All Chapters of The Alpha's Christmas Sin: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

49 Chapters

CHAPTER ELEVEN — Borrowed Normal

Ava's POVEleven days in and I had started keeping a mental list.Not intentionally. It just happened the way things happen when you are living in close quarters with someone you don't fully understand and your brain decides that cataloguing details is safer than sitting with the uncertainty of not knowing what any of them mean.Damian drank his coffee black. No sugar, no milk, nothing. He watched me put three spoons of sugar in mine one morning and didn't say anything but his expression did something brief and confused that I found genuinely funny and did not tell him.He was always the first one awake. Always the last one to stop working. Somewhere in the hours between he maintained a level of focus that made me feel lazy just being in the same room.He had a lot of suits. Too many suits honestly. They were all dark and expensive and perfectly fitted and he wore them like he had been born in one which was impressive and also slightly exhausting.He read books. Actual books. Real one

CHAPTER TWELVE — The Space Between

Ava's POVThursday came in gray and cold and I was already awake before my alarm.I had been lying in the dark since five thinking about what Elena might say and trying to prepare myself for something I couldn't prepare for because I didn't know what shape it was yet. That's the thing about waiting for information. Your brain fills the gap with everything it can imagine and by the time the actual thing arrives you're already exhausted from all the versions you invented.She arrived at eleven.Her suggestion to come to the manor rather than meet somewhere public told me before she walked through the door that this was not a coffee and catch up conversation. She stood in the entrance hall and looked around at the high ceilings and the heavy dark wood of the place and her expression did the thing it did when she was processing something and keeping her face neutral while she did it."This is where you live now,""For now."She looked at me properly then. The doctor look, the one that goe

CHAPTER THIRTEEN — The Truth Has Teeth

Ava's POVHe didn't start with the wolves.He started with his father."My father was a Hawthorne by name and an Alpha by blood," he said. "He didn't choose it. It was inherited the way everything in our family was inherited, without being asked and without the option to refuse." He had his hands flat on the kitchen table, not fidgeting, just placed there like he needed something to anchor him. "He spent his whole life controlling it. Managing it. Making sure the business world never saw anything that couldn't be explained by ordinary human ambition.""Did it work?""Mostly." A pause. "Until it didn't."I left the soup on low and sat across from him. The kitchen felt smaller than usual. More contained. Like the walls had quietly moved in a few inches to make room for whatever this conversation was going to become."The wolf gene in our bloodline is dominant," he continued. "It doesn't skip generations. It doesn't dilute. Every Hawthorne male going back further than our records exist h

CHAPTER FOURTEEN — Forty Questions

Ava's POVThe soup got cold before we were halfway through.Neither of us noticed until I reached for my spoon at some point past nine and found the bowl had gone from warm to room temperature while I was busy asking question seventeen, which was about the full moon and what exactly happened to him during it and whether I needed to be concerned about my physical safety in this house."You don't," he said."That's not a detailed enough answer for question seventeen.""The shift is controlled. It has been for years." He looked at the cold soup without particular concern. "I leave the house. I run. I come back.""The pre-dawn walks.""Yes.""Luca logs them as perimeter checks.""Luca is thorough.""Luca is covering for you.""Also yes."I picked up my spoon anyway and ate cold soup because I was genuinely hungry and also because the normalcy of it felt necessary, two people at a kitchen table eating soup and talking about werewolves like it was a reasonable Thursday evening activity."Do

CHAPTER FIFTEEN — Pack

Ava's POVThe pack meeting was in three days and I was trying not to think about it by aggressively reorganizing the flower cooler at Petals.It wasn't working."You're putting the lilies with the roses again," Jamie said from behind me."They're both flowers.""They have different water requirements and you know that." She nudged me aside and started fixing what I had done. "What's wrong.""Nothing's wrong.""Ava.""I have to go to a werewolf pack meeting in three days," I said. To the cooler. "With actual werewolves. As the last surviving member of an ancient extinct wolf bloodline that apparently everyone in this secret supernatural world wants to either control or kill." I straightened up and turned around. "So nothing's wrong exactly. It's more that everything is wrong in a very specific and unprecedented way."Jamie stared at me."Werewolves," she said."Werewolves.""Like. Actual.""Yes Jamie. Actual."She was quiet for a moment. Then she sat down on the stool behind the counte

