Lahat ng Kabanata ng Fake Dating The Alpha Hockey Player : Kabanata 131 - Kabanata 140

Warren's POVNobody ever asks me how I'm doing.Not in a real way. They ask in the passing, social way— how are you, fine, good, great— the kind of exchange that doesn't expect an actual answer and would be mildly uncomfortable if it got one.It's fine. I'm used to it. I grew up as the Alpha's son, which means I was visible but not particularly seen. My father saw a chess piece. The pack saw an heir. The college saw a hockey player. Zane saw a rival— and, honestly, I worked hard to earn that one.Now I sit in the Beta's office, which used to be one of my father's secondary meeting rooms, and stare at a stack of pack administration files that Zane left on my desk with a note that says ‘welcome to the job’ in his characteristically economical way.I should be reading them. I've been staring at them for forty minutes.The chair is stiff. The window looks out over the training grounds, where a group of younger wolves are drilling footwork in the afternoon light, their breath misting in th

Zane's POVThe Alpha's office still smells like my father.Not strongly— it's been cleaned, aired out, the desk cleared of everything that belonged to Rowan. But scent lingers in wood and fabric in a way that soap can't fully reach, and every time I sit behind that desk I catch the edge of it. Old cedar and expensive whiskey and something underneath that I have no name for except ‘wrong.’I've been considering having the whole room repainted.Warren says I should. Elder Soren says I should give it time, that reclaiming a space is a process. Kaidora said nothing when I mentioned it, just looked around the room with the careful, assessing eyes she uses when she's thinking about something she hasn't decided yet.This morning I'm sitting behind the desk with a report from the outer territory patrol in front of me and I can't focus on a single word.The transition has been smooth on paper. The pack accepted the shift of power quickly— faster than I expected, honestly. Rowan had ruled throu

Zane's POVI find Kaidora in the kitchen at midnight.She's sitting on the counter— not a chair, the actual counter, with her back against the upper cabinet and her knees pulled up— eating leftover rice directly from the storage container with a fork, staring at the middle distance with the focused blankness of someone whose brain is still very busy while their eyes take a break.I stop in the doorway.She doesn't startle. She'd have heard me coming. "Don't say anything," she says without looking at me. "I know it's midnight.""I wasn't going to say anything." I cross to the refrigerator and find the cold beef stew from dinner. "Move over."She moves sideways along the counter and I hop up beside her, stew container in hand. We sit shoulder to shoulder in the dark kitchen, eating cold leftovers at midnight like two completely normal people."Can't sleep?" I ask."Slept for four hours. Then my brain decided it wanted to think about everything at once." She spears a piece of rice though

Kaidora's POVThe dream always starts the same way.I'm ten years old and I'm standing at the edge of the tree line at the back of our property, and the night is very still, and somewhere behind me the house is warm and lit up and my parents are inside doing ordinary things— my mother laughing at something, my father's reading light still on. And something is in the trees in front of me. I can feel it. Massive and wrong and pointed directly at me.In the old version of the dream, I would try to run back to the house and my legs wouldn't move and I'd wake up with my heart slamming against my ribs, soaked in cold sweat, ten years old in a too-big body that had never stopped carrying that night.The dream is different now.I'm still ten. The trees are still dark. The thing in them is still real and dangerous and pointed at me.But my wolf is there.She stands between me and the tree line, vast and silver-white, her pale moon eyes fixed forward. She doesn't growl or show her teeth. She ju

Kaidora's POVI've started learning names. Not in the cursory way I learned them during the infiltration— when every name was tactical information, attached to a threat assessment and a role in the structure I was dismantling. That was cataloguing. This is different.This morning I'm sitting with a woman named Daria in the pack's communal garden, helping her stake tomato plants that got flattened in last night's wind, and I'm learning that she has three children under seven and a mate who works the night patrol rotation, which means she does the morning alone every day, which means the tomatoes fell over at five AM and she's been trying to fix them with a toddler on her hip ever since."Here." I take the stake from her and drive it into the soil with the force that still surprises me sometimes— my own strength, recalibrated since the shift. The plant straightens.Daria watches with frank appreciation. "That would have taken me another twenty minutes," she says."You had a toddler on y