All Chapters of Alpha VS Omega' Twin VS Twin (A Dark Werewolf Romance): Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

POV: Jack | London streets and back roomsSilas taught me to keep records the way other people keep breathing, which is to say without thinking about it, reflexively, as a condition of survival rather than a choice made fresh each morning.I have been keeping records for four years, since I was seventeen and Silas found me lifting purses in Southwark and decided that someone with my particular talent for noticing things other people overlooked was more useful as an apprentice than as a cautionary example. He was correct. He was almost always correct, which was one of the things about him that was both admirable and difficult to live alongside.He has been dead for eight months and I have been running the operation alone since then, which is a different thing from running it with him, not worse exactly, but different in the specific way that doing something without the person who taught you feels different from doing it with them, even if the thing itself is unchanged.The body trade c

POV: Isla | The Shelter, RookeriesThe shelter has thirty-one children in it now and I have been awake for the better part of thirty-six hours and the thing that has kept me functional across those thirty-six hours is not coffee or willpower but the specific relentless urgency of children who need things, because when someone needs something from you, you find a way to provide it even when you have nothing left, and then you find a way after that.I was not prepared for this. I was prepared for a rescue operation, for the immediate aftermath, for medical triage and trauma response in the framework I know from working with packless communities. I was not prepared for thirty-one children who have never experienced a safe environment and who do not have a behavioral template for one, who treat every kindness as a possible trap and every closed door as a threat and every unexpected sound as the beginning of something that will hurt them.What I was also not prepared for was how many peopl

POV: Callum | The Feral Den, New Year's EveThree years ago tonight my father was still alive and I was someone else, a version of myself that I cannot fully reconstruct from the inside because the person you were before the thing that changed you is always slightly hypothetical in retrospect, assembled from evidence rather than memory.Three years. I am thinking about what three years means while standing in the Feral Den with five hundred people moving around me, which is not a number I intended and which is the number anyway, the packless community and the Rookeries regulars and the volunteers and the rescued wolves and the hybrid children's guardians and Tom's network and Cormac, who is leaning against the bar with the expression he has developed over the past year that I have decided to call settled, because it is not happy exactly but it is the expression of someone who has stopped fighting themselves, which in Cormac is the closest thing to peace I expect to see.Three years ag

POV: Callum | The Rookeries, then emergency meetingThe counterfeiting is discovered on a Tuesday, which is the day Tom's financial contact in the supernatural banking network calls in a voice that has the specific flat quality of someone who has been calm about an emergency for as long as they can maintain it and has reached the limit.Dragon scrip is the backbone of the supernatural economy. It has been for two hundred years, which is how long the dragons have been issuing it, and its value is guaranteed by the dragons' hoards, which are real and large and not subject to the fluctuations that affect human currency because nobody who understands what a dragon is willing to do to protect its hoard is going to speculate against it. The scrip works because the guarantee is real and everyone knows the guarantee is real.Someone in the Hermetic Order has been counterfeiting it.The forgeries are sophisticated enough that they have been circulating for four months without detection, which

POV: Callum | Parliament steps, then the Feral DenI do not write the speech in advance because I have learned, over three years of standing in front of crowds, that prepared speeches have the quality of prepared speeches, which is to say they land with the specific hollowness of words that were written somewhere else and carried to this place, and the crowds I have been speaking to have very good instincts about hollowness because they have been on the receiving end of it from Parliament and the Order and every institution that has claimed to speak on their behalf for decades.So I stand on the Parliament steps at noon, with two hundred people below me and another hundred filtering in from the surrounding streets and the city behind all of them doing the city thing of continuing regardless, and I say it the way it actually is."Two foreign powers are fighting in Scotland over who gets to manage us," I say. "The American Confederation wants territory. The European Covenant wants autho