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CHAPTER FIVE
publish date:
2026-07-24 23:23:14
Latest chapter
FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL Chapter 138
Elena“Okay,” Ryder said. He was still holding his hands out in front of him like they belonged to somebody else. “Nobody panic. Elena, how long do I have?”“I don’t know.”“Guess.”“Ryder.”“You’re the one with the gift. Guess.”The gray had reached his wrists and was creeping up the insides of his forearms, thin lines branching out like cracks in a frozen pond. He didn’t look scared. He looked like a man filling out a form. That scared me worse than if he’d screamed.“An hour,” I said. “Maybe less.” I hadn’t known the number until it came out of my mouth, but when it did, I felt how true it was. Whatever had its hooks in him was moving slowly, and it was moving steadily, and it was not going to stop.“Can you see where it’s coming from?” Marcus asked. He’d pulled himself half upright in the wheelchair, and Eleanor had a hand pressed flat against his chest like she could hold him in place.I closed my eyes and let the gold come up, and there it was, thin as fishing line, running from
FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL Chapter 137
Elena“Let me make sure I’ve got this right,” Dennis said, leaning on his mop in the fourth floor family waiting room. “It’s one in the morning, and you want me to stand here and watch a rich guy confess to something. And I’m not getting overtime.”“You’re getting my thanks,” I said.“I’m getting a story for the guys at the Elks Lodge. That’s worth something.” He pushed his reading glasses up into his hair. “Nineteen years in this building and nobody’s ever asked me to witness anything. Mostly I get ‘watch the wet floor.’”The waiting room had a fish tank that bubbled too loudly, a TV playing a cooking show on mute, and a lighthouse puzzle on a card table with about forty pieces missing. Joanie from the front desk had brought her lanyard upstairs and kept twisting it around her fingers. Walt sat in a vinyl chair with his coffee, still wearing the Bulls hoodie, and every few minutes he checked his phone for word from his wife’s room down the hall.“Gallbladder’s fine,” he told us for t
FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL Chapter 136
ElenaThe elevator doors opened on the fourth floor and the sound hit us first—Martha’s laugh, bright and broken and too loud for a hospital at midnight.Ryder and I stepped out into the corridor and found the door to Marcus’s room standing wide. Inside, Martha sat on the edge of the bed with both hands pressed to her chest like she was still checking that the tightness had really left. Eleanor held one of her wrists. Marcus was propped higher against the pillows, color returning to his face in slow patches. Victoria stood near the window with her arms folded, watching the hallway as though she expected more gray coats to appear at any second.Martha saw me and the laugh cut off mid-breath.“Baby,” she said. The word cracked. “You’re here. You’re actually here.”I crossed the room and let her pull me into a hard, shaking hug. She smelled like hospital soap and the peppermint candy she always kept in her purse. Underneath it I felt nothing of the cold wire that had been choking her for
FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL Chapter 135
ElenaRyder’s face had gone the color of the marble floor.I held the paper out so he could see it properly, the brown smear of Martha’s blood and the two signatures side by side under the fluorescent light. His eyes moved over the heavy cross-stroke on the G the way a man looks at a wound he already knows is fatal.“Elena,” he said again, softer this time. “That’s my father’s signature.”“I know.”He came the rest of the way down the stairs like someone walking through water. Marcus’s guards shifted but did not stop him. Behind us the medics were still shouting orders around Cassian’s gurney; the sound felt far away, like it belonged to a different hospital.Ryder stopped in front of me. He did not take the paper. He only stared at it.“He never told me,” he said. “Not once. Not even after the cabin. Not after Halloway. Nothing.”“Cassian said to read the bottom. All of it.”I turned the page over. The back was almost blank except for three lines written in the same slanted hand, sma
FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL Chapter 134
Elena“Read it aloud?” Cassian Cross said. “Child, I haven’t needed to read that paper in twenty-one years. I wrote it.”“Then it won’t be hard.”The lobby felt bigger than it had when I came in with a headache and a sandwich the week before. The gift shop was shuttered, a rack of teddy bears still wearing get-well ribbons behind the grate. A vending machine hummed in the corner. Marcus’s guards stood along the staircase with their hands loose at their sides, six men in gray coats stood behind Cassian’s chair, and the clock over the information desk said 11:46.The night receptionist, a young woman with a lanyard full of enamel pins, had both palms flat on her desk like she thought it might float away.“I already know the last line,” I said. “I just want to hear you say it.”“Do you.” He smiled, a little slower than before. “And how would you know that?”“I sat in a stairwell for six hours and looked at tonight from every side. In some of them you take the paper out of your coat and r
FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL Chapter 133
Elena“You are not allowed to be here,” Ryder said, and he moved between the doorway and the rest of us before I had even finished standing up. “Elder Thorne ordered Martha placed under Article Four protection less than an hour ago.”“I read the order on the way up.” Cassian Cross leaned a little on his silver cane, calm and courteous, as though he had come to visit a sick friend. “It is a fine order, young man, and it protects Martha Hart from the Council. It does not protect her from me, because I am not the Council. I am the holder of an oath.”“What oath,” Marcus asked from the bed. His voice was weak, but I heard the old alpha under it, the one who had walked into rooms full of elders and made them go quiet.“A blood oath, Marcus, sworn at your sister’s own kitchen table twenty-one years ago, before a witness, with a drop of her own blood on the paper.” He smiled again, and it was a patient smile, the kind that had never once been in a hurry. “You may know it as the oldest law in
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