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CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT — The Morning After Everything Else
publish date:
2026-05-20 01:36:29
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The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT — The Morning After Everything Else
Damian’s POVJamie made breakfast and I had already realized that she wakes up by six in the morning and decide that the only sane response to a supernatural standoff at three a.m. was eggs, coffee, and the stubborn normalcy of food appearing on a kitchen table. I came downstairs to the smell of butter sizzling and the sight of her at the stove, spatula in hand, looking for all the world like someone who hadn’t spent the night waiting to hear if her best friend was going to survive.Theo sat at the kitchen table with the expression of a someone who’d been awake running perimeter checks all night and had recently been told to sit down. Jamie had handed him a cup of coffee, and the combination of exhaustion and caffeine had apparently made compliance the path of resistance. He blinked at me when I walked in, gave me a nod, and went back to staring at his mug.Jamie glanced over her shoulder. “Eggs are ready”I sat.She set a plate in front of me like someone who’d been feeding people th
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN — The Last Night
Ava’s POVShe came the way people come when the math has failed and all that’s left is the objective and a willingness to burn whatever’s left to reach it. Desperation has a sound. I heard it before I felt it like a wrongness rolling through the territory like distant thunder, making the hair on my arms stand up before my brain caught up.Then the territorial awareness slammed awake.Wolves moving fast, driving straight for the manor like an arrow loosed in the dark. I was already sitting up when Damian’s hand closed around my arm. He’d felt it through the bond a heartbeat after I felt it through the ground. Neither of us spoke. The perimeter held for four minutes. I had counted. I stood at the bedroom window with my palm pressed flat to the glass, watching the darkness churn below. Marcus’s twelve wolves met them at the outer edge, and for four minutes the night was nothing but snarls and impact and the shudder of bodies colliding in the dark. I felt every breach attempt like a spl
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX — After the Warehouse
Damian’s POV The drive back felt different. Before the warehouse, the silence in the car had been a held breath. Tight, electric, everyone braced for impact. Now it was the quiet of surfacing after a deep dive, lungs still adjusting to air that didn't taste like six years of someone else's plan. No one spoke much. Not because there was nothing to say, but because we were all still measuring the shape of what had just happened and what it meant for the hours coming. Luca drove with the same steady hands he always had. Leo sat twisted in the passenger seat, phone glowing against his face, already sifting through the data trail Selene's people left behind. The aftermath written in network traffic instead of blood. While Ava was beside me. She hadn't said much since we walked out of that building. I knew better than to ask. This wasn't her shutting down, this was her turning things over, piece by piece, giving every fragment of information the weight it deserved before she opened her
The Alpha's Christmas Sin Chapter Sixty five — The Warehouse
Ava’s POVThe warehouse district at dusk was where six-year plans went to curl up and die.I stared out the SUV window at buildings that had no more warmth left in them than tombstones. Empty streets stretched between hulking shells of industry, and the Mississippi bled its cold, muddy scent through every crack in the glass. That river didn’t care about any of us. It just kept moving, dark and indifferent which made me shiver, but not entirely from the temperature.Leo’s voice had crackled through the comms forty minutes ago. Selene’s network traffic, her people and her shadow contacts, had all been routing to a single address since midday. A warehouse she’d kept breathing under a shell company, hidden behind four layers of corporate rot, for six years. She’d run here the second she felt the seed dissolve. She hadn’t waited for us to corner her. She’d retreated to the one ground she’d been preparing before I even knew my own wolf existed.She was already inside. She’d been in there fo
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER SIXTY FOUR — Desperate
Ava's POVI stayed in the frost in ruined training clothes as I watched four sparrows on the wall while Damian stepped away to make the call.His voice carried across the garden, low and even. The cadence of someone receiving, not delivering.I didn't try to listen but I knew Marcus was the one giving the pieces while Damian organized them. Somewhere in that process I usually reached the conclusion before either finished explaining.The bond shifted while Damian was still on the phone. Not the seed, because that was gone. Just Damian. His presence carried something adjacent to alarm. The frequency of a man whose understanding had just been reorganized.And I knew immediately that it was significant new information.The call ended.He crossed the garden and looked at me. Neither of us spoke at first."Sit down," I said.He glanced at the frost."I shifted involuntarily and pushed a supernatural parasite out of our bond this morning, Damian. Sitting in a bit of frost won't end your life
The Alpha's Christmas Sin Chapter sixty three— The Window
Ava’s POVIt happened just after noon.It wasn’t because noon mattered. It was because the thing inside the bond decided it was time to wake up.I was halfway through another training sequence with Sera when something shifted low in my chest. It was small at first, like a sleeper turning over beneath blankets. My breath caught, making my hand miss the next strike entirely.Sera saw it, and said quietly, “That’s it.”“Yeah.” I nodded.“How active?”“Not fully.” I swallowed. “But close.”Her gaze sharpened immediately, looking at me the scary way surgeons probably looked right before opening someone up.“And the window?”“Opening.” My breath hitched.She stepped back at once, giving me room without retreating. The movement was efficient, like she’d already rehearsed this moment in her head fifty times.I closed my eyes briefly and reached for the bond.Damian was inside the manor. I could feel him clearly now that I knew how to separate him from the rest of the noise going on in my head
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER THIRTEEN — The Truth Has Teeth
Ava's POVHe didn't start with the wolves.He started with his father."My father was a Hawthorne by name and an Alpha by blood," he said. "He didn't choose it. It was inherited the way everything in our family was inherited, without being asked and without the option to refuse." He had his hands f
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER TWELVE — The Space Between
Ava's POVThursday came in gray and cold and I was already awake before my alarm.I had been lying in the dark since five thinking about what Elena might say and trying to prepare myself for something I couldn't prepare for because I didn't know what shape it was yet. That's the thing about waiting
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER ELEVEN — Borrowed Normal
Ava's POVEleven days in and I had started keeping a mental list.Not intentionally. It just happened the way things happen when you are living in close quarters with someone you don't fully understand and your brain decides that cataloguing details is safer than sitting with the uncertainty of not
The Alpha's Christmas Sin CHAPTER TEN Things That Don't Have Names Yet
Ava's POVI woke up at three in the morning with my heart beating too fast and my skin on fire.Literally on fire,not just a figure of speech or at least that was what it felt like, a burning that started at the surface and went deeper than skin, moving through muscle and bone like something trying
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