Novels by LisaWrites

The doctor knocked softly before entering, a woman in her forties with kind eyes and a clipboard that probably contained Jayda's death sentence written in medical terminology."Ms. Marlowe, I'm Dr. Sarah Chen, I've been reviewing your test results." She glanced at Lucas, then back to Jayda. "Would you like privacy for this conversation?""He already knows," Jayda said quietly, her voice still rough from whatever they'd given her to help her sleep. "You can say whatever you need to say."Dr. Chen nodded, pulled a chair closer to the bed, sat down with the careful movements of someone about to deliver terrible news. "Your collapse was caused by a combination of severe anemia, dehydration, malnutrition, and physical exhaustion, all of which are being compounded by the progression of your lung cancer."Lucas made a sound like he'd been punched."The training you've been doing," Dr. Chen continued, her voice gentle but firm, "has accelerated your physical decline in ways that are frankly d

She followed him into the small office tucked into the corner of the garage, the space barely large enough for a desk and two chairs, the walls covered with racing posters and schedules and photographs of drivers Lucas had trained over the years.He closed the door, turned to face her with an expression that held equal parts fury and fear."You almost killed yourself and another driver out there," he said, his voice tight with control that was clearly costing him effort to maintain. "Your vision blurred mid-turn, I saw it happen, I saw you overcorrect and almost cause a pile-up that could have injured or killed multiple people.""I'm fine," she said automatically, the lie so practiced now it came without thought. "It was just a mistake.""It wasn't a mistake, it was your body failing you mid-race, this is exactly what I was afraid of, exactly why I didn't want you racing yet." He moved closer, his hands gentle as they gripped her shoulders. "You're not healthy enough for this, somethi

"I heard you were racing again," Antonio said, working to keep his own voice equally neutral even though concern bled through despite his best efforts. "I wanted to see if it was true.""It's true," she said, setting her helmet down with more force than necessary. "Now you've seen it, you can leave.""Jayda—""You don't get to do this," she interrupted, her voice shaking with fury she'd apparently been holding back for weeks. "You don't get to divorce me, tell me you're too busy making money to stay married, tell me our relationship is consuming time you don't have, then show up here acting like you care what I do with my life.""I do care," he said quietly."You have a funny way of showing it." She moved past him toward the garage, her shoulder brushing his arm in passing, the brief contact sending electricity through him that he had no right to feel. "Go back to Lisa, go back to your empire, go back to whatever was more important than our marriage, just leave me alone.""Racing kill

She couldn't talk, could barely breathe between coughs, her vision starting to blur at the edges while panic clawed up her throat. Finally the spasms eased enough that she could pull in a gasping breath, could wipe her mouth with a shaking hand, could try to compose herself before Lucas made it to her location.But he was already there by the time she managed to straighten up, already pulling open the car door with concern etched deep into every line of his face."What happened?" he demanded, his hands already checking her over like he expected to find injury."Just a coughing fit," she managed, her voice raw and rough. "Went down the wrong way."His eyes narrowed as he took in her pale face, her trembling hands, the way she was very carefully keeping her right palm hidden. "Let me see your hand.""It's fine.""Jayda." His voice held a warning. "Let me see your hand."She had no choice but to show him, to let him see the blood smeared across her palm even though she'd tried to wipe mo

"I need to tell you something," Jayda said after her third lap, her breathing still labored but better than it had been three weeks ago, her lungs not quite burning the way they used to after even minimal exertion.Lucas looked up from his stopwatch, his expression already wary like he knew whatever she was about to say would be a problem, like he'd learned to read the particular tone in her voice that meant she'd done something he wouldn't approve of. "What?"She took a breath that didn't quite fill her lungs properly. "I got a call yesterday from David Chen, East Coast Amateur Racing Circuit, he offered me a spot in a race.""And you told him no," Lucas said, not a question but a statement of what should have happened, what any rational person who'd been training for only three weeks would have said."I told him yes."The silence that followed felt heavy enough to crush her, thick with disappointment and anger and something that might have been fear. Lucas set down his stopwatch wit

Three weeks after the divorce, Antonio Moretti sat in his office staring at a photograph that had just been delivered by his private investigator.Jayda at Riverside Track, dressed in a racing suit, climbing into a car, her expression focused in ways he hadn't seen in years.She was racing again.After three years of silence, after walking away from everything she'd built, after promising him she was done with that dangerous life, she'd gone back the moment he wasn't there to stop her.He should have expected this, should have known that taking away her freedom, her passion, her identity would only make her crave it more once she was finally free of the cage he'd built around her. But seeing the photo—seeing her in that racing suit, seeing the determination etched into every line of her body even from a distance—made something twist painfully in his chest.She looked alive in that photo in ways she hadn't looked during the last year of their marriage, looked like the woman he'd fallen

