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EIGHTY-SIX: The Memory

Author: Circeleari
last update publish date: 2026-03-12 23:59:52

He doesn’t answer me.

That’s the first thing. He just sits there with both hands on the wheel and the engine still running and his knuckles slowly returning to their normal color, and he breathes, and I watch his face do things that faces shouldn’t have to do, cycling through something private and enormous, and I think, this is it.

This is the moment I have been dreading for seven years.

“Dante.” I keep my voice even. Doctor’s voice. The one I use when I need someone to stay with me. “Talk to
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  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   NINETY-EIGHT: Epilogue

    FIVE YEARS LATERGerald is on the counter again.I know this before I even come downstairs because I can hear Dante saying “get down” in the voice he uses when he has already said it four times and is now simply saying it for the record, knowing full well it will accomplish nothing.Gerald has never once in five years gotten down from anywhere voluntarily.I come into the kitchen.Gerald is on the counter.Dante is at the stove. He’s in a grey shirt—always a grey shirt, I have stopped questioning this, I believe he has forty of them—and he is making breakfast with one hand and gesturing at the cat with the other, and Gerald is sitting directly next to the chopping board with the supreme unbothered energy of a cat who knows he is untouchable.He is untouchable because Daxton will riot if anyone moves him.“Morning,” I say.Dante looks at me over his shoulder. The look he gives me every morning, the one that still does something to my central nervous system even after all this time, war

  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   NINETY-SEVEN: Home

    “Say that again,” I say.Dante doesn’t answer. He’s looking at the phone like it’s something that bit him, and for a man who walked out of a warehouse full of people who wanted him dead approximately four minutes ago looking completely unbothered, the fact that a phone call is doing this to his face tells me everything.“Dante.” I put my hand on his arm. “Say that again.”“Judge Callum Sorin,” he says. “My father.”I stare at him.“Your father,” I repeat. “Is a corrupt judge. Who was working with the people who tried to have you killed. Who is now calling you directly after we just sent evidence of his crimes to a journalist.”“Yes.”“And he’s Daxton’s grandfather.”“Biologically.”“Dante.”“I know.”The phone is still ringing.“Are you going to answer it?” I ask.He looks at me. Then he picks up.He doesn’t say anything. He just waits.A voice comes through the speaker, older, clipped, the voice of a man who has spent decades being the most important person in every room he enters. “

  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   NINETY-SIX: Tonight We End It

    “How is that possible?” I say. “Your people aren’t in position yet. You said seven.”“I know what I said.” Dante is already texting. Both thumbs, fast, the phone Rafe handed over replaced with his own. “They moved because Rafe’s call spooked them. They think we’re onto the location.”“We are onto the location.”“They don’t know that yet. They just know something shifted.” He looks up. “My people can be there in forty. The Kavris will be set up in twenty.”I do that math. “That’s a twenty minute gap.”“Yes.”“Dante—”“I know.”“That’s twenty minutes of you walking into a room full of people who want you dead with no backup and a hard drive they’re going to take the second they see it.”“They won’t see it,” he says. “Because you’re not bringing it in.”I stare at him. “What?”“The drive stays with you. Outside.” He holds my eyes. “You are my backup. If I’m not out in twenty minutes, you send it. I set up a journalist contact years ago, a dead drop, it auto-submits if I trigger it from m

  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   NINETY-FIVE: Don't You Touch Him

    I stare at him for another full minute.He doesn’t move. His sides rise and fall, the bandaging still clean and pale against all that black fur. The early light through the cabin’s one window cuts across the floor and lands just short of him, like even the sun is a little bit wary.You need to leave, I tell myself. Right now. Before he wakes up.But I grab the old wool blanket from the cot in the corner anyway and I spread it over him. As carefully as I can. He shifts once and I freeze, but he doesn’t wake.I back out of the cabin.Then I run.I run as far as I can* * *My father is already yelling before I get the door open.I slip into the kitchen, tie my hair back up from where it’d fallen loose, and get the pan on before he gets to the part of the yelling where he starts throwing things. Eggs. He likes his eggs over easy. If I break the yolk he makes me do it again. I’ve learned not to break the yolk.“Where were you?”“Out early.” I keep my back to him. “Sit down Sir, it’s

  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   NINETY-FOUR: Trusting the Wrong Person

    “Rafe,” I say.Dante doesn’t answer.Which is its own answer.I look in the side mirror. The second car is still there, two lengths behind us, keeping pace. Rafe behind the wheel, both hands visible, completely normal, completely calm.The way he’s been the entire time.“Tell me I’m wrong,” I say.Dante is quiet for a long moment. “You’re not wrong.”“Dante—”“The way Vera knew we were at the mall,” he says. Low. Controlled. Like he’s working through it in real time and not loving where it lands. “She had a photo within the hour. We didn’t tell anyone where we were going. Only Rafe knew.”“He could have had someone watching the house.”“The voicemail,” Dante says. “That night. It came three hours after we arrived at the mansion. Vera needed an inside location to send that fast. Someone told her the address the moment we pulled through the gate.”I think about Rafe at the mansion. First on the perimeter. First through the back door. First to say he’s back in the foyer while Vera was st

  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   NINETY-THREE: The Old House

    “Strangers,” Dante says.“A couple. Young. I think they have a cat.” I watch his face. “I’m sorry, did you want me to have kept the house I shared with the man I thought I’d accidentally killed?”He looks at me for a second. “Fair.”“Thank you.”“We’re still going.”“I know we are.”Daxton looks up from the couch. “Are we going on a road trip?”“Yes,” Dante says.“Can we stop for snacks?”“Daxton—” I start.“Yes,” Dante says.Daxton pumps his fist.I grab the wolf plushie off the cushion beside him and hand it over. “Shoes. Right feet this time.”He looks down. Looks back up. “I was testing you.”“Sure you were.”Rafe meets us at the car.He’s already heard — Dante called him on the way down Marcus’s stairs, two minutes, short sentences, the kind of conversation where both people already know the shape of the problem and just need to confirm the details. Now Rafe is leaning against the passenger door with his arms crossed and the expression he wears when he’s about to say something Da

  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   FOURTY-SEVEN: I'll Take This Project

    It’s about to be midnight and I’m still in the hospital. The smell of antiseptic still clings to my skin.No matter how many times I wash my hands, I swear I can still feel his blood on them.The fluorescent light above me buzzes, flickering once—twice—like it’s just as exhausted as I am. I’m sitti

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-26
  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   FOURTY-FIVE: The Monster

    “And make me remember, everything I’ve forgotten.”The air in the room is too still. Too fucking thick.It almost feels like breathing through smoke.Dante doesn’t move for a moment after saying it. He only stares—no, studies me, it’s as if he’s watching something crawl under my skin. Then he rise

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-25
  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   FOURTY-SIX: It Was You

    “It was you.”Every muscle in my body locks. Shit.The hum of the broken lights, the metallic sting of blood, the faint hiss of the busted ventilation—it all fades until it’s just his voice echoing in my head. My pulse skips so violently I think it might choke me.He’s looking at me like he’s seeing

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-26
  • Nursing the Murderer Alpha King   FOURTY-NINE: Moving

    Hell. No.The second those words leave his smug-ass mouth—“Welcome home, Doctor”—I know I’ve officially reached the seventh layer of hell. And Dante’s the devil lounging at the bottom with a glass of scotch and that stupid fucking smirk.I snatch the contract off the table and storm out of the offi

    last updateLast Updated : 2026-03-26
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