All Chapters of ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The drive to his estate takes forty minutes. I counted. It is something I do when I need to stay inside my own head instead of the one that's spinning. One minute. Two. The city thins out gradually, buildings giving way to wider streets, wider streets giving way to the kind of neighborhoods that don't have corner stores or bus stops. Old money geography. The kind of quiet that costs a lot to maintain. I have my mother's face in my head the whole drive. Gloria Navarro. Five foot three, dark hair going silver by the time I was fifteen, laugh lines so deep they stayed even when she wasn't laughing. She worked the morning shift at a hotel laundry and the evening shift at a diner on Halsted for most of my childhood and she never once complained about either. She brought home other people's leftover bread from the diner on Fridays and made soup from it on Saturdays and somehow made that feel like abundance. She never talked about her family. Not her parents, not siblings, not where s

Chapter Thirteen: The Name Behind the Order I don't sleep after that. I lie in the guest room with the tablet screen burned into my memory and those four words sitting in my chest like something with weight. "Confirmed. Notify the client." Three days after my initial bloodwork. Before the procedure. Before any of this became real. Someone was watching me before I ever knew I was being watched. I get up at six, shower with the toiletries Isobel apparently stocks with the efficiency of someone who anticipates everything, and go downstairs in yesterday's clothes feeling like a woman who slept three hours because she did. Dominic is already in the kitchen. This surprises me. Not because I thought he didn't have a kitchen but because I somehow didn't picture him in it. He's standing at the counter with coffee and his phone and a stillness that suggests he didn't sleep much either. He looks up when I walk in. "There's coffee," he says. "Decaf. I checked." I stop in the doorway. He c

Nobody speaks for a moment.The fire is going in the grate and the soup is sitting on the side table and Hadrian Voss's photograph is on the desk between us and the room has the particular silence of people absorbing something that changes the shape of what they thought they knew.Callum breaks it first."Nadia's father," he says from the doorway. He came in quietly somewhere during Declan's presentation and I didn't notice until now. His voice is different from how it was at the front door. Stripped of the easy warmth. "He's been doing this the whole time.""It appears so," Declan says.Callum looks at Dominic. Something passes between them that has years of history in it. The kind of look that only exists between people who have stood in the same grief together.Dominic doesn't look back. He's looking at the photograph.I watch his face do the thing it does when something costs him more than he's going to show. The slight tightening around the eyes. The jaw doing its careful, contro

I don't move.I sit up in bed with my phone in my hand and the kitchen light spilling through the gap under my bedroom door and I think, very carefully, about the last hour.Isobel's team was here. Dominic is on my couch twelve feet away. The window was patched and re-locked with hardware that a professional installed forty minutes ago. There is no logical way someone got back into this apartment.Which means the light was on before everyone left.Which means whoever sent that text has been watching my apartment long enough to know what I do before bed.I get up. I open my bedroom door. Dominic is on the couch with his jacket folded over the armrest and his eyes already open, which tells me he wasn't sleeping either. He looks at me and then at the phone in my hand and sits up."Another text," I say.I hand him the phone.He reads it. Something moves through his face, fast and controlled, there and gone. He stands up and goes to my kitchen window and looks out at the street below witho

Dominic makes three calls in ten minutes.I sit in the chair by the window and listen to the half I can hear. His voice stays level the whole time, which I've learned means he's more unsettled than usual, not less. The control goes up when the ground goes unstable. It's a tell I've started to read the way I read patients who say they're fine in the same tone they use to say everything else.The third call is to Isobel.He tells her to pull everything Declan Marsh touched. Every file, every recommendation, every communication that came through him since Dominic first brought him in. He tells her to do it quietly and to assume Declan may have people watching the process.He hangs up and looks at me."How much did we tell him?" I ask."Everything we had at that point," he says. "The Voss connection. The Lunare bloodline. Nora's research. The clinic access log.""So if he's feeding information to someone, they know all of it.""Yes."I think through the implications methodically because t