Matthias's pov The three weeks passed differently from the weeks before them.I noticed this without deciding to notice it — the way you noticed a change in weather not by looking at the sky but by the feeling of the air on your skin, something shifted at the level of atmosphere rather than event. The days had a quality they hadn't had before, something that moved forward rather than simply passing, and I understood after the first few days that the difference was this: I had stopped managing what I was feeling and had started simply feeling it, and the two experiences occupied the same hours entirely differently.She left a herb cutting on my office windowsill.I found it one morning when I came in early, a sprig of something I identified after a moment as rosemary — for memory, she had told Petra, I remembered that — placed in a small glass of water on the sill where the morning light hit it, and no note, no explanation, just the thing itself, and I stood looking at it for longer t

Lyra's pov He came to the healing house in the late afternoon with a letter in his hand and something in his face that was not quite uncertainty — Matthias did not do uncertainty, not visibly — but the particular quality of careful that he carried when he was about to put something in front of me and genuinely did not know what I would do with it.He held the letter out and I took it and read it.The Council of Northern Territories. A quarterly gathering of neighboring Alphas and their mates. Three weeks from the date of writing. Formal occasion, neutral ground, the Harrow Pack's territory hosting this cycle.I read it twice and looked up at him."I want to take you," he said. "I think it's the right move. But it's your choice and I'm not making it for you."I held the letter and sat with what it contained — the weight of walking into a room full of Alphas and their mates, of being seen publicly as his, of standing in a political arena I didn't fully understand yet with my silence an

Matthias's pov The letter arrived with the morning correspondence, unremarkable in its envelope, the Council of Northern Territories seal on the wax — the quarterly gathering of neighboring Alphas and their mates, hosted this cycle at the Harrow Pack's neutral ground, three weeks from the date of writing.I read it twice and set it on the desk and looked at it.I had not attended the previous two gatherings. The first because Elise and the boy had been dead for four months and the idea of walking into a room full of Alphas and their living mates and their ordinary unbroken lives had been something I was not prepared to do and did not do. The second because a year later I was still not prepared and had calculated, correctly, that my absence would be interpreted as grief and therefore forgiven. The third time would not be forgiven. The third time would be interpreted as something else — instability, weakness, an Alpha who had lost his footing and was no longer worth the political inves

Lyra's pov After he left I sat at the desk and put my hand to my neck and stayed very still.The room had resettled into its ordinary quiet — the lamp burning, the sounds of the mansion in its evening routine, the patrol at the wall — and everything looked exactly as it had looked before he knocked on the door, and nothing was the same, and I sat at the desk and took that in without trying to arrange it into anything manageable yet.The first thing I established, sitting in the quiet with my hand at my neck, was that I was not afraid.I turned that over carefully, the way I turned important things, feeling its edges, checking it for the places where it might be performance or wishful thinking or the careful construction of a woman who had learned to tell herself she was fine so many times that the telling had become indistinguishable from the truth. But it held. It held in the way that true things held when you pressed on them — not giving, not shifting, just there, solid and certain

Matthias's pov I stood outside her door for longer than I had stood outside any door in recent memory, which was notable given that standing outside doors had become something of a pattern in the past weeks.The difference was that this time I knew exactly what I was about to say and had no uncertainty about the decision, only about the execution — about how to put it in front of her in a way that gave her a real choice rather than a frightened one, how to explain what I needed to do and why without making it something she felt she had to agree to, how to be someone she could trust with this when she had every historical reason to trust no one with anything that involved her body and what happened to it.I knocked.A moment, and then her voice — the knock she used on the nightstand when she was telling me to come in, two raps, which I had learned to read as clearly as speech, and I opened the door.She was at the desk with the private notepad, which she closed when she saw me — not q

Matthias's pov I was at the desk with the morning's correspondence when Knox started.Not with a question, not with the running commentary that had been his default register for thirty-seven years — just a steady, present awareness that sat at the edge of my consciousness like a wolf who had settled in a doorway and was not going anywhere and was not pretending to be doing anything except exactly what he was doing, which was waiting.I kept working.*The tea,* Knox said, after a while.I set the pen down.*You know exactly how she takes it,* he said. *The amount of honey. The temperature. The strength. You learned it without deciding to learn it, without making a project of it, without any conscious effort whatsoever — it simply entered you the way things enter you when you are paying attention to something because it matters to you rather than because it is your responsibility.* A pause. *That is not obligation, Matthias. That is not duty. That is not an Alpha attending appropriatel