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Chapter 8
publish date:
2026-07-17 04:35:47
Latest chapter
The Rogue Queen's Rise Chapter 8
Daniel's truck comes up the drive four days after he left, and I'm on the porch before the engine's fully cut, which tells me something about how little of the last four days I've actually spent doing anything but waiting.Four days is a long time to run a pack from a porch. I've signed off on disputes I'd normally have walked out to settle myself.I've let Sarah handle two supply runs I'd usually oversee.I've stood at that same kitchen counter more mornings than I want to count, looking at a stack of two mugs I haven't been able to bring myself to reduce to one, like keeping the second one out is its own kind of waiting.He doesn't get out right away. He sits there a second, hands still on the wheel, the way a man sits when he's deciding how to say something instead of whether to say it, and by the time he does climb out I've already braced for whatever's coming to be worse than I want it to be."She's alive," he says, before I can ask. "Safe. Two states over, at a garage a friend of
The Rogue Queen's Rise Chapter 7
It comes back on the fourth day, and this time it doesn't slow down. It stops.I hear the engine cut from inside the office, and by the time I reach the bay door Wells is already there, still as stone, watching a man climb out of the truck like she's already decided which direction she'd run if running turned out to be the answer.He's not Marcus. I know that before I even see his face — wrong height, wrong way of standing, none of the stillness Marcus wears like armor. This man moves like someone used to being second, comfortable in it, which is its own kind of tell.Renata's out of the office before he's fully out of the truck, and Piper appears in the doorway behind us a beat later, drawn by whatever change in the air told her something in the garage had shifted. Nobody says anything to call her forward.She comes anyway, the knife from her welcome kit already in her hand, held loose but not lowered, and I feel something in my chest tighten and loosen at the same time — tighten bec
The Rogue Queen's Rise Chapter 6
The truck doesn't come back the next day.It doesn't come back the day after that either, and by the third morning I've almost convinced myself Renata was right the first time — somebody's mailbox, somebody's wrong turn, nothing that has anything to do with us.Almost.Wells doesn't relax the same way. I notice it in small things — the way she's started sitting closer to the bay door instead of the back office, the way her bucket has migrated again, another six feet, until she's close enough to see the gravel drive without being seen from it. She hasn't said a word about the truck since it passed. She hasn't needed to. I've learned enough of her sideways language by now to read it in where she puts her body.Piper notices too, in her own way. She's started sleeping with her boots on — the ones Renata gave her that first night — and when I catch her at it she just shrugs, like it's obvious, like of course you keep your boots on when something in the air has changed and nobody's told yo
The Rogue Queen's Rise Chapter 5
The garage smells like engine grease and cold concrete, which is better than it sounds. It smells like nobody's watching.Renata's got the bay doors half up, morning light cutting a low gold line across the floor, and Piper is standing in the middle of it with her fists up like she's seen this in a movie somewhere and is doing her best impression."Lower," I tell her. "Your center of gravity's up in your shoulders. That's the first thing anyone bigger than you is going to use.""Everyone's bigger than me.""Then it's the first thing everyone's going to use." I step around her, adjust her stance with two fingers at her hip, nothing more than that. "Lower."She drops an inch. It's not enough, but it's something, and I've learned in two weeks that with Piper you take the inch and you don't say more about it than the inch deserves. She's seventeen and jumps at doors closing. Praise sits on her wrong, like a coat that doesn't fit — too much of it and she shrinks instead of standing taller.
The Rogue Queen's Rise Chapter 4
The first one shows up eleven days after I do, which is how I learn that Renata's garage isn't quiet so much as it's waiting.I'm elbow-deep in a crate of spare parts I don't understand yet, sorting by size because Renata said sorting by size was a start, when the bay door rattles on its track and a girl steps in off the gravel like she's not sure the building will let her.She's young. Younger than young — seventeen if I'm being generous, all wrists and collarbone, wearing a jacket two sizes too big for her the way I used to wear my own posture two sizes too small. She doesn't look at me first. She looks at the exits.I recognize that particular scan, the door, the other door, the gap under the workbench big enough to fold into if it comes to that, because I used to run the same count in my head every time I walked into Marcus's kitchen."Renata around?" the girl asks, voice pitched low, like she's trying to take up less space with the sound of it too."In the office. I can get her."
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The coffee's gone cold on the counter an hour before I let myself throw it out.That's not sentiment. I don't do sentiment, whatever Ava thinks she's seen in me over three years of watching me lead. It's discipline — I don't waste things, and pouring out a full mug because the woman who was supposed to drink it walked into the trees instead feels, this morning, like the first waste I've allowed myself in longer than I can remember.Daniel finds me still standing at the counter when he lets himself in the way he's let himself in for eleven years, no knock, because a beta who knocks isn't a beta I trust."You look like you lost a fight," he says."I didn't fight anyone.""That's usually worse, with you." He pulls the second mug toward himself, the one that was meant for Ava, and drinks from it without asking, which is the kind of thing only Daniel gets to do. "Talk."I tell him. Not all of it — some of it I'm still turning over, still deciding what shape to give it before I say it out l
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