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홈 / Romance / ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE / Chapter Twenty-Three: When They Start Removing Witnesses

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Chapter Twenty-Three: When They Start Removing Witnesses

작가: Author Rowan
last update 게시일: 2026-03-26 06:28:12

I read the headline three times.

Each time it says the same thing.

Dr. Felix Maddox. Body found. Lincoln Park.

I put the phone down on the counter and I look at it the way you look at something you want to be wrong about. Dominic reads my face before he reads the screen. He turns the phone toward himself and I watch him go through the same process I just did. Reading it. Absorbing it. Arriving at the same place.

He straightens up slowly.

"He was the only person inside the clinic who could confi
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  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Fifty-Three: The Woman Who Saved Herself the Trouble

    I sit up.Two in the morning and the room is dark and my phone is lit and Petra Adair has sent me an email with the specific confidence of someone who has decided that being found is less dangerous than being hunted.I read the subject line three times.“You've been looking for me. I thought I'd save you the trouble.”I opened it.The email is long. Longer than I expected. Not the short, operational communication of someone covering their tracks. Something else. The length of someone who has been composing this in their head for a while and is finally putting it somewhere outside themselves.I read it once quickly to get the shape.Then I read it again slowly.She starts with Callum.She says she was placed near him eighteen months ago by a handler she identifies only as V, which I assume means Voss, Hadrian, before his health declined to the point where Orlan began managing operations directly. She was given a specific brief. Get close to Callum Sinclair. Learn what you can about Dom

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Fifty-Two: The Case That Wouldn't Close

    I look at Judith's message.Petra is still beside me. She reads the screen over my shoulder and her hand tightens on mine briefly before she releases it, which is Petra's way of saying go, I'll be fine, go handle the next thing.I call Judith.She answers immediately. She sounds the same as she always sounds, which is like a person who has chosen composure as a permanent state rather than an occasional tool. But underneath tonight there is something additional. The specific quality of information that surprised even her."Tell me," I say."The detective on the Maddox case received new evidence this afternoon," she says. "Submitted anonymously. A thumb drive was delivered to the precinct by courier at two-fifteen, which was during the session."During the session."Someone submitted it deliberately while we were occupied," I say."The timing appears intentional," she says. "The drive contains security footage from the clinic. The secondary entrance. The night Maddox died.""Nora was on

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Fifty-One: What She Left Before I Arrived

    I don't move.The phone is in my hand and the interim director's voice is still in the room and Dominic is beside me reading my face the way he always does and I am completely still.My mother.At Harlow Fertility Clinic.Eight years before I walked through those doors."She was a patient there?" I say."Not a fertility patient," the interim director says carefully. "Our records show she visited the clinic once, eight years ago, as a walk-in. She spoke with the clinic director at the time, a Dr. Hargrove, who has since retired. She was not seeking treatment. She requested to leave a sealed document in a patient file." A pause. "The file she requested it be placed in was registered under a future patient name.""My name," I say."Yes," she says. "The file was created in anticipation. It's a practice we occasionally accommodate for estate planning purposes. A parent leaving medical history documentation for an adult child who may become a patient later."Estate planning.My mother walke

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Fifty: After the Room

    We eat lunch.This is Petra's decision and it is the right one. She finds a restaurant two blocks from the session building, a small Italian place with tables close together and bread that arrives without asking for it, and she herds everyone into it with the authority of a woman who has decided that the most essential thing available right now is a hot meal.Everyone comes.Dominic and Callum. Nora and Camila, who sit side by side for the first time properly, their shoulders almost touching as if reclaiming proximity they lost. I smiled and looked at Gareth, who is still in the chair but has the color back in his face and eats an entire bowl of soup without pausing. Orlan, who sits at the end of the table quietly and pays for his own meal when the bill comes, which I notice and don't comment on.Aldric Vane does not come.He left the building after his testimony with the contained, forward-facing energy of a man executing the next phase of a plan. He shook Dominic's hand in the corri

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Forty-Nine: The Record That Changes Everything

    Theodore walks into the session room at ten forty-seven.He doesn't announce himself. He comes through the door with the quiet, deliberate energy of a man who has made a decision and is done deliberating, and he crosses to the panel table and sits in the empty chair and looks at Rosamund.She looks at him.One second of something passing between two people who have known each other for forty years and understand without speaking what the return means.Then Rosamund says, for the record, "The panel is now complete. All three senior members present. Theodore Voss resuming his seat at ten forty-seven."The recording equipment blinks.Theodore looks forward, then the session continues.I sit back down.Gareth glances at me from his chair. I give him the small nod that means it's handled. He looks back at the panel.Rosamund picks up where the presentation paused. She does it without acknowledging the gap, without explaining Theodore's return, without giving it more weight than the record

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Forty-Eight: The Question Nobody Asked

    I look at the text under the table.Seven words. Unknown number. Sent at the exact moment the session opened.Someone is in this building.Someone who knows Theodore withdrew and believes the reason matters enough to interrupt the opening of a formal Conclave session to tell me so.Rosamund is still speaking. The formal opening language, procedural and measured, the kind of words that establish record and context before anything substantive begins. She hasn't looked at me yet. The panel members are settling. Gareth is to my left in his chair. Aldric two seats down, straight-backed and contained.I look at the text again.*You forgot to ask why Theodore really withdrew.*I think about Theodore in his hospital chair this morning. The expression on his face when Dominic told him Hadrian was gone. The specific quality of a man who has spent fifty years being the brother who holds things together and has just understood there is nothing left to hold.That was real. I read it and it was rea

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Twenty-Two: What I've Been Reading All Along

    He's waiting at the front door when Isobel pulls through the gate.Not inside, not in the study, not being efficient somewhere with his phone and his impossible schedule. At the front door, hands in his pockets, watching the car come up the drive with an expression that goes carefully neutral the m

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Twenty-One: What the Blood Actually Carries

    She makes tea first.I watch her move around the small kitchen attached to the sitting room, filling the kettle, getting cups from the cabinet, doing it all with the unhurried ease of someone who has learned that the most important conversations need a moment of ordinary before they begin.I don't

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Twenty: The Woman Who Heard Everything

    I put the phone face down on the table.Then I pick it up again and look at the timestamp on the message. Eleven forty-seven. Dominic left the room at eleven forty-five. Two minutes. She sent it two minutes after I said I wanted to meet her and before he finished dialing her number.Which means the

  • ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE   Chapter Nineteen: Everything We Were Told to Believe

    Dominic makes three calls in ten minutes.I sit in the chair by the window and listen to the half I can hear. His voice stays level the whole time, which I've learned means he's more unsettled than usual, not less. The control goes up when the ground goes unstable. It's a tell I've started to read

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