Lahat ng Kabanata ng marked by the mafia alpha: Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

The Party IIISol's lips were swollen.He pressed forward anyway, fingers finding the front of Zaren's shirt, tracing up his chest slowly, eyes half lidded and completely unbothered by the fact that his face was still flushed from his jaw to his hairline."I want more."Zaren looked at him.Then his hand moved — fingers catching Sol's chin, tilting it up, and his eyes moved over Sol's face with that slow deliberate focus that made thinking in straight lines basically impossible."You like playing games." Not quite a question. His thumb pressed once under Sol's jaw. "I'm going to punish you for tonight."Sol didn't blink."But not now." Zaren's eyes dropped to his mouth for one second. Came back up. "I like them sober."He held Sol's gaze just long enough to make sure that landed exactly where he meant it to.Then he grabbed Sol's wrist and pulled him out of the bathroom and back into the noise and light of the party and Sol followed because his legs had apparently decided to just do w

The MorningZaren was already outside when Keal came down.Leaning against the car, arms crossed, eyes on the middle distance. Not looking at the door. Not looking at anything in particular. Just standing in that contained way of his that gave nothing away and asked for nothing back.Lior came out next, bag over one shoulder, sunglasses already on, moving past both of them and getting straight into the back seat like she had somewhere more important to be and this car was simply the vehicle between here and there.Keal stopped at the passenger door.Looked around."Where's Sol."Zaren said nothing.Lior's voice came from inside the car, flat and unbothered. "He said he had something to take care of. He'll catch up with us later."Keal looked at Zaren over the roof of the car.Zaren opened the driver's door and got in.Nobody spoke on the drive.Lior had her head against the window, one earbud in, watching the trees pass with the energy of someone actively choosing not to be present. K

The HallwayThe morning hallway was loud the way school hallways always were — lockers slamming, conversations overlapping, the specific chaos of two hundred people trying to exist in the same corridor before first period. Lior walked through it with her bag on one shoulder and her eyes forward, aware of Keal beside her the way she was always aware of Keal beside her, which was something she had stopped examining too closely because nothing good lived at the end of that particular line of thought.They weren't talking.They did that sometimes — walked together without talking, fell into the same pace without deciding to, occupied the same space with a comfort that Lior would never acknowledge out loud because acknowledging it meant thinking about why it was comfortable and she wasn't doing that today.Then she heard her name.She turned.Derek was coming down the hallway toward her and the smile hit her face before she'd consciously decided to produce it — wide and genuine, the kind t

Eight O'ClockSol stood in front of Zaren's door and counted.One.His heart was doing something completely unreasonable. He pressed his back flat against the wall beside the door and told himself this was nothing. He came to Zaren's room all the time. This was normal. He was a normal person about to do a normal thing.Two.The confidence from this morning felt like something that had happened to a different person. That version of Sol — the one who'd walked through the school gate with his shirt open and asked a girl to be his girlfriend in front of everyone and looked across a parking lot at Zaren with a smirk — felt very far away right now. Right now there was just a hallway and a closed door and a heartbeat that needed to calm down immediately.Three.The door opened.Sol's count died.Zaren stood in the frame in nothing but a towel, hair damp, water still tracking down his collarbone and his chest and the lines of his abdomen, and Sol's brain went through a brief and violent rebo

The classroom was loud in that particular pre-lesson way — chairs scraping, people leaning across desks, conversations running over each other — and Sol heard none of it.He sat with his pen in his hand and his notebook open to a blank page and his eyes on a fixed point somewhere past the whiteboard that had nothing to do with the whiteboard and thought about seven days.Seven days.He'd wanted his full wolf his entire life. That wasn't an exaggeration — it was the kind of wanting that lived in your bones, that you stopped noticing after a while the same way you stopped noticing breathing, constant and underneath everything. The half-shift he'd been carrying since he was fourteen — present, functional, but incomplete, like a sentence cut off before the last word — would finally close.He should be happy.He was happy.And underneath the happy, sitting quiet and immovable, was the thing he couldn't logic his way out of.What if Zaren isn't my mate.He pressed the pen to the page and dr