All Chapters of Nursing the Murderer Alpha King: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

“You mentioned he’s been too thin. That he’s not eating well.” Dante leans forward, and there’s genuine concern in his eyes. “What’s wrong with him, Eris?”I exhale shakily, the panic attack that was building in my chest deflating like a punctured balloon. He doesn’t know. He saw Daxton’s face and he doesn’t know.Or maybe he suspects and this is his way of circling the truth.Either way, I have approximately five seconds to pull myself together before I completely lose my shit in front of my son.“It’s . . .” I struggle for words that aren’t lies but aren’t the whole truth either. “It’s complicated. A genetic thing. I’m working on it.”“Genetic?” His eyes narrow, and I watch him process that word with the kind of focus that probably makes people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. “From which side of the family?”My heart stops. “His father’s side.”The silence that follows is so loaded it could sink a ship. Dante’s gaze shifts to Daxton, who’s currently trying to build a castle ou

“He’s my son, isn’t he?”The words hang in the air between us, between Dante standing blood-splattered at the warehouse entrance and Daxton, my son, his son, pressed against my chest in a body that shouldn’t exist yet, enormous and trembling, still whimpering in that broken, childish way that makes my ribs feel like they’re collapsing inward.I open my mouth.I don’t know what I would have said. I genuinely don’t know. Because that’s the moment the shooting starts.Three men. Side door we didn’t clock. Human guns, not wolves, just hired muscle with semi-automatics and poor life decisions, and the sound tears through the warehouse like the world cracking open. I don’t think. I throw myself over Daxton, both arms around his massive skull, and Dante moves too,moves is too small a word, he appears, somehow between us and the gunfire before I’ve even registered him crossing the space, arms wide, a wall of a man absorbing the threat with his body.Daxton reacts the way a frightened animal

The problem with Daxton having zero adjustment issues is that he immediately starts having requests.By eight-thirty he has identified three things the mansion lacks that he considers essential to human survival, his wolf plushies, left at home, a tragedy he is processing loudly, his specific brand of orange juice, the one with the bear on the box, not the eagle, the eagle one is wrong. and something he describes only as his stuff, which when pressed turns out to mean everything he owns.“We can go get your things,” I tell him.“Can we go now?”“After breakfast.”“I’m done with breakfast.”“I’m not.”“You’ve been done for ten minutes, you’re just drinking coffee.”“That is breakfast.”Daxton looks at Dante with the expression of a man seeking a second opinion. Dante, who has removed the apron and is leaning against the counter with his own coffee, looks at the window.“Don’t,” I say to him.“I didn’t say anything.”“You were about to be helpful.”“I was about to suggest,” he says, “th

There is a version of this moment I have rehearsed.I have been rehearsing it for seven years, in the back of my mind, in the small hours, in the specific kind of quiet that arrives after Daxton falls asleep and there is nothing left to do but think. I have run the scenario. I have prepared answers. I have constructed a version of myself that is calm and measured and has a story ready, a good one, airtight, the kind that holds up under pressure.That version of me is not here right now.The version of me that is here has her hands on Dante Sorin’s face in a hallway at nine-thirty at night and her mind has gone completely, totally, catastrophically blank.“What happened in the forest,” he says again. Not a question this time. A door he’s standing in front of, waiting for me to open it.I drop my hands.I take one step back. Then I stop, because the wall is there, and I am out of room, and Dante is looking at me with that open, fractured expression that I have never seen on him before a

Dante sees the text before I can turn the phone over.I watch his face close. Everything that was open in it thirty seconds ago, the fractured warmth, the forehead against mine, the hands that were gentle in a way I was not prepared for, all of it locks shut in one clean motion, like a house going dark room by room, and what’s left is the other thing. The thing I saw in the forest. The thing that sat at the head of that long table.The thing I forgot, somewhere between the library floor and his mouth on mine, that he still is.“Stay here,” he says.“Absolutely not.”He looks at me. There is no argument in the look. There is barely a person in the look, just the function of someone who has already calculated every variable in the room and assigned each one a value and is moving accordingly.“Daxton is upstairs,” he says.“I know where my son is.”“Then you know why you’re staying here.” He picks up my phone. He doesn’t look at the text again. He sets it face-down and he looks at me wi