Hunted By Alphas, Claimed By The Alpha King

Nobody followed me up here.I'm almost certain of that. I took three turns after the parking garage, lost visual on both of them by the second block, and the elevator was full of civilians going about their Friday evening completely unaware that the person standing in the back corner had just left a jacket in a stranger's hands and run for his life.Almost certain is not certain.I scan the room.About sixty people. Two exits I can see, one behind me and one on the far side behind a catering table. The men who were at the door when I came in have not moved. I count three of them. Big. Still. Earpieces. Not hotel security, the posture is different, this is private and specific and they are watching the room not the door.They are watching me.Not aggressively. Not with the hands-on energy of the two in the parking garage. Just, aware. Noting. The way you watch something your employer told you to watch.My wolf is not helping.My wolf is still turned toward the window with that devastati

The apartment is everything the building promises and nothing like what I expected.Not cold. Not the deliberate performance of wealth I braced for. Just... large and dark and quiet and real, like a place that belongs to someone rather than being owned by them, and looks out at the city through the floor to ceiling windows.Makes me try hard to remember what thinking clearly feels like.I sleep for six hours.Which is remarkable because I have not slept six consecutive hours since I was approximately seventeen years old. My body has been running on four hours and hypervigilance for so long that sleeping in a strange place should be impossible, my nervous system doesn't know how to do it, and yet I wake up in Thalrion Bloodryn's guest room at seven in the morning having slept like something that doesn't have problems.My wolf is very comfortable.My wolf has been comfortable since we got here and he would like me to acknowledge that.I get up and find the bathroom and look at myself in

His name is Soren and he walks in at nine like he owns the place, which he doesn't, but nobody has apparently told him that.He is tall and broadly built and has the kind of face that is permanently halfway to a grin about something and he stops in the kitchen doorway and looks at me at the counter with my second coffee and looks at Thalrion at the other end of the counter with his first coffee and he does a very slow blink."Well..." he says."Don't," Thalrion says."I'm just taking it in," he says. He points at me. "You're real.""Last time I checked," I reply."I told him," Soren says. He is pointing at Thalrion now. "I told him for three years that the bond thread was something. Three years. He told me I was projecting." He comes fully into the kitchen and sits on the stool next to mine with the ease of someone who has been using this kitchen his entire adult life. "You look exactly like someone worth three years of being told you're projecting.""Is that a compliment?" I ask."Abs

Soren finds me in the window seat the next morning.Not the kitchen window seat. The one in the book room, the one that is becoming mine in a way I have not given it permission to become, and he leans in the doorway with two cups of coffee and holds one out and says, "He sent me.""I know," I say."How do you know?""Because you look like someone who was told to check on someone and is deciding how to do it without looking like that's what you're doing," I say.Soren stares at me.Then he comes in and sits on the end of the window seat and hands me the coffee and looks at the city for a moment. "He said bring you coffee. He didn't say check on you.""Same thing," I say."Yeah," Soren says. "Same thing." He drinks his coffee. "How are you doing, actually?""I read the file yesterday," I say."All of it?""All of it."He nods slowly. "And?""And I've been accidentally commanding Alphas into compliance for eight years and didn't know it," I say. "And apparently my body can absorb strength

I can't sleep.This is not new. Sleep and I have had a complicated relationship for eight years and one filing and one pair of warm hands on my face is not going to fix eight years overnight. I lie in the guest room and look at the ceiling and listen to the building settle around me and try to convince my body that it is safe here.My body is mostly convinced.My brain is running a highlight reel of everything that has happened in the last three days on loop with special extended runtime for the kitchen scene and the almost-smile and the this conversation isn't finished from yesterday and I cannot get it to stop.I get up at two in the morning.I pad down the corridor in the dark and I am heading for the kitchen for water when I see the light under the study door and I stop.I should keep walking.I keep walking.Right up to the study door which I push open because I have apparently lost the ability to make sensible decisions in this building, and Thalrion is at the desk with papers sp