All Chapters of Fake Dating The Alpha Hockey Player : Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

Zane's POVWarren calls at midnight from Crestfall.I'm awake. I've been awake since ten, running the eastern territory reports against the Varden Pack history and building a picture I don't entirely like. Kaidora is asleep beside me, one hand loosely curled near her face, her wolf close enough to the surface that I can see the faint silver in her eyelashes when the light catches them. She'd be awake if I turned the lamp on. I keep it off and take the call in the hallway."Tell me," I say, keeping my voice low."The town is on a low-level alert," Warren says. His voice has the even, contained quality he uses when he's reporting and not editorializing. "Not external threat— internal. Something happened inside the Varden Pack in the last two weeks."I lean against the wall. "What kind of something?""I don't know yet. But it's enough that their people in town are moving differently. Tighter. Less casual. The kind of movement you get when wolves have been told to be careful without being

Kaidora's POVAmber finds me in the library.Not the main pack library— the smaller one off the second-floor hallway, the one with the mismatched chairs and the window that sticks and the collection of fiction that previous pack members accumulated over forty years. It smells like old paper and dust and something faintly sweet that I haven't identified yet. I've been coming here in the evenings because it's quiet in a way the rest of the pack house rarely is.She knocks on the open door and waits. She always waits now, which is its own kind of language."Come in," I say, without looking up from the pack history I'm reading.She comes in and takes the chair two seats down from mine, which is also its own kind of language— close enough to be in the same room, not so close as to assume. She has a book in her hands that she clearly took from the shelf on the way in, a prop as much as anything.We sit in quiet for a while."I saw Elder Petra today," she says finally."How was it?""Terribl

Warren's POVI'm back from Crestfall by Thursday.The drive back is quieter than the drive out. Maddox has the radio on low, something instrumental, and I sit in the passenger seat and let the last three days process the way important things need to process— not actively, not by turning them over and examining them, just by letting them be there while I look out the window.Elan was thinner than I remembered. That's the thing I keep returning to. Not the intelligence, not the analysis, not the back-channel arrangement we set up before I left. Just Elan, thinner than I remembered, with a heaviness about him that comes from carrying a difficult situation for too long without being able to put it down.I know that weight. I've been carrying my own version of it.I spent three years watching my father do things I knew were wrong, calculating every day whether today was the day I did something about it or whether I waited for a better opening. And every day the better opening seemed like i

Kaidora's POVThe photograph of my mother is on my desk now. Not the one with the baby, that one I keep in my journal, tucked between two pages, private in a way that the others aren't. The courtyard one, the laughing one, I've put in a small frame that Daria pressed on me when I mentioned I'd found some old family photos. “I have seventeen spare frames,” Daria said, with the energy of someone who has been collecting things that might be useful someday and has finally found a purpose for one of them. “Take as many as you want.”I took one.It sits on the corner of the desk and my mother laughs out of it every time I look up from whatever I'm reading.I've been thinking about her differently since the photographs. Less as a symbol and more as a person, which sounds simple and is not simple at all. A symbol is fixed. You know exactly what it means and what it asks of you and how to carry it. A person is dynamic, complicated, full of details that don't resolve into a clean lesson.My mot

Zane's POVThe morning of the meeting is cold and clear.I'm up before dawn, which is not unusual. I sit with coffee at the kitchen table and go through the framework one more time— not because I don't know it, I know it completely, but because the act of reading it settles something. Tells my brain we are prepared, we have done the work, we are not walking in blind.Kaidora comes down at five-thirty, already dressed, her hair back, the particular quality of stillness about her that I've learned to read as focused rather than distant. She pours coffee and sits across from me without speaking.We sit for a while in the morning quiet."Ready?" I ask."Yes." No hesitation. "You?""Yes."She nods. Looks out the window at the dark that's starting to thin at the eastern edge."Daren Varden is going to read you the moment you walk in," she says. "Before any formal language. He's been reading Alphas for thirty-four years. He'll know within thirty seconds whether you're the real thing.""I kno