops so only I can hear it. "Mason. I wish I'd had him with you instead. I look at the way he holds onto you and the way you hold him back, and I think about what it would have been like if he'd bee

EMILYI take the stairs down instead of the elevator. No call ahead, no text to warn him, because the elevator is too slow and my body needs somewhere to put all of this, and the burn in my thighs is better than the alternative, which is screaming.Nick opens his door before I’ve finished knocking. Grey t-shirt, bare feet, glasses shoved up onto his forehead like he forgot they were there. His eyes move over my face and his hand comes up to reach for me. I step past it into the apartment before he can touch me.“I went to see Richard.”Everything in him goes still. “Alone?”“Yes.”“Emily.”“My mother’s death wasn’t an accident.”He stops breathing. I watch him remember to start again.“The brake lines were cut. Richard buried the investigation himself, killed it before it could go anywhere. And every thread he followed afterward traced back to Blackwood Holdings.” I’m saying the worst sentence I have ever said out loud, and my hands won’t stop shaking, so I press them flat against my