All Chapters of Alpha：No Second Chance: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Angel's povLily's session ran long because she wanted it to. She had discovered a gap in her defensive technique during the week and had spent the last forty minutes refusing to stop until she had closed it, which I respected enough not to rush.By the time we finished the rain had started.Not ordinary rain. The kind that arrived without warning and meant something — the pressure dropping fast, the temperature shifting, the particular smell in the air that made wolves uneasy before the first drop fell. My wolf had been tracking it for an hour without my full attention. By the time I registered it properly the water was hitting the windows hard enough to blur the glass.Dana called while I was packing up the lesson materials."Don't go outside," she said, before I could speak. "Angel, listen to me. Two wolves in the eastern district have already been — the drainage has failed on the main road and there's been an accident. Stay where you are.""Where are you?" I said."Elias's pack ho

Angel's povHe had very dark eyes. The kind that were direct without being aggressive, that looked at you completely when they looked at you, and I remembered that Finn always complained that the food I cooked was not good. Once I was sick and didn't want to cook, but he still asked me to cook for him. He never cared about me. Lily launched into a detailed account of what she wanted to cover in today's session and I redirected my full attention to her and kept it there.Kian stepped away from the table to make a call. I caught fragments — Beta, the door, something being brought in. A few minutes later a staff member came through with a wrapped package and set it on the side table without explanation.Kian brought it to me.I unwrapped it.The ceramic piece. Whole. The breaks were invisible — not filled or approximated, actually invisible, the restoration so precise that I turned it over three times looking for the seam before I accepted that I wasn't going to find one.I looked up at

Angel's povChristmas came quietly to Dana's apartment.I had bought ingredients in the morning — enough for a proper meal, the kind I used to make when the holiday meant something organized around other people's schedules. I didn't need that much food for one person but I made it anyway because the making of it was something to do with my hands.The street outside was loud with it. Lights on every building, families moving in and out of restaurants, children in wolf ears that were sometimes decorative and sometimes not. I watched it from the window while the oven ran and thought about Finn.He was five the first Christmas I had made this particular dish. He had eaten three servings and fallen asleep at the table and Bastien had carried him to bed and come back and sat across from me and for one evening the distance between us had felt manageable. I had held onto that evening for longer than it deserved.I picked up my phone twice before I put it back down. Then I opened the social fe

Lilian's povI saw her the moment she walked in.Bastien's attention moved before I could redirect it — just a flicker, just the involuntary tracking that wolves did when someone they knew entered a space, but I felt it and it settled in my chest as something cold and useful.She was with Kian.I looked at them at their table and considered this. They sure looked closed but I wasn’t worried. Kian couldn’t possibly like an omega like her. I was just pissed that Bastain was distracted with her here. Kian was a strategic man with high standards and an established position. Angel was a divorced Omega with a tutoring job and a forum post asking for secondhand competition equipment. The arithmetic didn't produce anything threatening."I miss Mom."I turned. Finn was looking at his plate with the small, folded expression he got when something was bothering him and he was trying to decide whether to say it."Look," I said, and reached into my bag and produced the small puzzle I had bought for

Dana’s POVPain came without warning.One moment, I was still standing there, my hands stiff with cold, the metallic smell of fish clinging to my clothes. The next, the boss’s hand clamped around my collar, dragging me backward with brutal force.I didn’t even have time to scream.My back slammed into the concrete floor. The impact knocked the air from my lungs, a sharp, tearing ache spreading through my chest. Before I could curl inward to protect myself, his boot came down hard against my ribs.He didn’t just hit me once, he continuously hit me until I lost count.I heard bones crack, not sure if they were mine or it was just my mind hallucinating.“Useless,” he spat.His fists rained down without rhythm, without restraint. Each blow blurred into the next. My vision fractured into shards of light and stars. I tasted blood, the taste of iron flooding my mouth.I screamed.I screamed until my throat burned raw, until my voice broke into hoarse gasps, but no one responded. When darknes