CHAPTER SIXTEEN — Into The Wild

Ava's POVThe pack meeting was not in a forest.I don't know exactly what I had been picturing. Something atmospheric probably. Torches maybe. Ancient trees and moonlight and wolves standing in a circle doing something ceremonial and vaguely threatening. Jamie had suggested a cave when I told her the meeting was happening and I had laughed but honestly a cave had not felt entirely outside the realm of possibility.It was a restaurant.A private dining room in the back of a Creole place in the Tremé neighborhood, down a side street with no sign outside, accessed through a door that looked like a storage entrance and opened into a warm low lit space that smelled like good food and old wood and something underneath both of those things that I was beginning to recognize as a wolf presence, a specific quality to the air that my newly awake instincts registered before my brain caught up."A restaurant," I said quietly to Damian as Luca held the door."Did you expect a forest?" he said, with

Chapter Seventeen — The Longest Century

Damian's POV One hundred and forty years. That was how long I had been managing this. The wolf, the hunger, the particular discipline required to exist in a human world while carrying something inside you that was fundamentally incompatible with human fragility. Years of learning exactly how much pressure to apply and where and when to release it before it became something I couldn't take back. I had watched cities burn and rebuild. I had buried people I cared about and people I merely tolerated and stood at both graves with the same expression because grief at my age had learned to be quiet out of sheer necessity. I had navigated wars and pack coups and corporate power struggles and the specific hell of watching someone you had allowed yourself to care about grow old while you remained exactly as you were. After enough of that you stopped allowing it. You kept people at the precise distance where they couldn't reach the parts of you that still felt things. You maintained contr

Chapter Eighteen— The Weight of Almost

Damian's POVLuca dropped a tablet on my desk with three surveillance photos on the screen and the expression of someone who had been awake longer than was healthy and had made peace with it."Moretti moved a third car to the north side of the street last night," he said. "Different plates, same two men rotating. They're not watching anymore. They're positioning."I looked at the photos. The shift in intent was clear to anyone who understood how Moretti's people operated. After three years of untangling his network from my company I understood it very well."Timeline?" I said."Hard to say. Could be they want her before the full moon. An uncontrolled Ashmoon female mid transition is considerably easier to take than a fully activated one." He sat down without being invited, which he only did when the situation had moved past formality. "We need more bodies on the perimeter tonight and tomorrow. I have three wolves I trust who can be here by this evening.""Get them here.""Already text

CHAPTER NINETEEN — Preparation

Ava's POVI woke up and knew immediately.Not because of an alarm or the light coming through the curtains or any of the ordinary things that usually pulled me out of sleep. I woke up because my body woke me, snapped me upright at five in the morning with a clarity that had nothing drowsy about it, like something inside me had decided that today was not a day for easing into consciousness gradually.The burning was different from the previous episodes.Before it had been urgent and frightening and directionless, something trying to get out without knowing where the door was. This morning it was purposeful. It knew exactly where it was going and it was simply waiting for the sun to finish its arc across the sky and hand the sky over to something older and more patient and considerably more powerful.I sat on the edge of my bed and breathed and took stock.My senses were doing things that would have terrified me three weeks ago. I could hear Luca moving on the ground floor with a clarit

Chapter Twenty— Blood and Moon

CHAPTER TWENTY — Blood and MoonAva's POVThe garden was different at night. Not just darker. Different in the way places are different when you arrive at them carrying something significant, when the location becomes part of the event rather than just the setting for it. The snow reflected the moonlight back upward so that everything was lit from below as well as above, soft and strange and nothing like ordinary winter darkness.I stood in the middle of the garden and felt the moon like a hand pressing flat against my chest.Not metaphorically. Physically. A pressure that was also a pull, directional and specific, like something enormous had decided it wanted my attention and had the patience to wait until it had all of it.Damian stood a few feet away. Close enough to reach. Far enough to give me the space my instincts were telling me I needed. He was watching me with that steady focused attention, older and more patient than anything I had encountered before, oriented toward someth

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