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CHAPTER 17 — Black Coffee and Daylight
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2026-04-09 08:30:55The first night with the motion lights felt like sleeping beside a nervous god.
Every shift in the yard became illumination. White bursts through the curtains, brief and sharp, followed by my heart trying to escape through my throat. At 11:14, a raccoon tripped the back sensor and sent me upright in bed with my hand wrapped around the trauma shears I’d set on the nightstand like that was a sane thing to do. At 1:02, a deer lingered too close to the road facing camera and turned the p
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When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 17 — Black Coffee and Daylight
The first night with the motion lights felt like sleeping beside a nervous god.Every shift in the yard became illumination. White bursts through the curtains, brief and sharp, followed by my heart trying to escape through my throat. At 11:14, a raccoon tripped the back sensor and sent me upright in bed with my hand wrapped around the trauma shears I’d set on the nightstand like that was a sane thing to do. At 1:02, a deer lingered too close to the road facing camera and turned the porch beam into daylight for ten long seconds.At 3:27, I checked the monitor and saw a dark figure moving along the back line. Broad shoulders. Quiet stride. Colton. He didn’t look at the house. Didn’t knock. He simply walked the perimeter once beneath the silver wash of moonlight, then vanished into the trees again like he’d been cut from them.I should have felt unsettled. I did. I also slept after that. The realisation tasted complicated.Morning came with the soft
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 16 — Bitter Things
The coffee sat on my counter all night like an insult. Dark blue thermos. Loosened lid. Steam long gone by the time morning dragged itself over my little house and poured grey light across the kitchen. Everything looked tired in that hour, my lilac wall, my half finished shelves, me. I stood in my socks with my tea mug warming my hands and stared at the thermos like it had personally offended my bloodline. I hated coffee. Hated the smell of it, the bitterness, the way Kyle had always drunk it black and acted like that made him complicated instead of just unpleasant. There had been mornings in that apartment where the scent of coffee had come braided with tension, with the scrape of his voice, with the wrong kind of silence. Still. The thermos remained. Proof of a man who had stood outside my house in the dark and left me something warm with a note that said, in his own strange language, I was here, and I didn’t ask anyth
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 15 — Proof Is a Thin Thing
Grace and I called the sheriff just after eight. By then the sun had climbed high enough to bleach the terror out of the yard, leaving only the facts behind. Mud churned by boots. Blood dark on leaves. The cameras Colton had installed in the night, small and watchful on the porch beam and back trees. My fox sleeping under sedation. My rabbit rigid with shock. My thrush alive because stubbornness is one of God’s smallest miracles. Sheriff Bell arrived in a dusty cruiser with a deputy young enough to still look surprised by things. Bell was broad through the middle, weathered by years and routine, with the kind of face that had learned to flatten itself against other people’s panic. He took off his sunglasses when he saw the blood near the treeline. His eyes slid over the yard, the cameras, my house, me. “Morning, Grace,” he said first, because of course in Moonbrook the hierarchy began with old roots. “S
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 14 — What the Night Dragged to My Door
After Colton left, the house stopped feeling like a home and became a shelter. There is a difference. A home breathes with you. It holds your routines, your mugs, your books with bent spines, your favourite blanket folded over the couch like a promise. A shelter is temporary. Every window becomes a question. Every creak in the walls becomes a warning dressed as sound.I locked the garage door behind him and stood with my hand on the bolt until my knuckles whitened.Then I moved. Fast. The only way I knew how to survive fear without drowning in it.I brought the thrush’s box into the laundry nook off the kitchen because the garage suddenly felt too exposed. I carried the rabbit in second, wrapped in a towel, his tiny body trembling like a heartbeat gone wrong. The fox was heavier, limp with sedation, a burden warm and vulnerable in my arms.I set them up as best I could in the house, heat pad on low, dim light, water within reach, my emer
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 13 — The Snareline
Colton held the second snare up in the porch light to show proof.The wire glinted pale, moonlight’s cruel twin, looped and ready to cinch around anything warm blooded and unlucky. My stomach rolled as if I could already feel it tightening.I opened the door only after I’d checked the lock twice, because my body was stubborn that way. Colton stepped inside without a word, boots leaving dark prints on my porch boards.His gaze moved past me to the garage like he could see through walls.“The fox?” he asked.“Sleeping,” I said, throat tight. “I sedated him lightly.”Colton nodded once, approval flickering in the set of his jaw. Then he looked down at the snare in his hand, and something hardened in him, quiet rage packed tight.“How many?” I asked.His eyes lifted to mine. “Three on your side of the treeline. One closer to the road.”My breath caught. “That’s.”“An over kill, I know,” he finished, voice low.I turned and led him into the garage, because the fox was there and the thrush
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 12 — Silver in the Grass
The fox slept like something that didn’t trust the world enough to truly let go. Even under the light sedation his body stayed tense. Muscles jumped beneath fur. His ears twitched at every creak of the house, every sigh of wind against the garage wall, every distant call from the forest like the woods were speaking a language his bones still understood.I checked the bandage again. The cut was clean now, flushed and wrapped. The bleeding had stopped, but the skin around the wound looked angry, redder than it should have been, swollen in a way that didn’t match a simple wire bite.My eyes drifted to the snare coil on the concrete floor. Pale. Too pale. Silver had a certain kind of wrongness to it. Not mystical. Not magical. Just… bright in a way that didn’t belong in dirt. It looked like moonlight pretending to be metal.I crouched and picked it up with gloved hands, turning it under the workbench lamp. No rust. No grime embedded into it the way you’d expec
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 11 — Closed Doors Don’t Keep Out the Dark
Blocking someone is supposed to feel clean. A boundary. A line in ink. A door shut with a firm click.But the next morning, I woke with the taste of it in my mouth anyway. Metallic and sour, like I’d swallowed a coin and it had lodged in my throat.The house was quiet in that pa
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 10 — The Friend Who Knew Too Much
I should’ve felt better after Friday, after cupcakes and laughter and the strange relief of someone filling my quiet with noise. Instead, I woke with my nerves already awake, as if my body had spent the night listening for the moment trust turned its face away.The thrush pecked at her f
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 9 — Things Not Quite Said
By Friday, my house smelled like vanilla and nerves.I’d baked because Bailey had texted SNACKS ARE NON-NEGOTIABLE and I, tragically, was the kind of person who responded to loud friendship with domestic surrender. The cupcakes were purple, of course. Lavender frosting with little sugar
When the Alpha Howls CHAPTER 7 — The Wolf Returns
That night, I latched the garage window so hard my fingers hurt. Once, twice. Checking it the way you check a door after a nightmare, the way you check your own skin for bruises, you swear you can still feel. The little metal catch clicked into place with a sharp finality, and I stood there stari
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