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COUNT BACKWARDS
publish date:
2026-10-31 18:21:02
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TOO LATE ALPHA COUNT BACKWARDS
I had four minutes. Five, if the driver was slow with the horses."Celeste. Look at me." I didn't touch her. "Not at your hands. At my face."Her gold eyes found me. They weren't quite looking at anything."A man is coming up the drive. You can't be like this when he reaches the stairs." She nodded, jerky and fast. "You can't push her down. She's been pushed for three years, and she'll fight you for it. You give her something to follow.""What?""Count backward from a hundred, one number to a breath. She follows your breath. She always does." My throat was dry. "It's what I did in the dark. It's all I've got."She dragged in air. "A hundred.""Slower.""Ninety-nine."I felt my wolf lift her head. She didn't ask me. She crossed the room inside me the way she'd have crossed a field, and she settled beside the frightened thing in the corner of Celeste's skin, and she hummed. It was one low note with nothing in it, the sound a mother makes over a cradle.By seventy the silver had drawn ba
TOO LATE ALPHA NOT DUE UNTIL THURSDAY
"I don't know" wasn't an answer. I'd spent four years in my mother's still room learning that, and I wasn't going to stop on a blue bedroom floor at midnight."Sit still," I told Celeste. "I'm going to ask you things, and you're going to tell me the truth, even the parts that sound stupid."She nodded. She was holding her own elbows tight against her ribs."How much, every night?""A spoonful. In hot water." She counted it out on her fingers like a child. "Before bed. He said it had to be before bed or it wouldn't take.""Headaches?""Since the first month.""Cold hands. Losing your appetite. Waking at three and not being able to get warm."She stared at me. "How did you know?""I had every one of them. I called it prison." I picked the cup up again, carefully, by the rim. "Do you understand what I'm telling you? Three years of this, in a girl who's meant to run with a wolf. It isn't a cure for anything. It's a lid."I'd come off mine all at once, in an afternoon, standing at a prison
TOO LATE ALPHA LAVENDER
Vance was still at the far end of the rail when I turned to go in."One more thing," he said. "Your list isn't the only way to a gate that opens from the inside. I won't say what I mean tonight. If you want to hear it, you only have to ask."I looked at him. He was watching the garden, not me, with his hands loose on the stone. He wasn't waiting for an answer."Goodnight, Alpha Vance," I said."Goodnight."I didn't go to bed. I went up the east stairs to the second floor and stopped outside Celeste's door, and stood in the dark corridor rubbing my hands together until they were warm. I'd done it a thousand times in the greenhouse, at my mother's elbow, before I touched anyone who was hurting. It felt stupid, and I did it anyway.I knocked twice."Ezra?" Her voice was thin, and close to the wood."It's me."A long pause. Then the latch lifted, and she opened the door a hand's width. She was in a white nightgown with the sleeves buttoned to the knuckles, and her hair was down. She had t
TOO LATE ALPHA MARSHBELL
Ezra's idea of doing it properly was a seating chart.He'd drawn it himself on the back of a Council circular, and it was waiting beside my plate when I came down on Saturday. Eleven places, three of them circled in ink. I'd asked for a mate. My brother had invited three."I didn't want to hand you one name," he said, low, at my shoulder. "If you hate them all, say so.""And if I like one?"He swallowed. "Then I'll say yes."I wore the dark green dress Marta had pressed. Mama's tray had gone up at seven. Celeste had sent word of a headache, and her chair stood empty at the far end, and I didn't believe the headache and didn't say so. Damon sat across from me in his sling, glaring at the candidates like a man pricing horses. Vance had ridden down from Stonefall that morning with the road still on his boots, and Ezra had put him on his right as the alliance guest. He hadn't said a word since the soup.The first candidate was a Beta from the river packs named Corry Ashdown. He spoke nine
TOO LATE ALPHA WARM HANDS
I didn't tell anyone until I was sure, and I wasn't sure until the sun came up.I spent what was left of the night in the still room with the lamp turned low. The house keeps its old prescription slips on a spike by the door, the way every house does, in case the dispensary ever asks what was filled and when. Nobody had thrown one away in years. I took the whole stack down and laid it across the table in rows, with Damon's page at the end.*W.* One sharp stroke and a long, careless tail, like a fishhook.I found it on the slips for Mama's tincture. I found it on the slip for the lavender tonic Celeste brewed every morning. I found it six times on the paper he'd written the winter I turned fourteen, when he told my father someone ought to write down the schedule. I'd been so proud of that schedule.I put Damon's page beside the nearest slip. I don't know why I bothered. I'd known the second I saw it.Half the physicians in the region sign with an initial, I'd told Damon. I'd wanted it
TOO LATE ALPHA SIGNED W
Damon left for Harrow Ridge four days after I asked Ezra for a mate. He left with his arm still in the sling, over Whitlow's objections, and Bren's warning that a man with one good hand shouldn't ride alone into a prison."I'm not going to ride into it," he said. "I'm going to knock on the front gate and ask politely.""That's exactly what I'm worried about."He looked at me properly. He'd been doing that a lot lately, as if he'd only just noticed I had a face. "You want to know whose money paid for that night in the laundry block. So do I. Nobody else in this house is going to ask the Warden the right question, because nobody else in this house has ever been in that building.""You haven't either.""Then it's a good thing I'm not squeamish about doors."He was gone before I could decide whether that was a joke.---I spent the week doing what I'd said I'd do. I went to Mama's rooms at six with tea, and Celeste was already there with hers. We stood at opposite sides of the bed holding
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