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Lahat ng Kabanata ng ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

115 Kabanata

Chapter Twenty-One: What the Blood Actually Carries

She makes tea first.I watch her move around the small kitchen attached to the sitting room, filling the kettle, getting cups from the cabinet, doing it all with the unhurried ease of someone who has learned that the most important conversations need a moment of ordinary before they begin.I don't rush her.I sit on the edge of a chair that is old and comfortable and worn in the specific way of furniture that has held a lot of people through a lot of difficult things. I look at the sitting room around me. More photographs. More old paper stacked on side tables. A bookshelf with texts in three languages, some of them very old, spines cracked and careful.She brings the tea and sits across from me and wraps both hands around her cup and looks at me steadily."What do you know about Lunares?" she asks."What Nora told me," I say. "What Dominic told me. Older bloodline. Connection to the moon. The ability to carry wolf pregnancies.""That's the surface," she says. "That's what the pack re

Chapter Twenty-Two: What I've Been Reading All Along

He's waiting at the front door when Isobel pulls through the gate.Not inside, not in the study, not being efficient somewhere with his phone and his impossible schedule. At the front door, hands in his pockets, watching the car come up the drive with an expression that goes carefully neutral the moment he thinks I can see him clearly.I see him clearly.That's the thing I'm sitting with the whole drive back. The thing Rosamund named and that I've been turning over since I left her sitting room. Every time I've looked at Dominic Sinclair and felt something I couldn't categorize, every time his presence did something to the air that I filed under stress response or proximity or the general chaos of the situation, it wasn't imagination.It was information.My blood reading his and finding something it recognized.I get out of the car. He looks at me the way he always does when I've been somewhere without him. That total, assessing look that starts at my face and works outward, checking

Chapter Twenty-Three: When They Start Removing Witnesses

I read the headline three times.Each time it says the same thing.Dr. Felix Maddox. Body found. Lincoln Park.I put the phone down on the counter and I look at it the way you look at something you want to be wrong about. Dominic reads my face before he reads the screen. He turns the phone toward himself and I watch him go through the same process I just did. Reading it. Absorbing it. Arriving at the same place.He straightens up slowly."He was the only person inside the clinic who could confirm how the sample error was arranged," I say."Yes.""Someone knew we'd eventually get to him.""Yes.""Which means someone has been tracking how close we're getting." I look at him. "Declan."Dominic's jaw tightens. "Declan knew our next logical step was the clinic's internal staff. I told him that two days ago." He picks up his phone. "I have to call Isobel.""Call Nora too," I say. "She found the original clinic connection. If someone is removing witnesses she needs to know she might be one."

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Woman With Two Stories

I don't move immediately.That's the thing about working in an ER. You learn that the first ten seconds after bad information arrives are not for action. They're for assessment. You take the information, you hold it, you look at it from every angle before you decide what it means and what comes next.Dark hair. Medium height. Private records room. Eleven forty-seven.Nora Reyes fits that description.So do approximately forty thousand other women in Chicago."Where is she now?" I ask."Study," Dominic says. "Isobel is with her.""Does Isobel know about the description?""That's who called me."I get up from the window seat. "Don't do anything yet."He looks at me. "Ella...""Don't do anything yet," I say again. "I want to talk to her.""She could be dangerous.""She could be framed," I say. "Those are two very different situations and they require two very different responses, and the only way to know which one this is, is to talk to her." I hold his gaze. "Let me talk to her."A paus

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Brother You Don't Suspect

I don't say anything.That's the right instinct and I follow it. Because the look on Dominic's face right now is not something that needs words added to it. It needs space. The specific, difficult space of a person sitting with the possibility that someone they love without reservation might have done something unforgivable.He pushes off the wall and walks to the window at the end of the hallway. He stands with his back to me and his hands in his pockets and he looks out at the grounds for a long moment.I give him thirty seconds."Tell me about Callum," I say quietly. "Not the version I've seen. Tell me something different."He doesn't turn around. "He's seven years younger than me. After our parents died he was nineteen and I was twenty-six and I ran the company and I raised him at the same time, which means I did both imperfectly." He pauses. "He's warm where I'm cold. Trusting where I'm careful. He has always believed that most people are operating from good intentions.""That's

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Quiet Candidate Speaks

I don't put it on speaker immediately.I look at Dominic first. One look. He reads it and moves to stand beside me close enough to hear without crowding and I press the speaker button and set the phone on the desk between us."Mr. Pryce," I say. "This is a surprise.""I imagine it is." His voice fills the room easily. The kind of voice that was built for large spaces and formal occasions. "I want to begin by saying that I understand your situation is frightening and I have no wish to add to that.""That's a interesting opening from a man whose brother forged authorization documents at a fertility clinic," I say.A pause. Shorter than I expect. "My brother acted without my knowledge or my sanction. I want to be very clear about that.""Clear and true are different things, Mr. Pryce.""Yes," he says. "They are. Which is why I'm calling you rather than managing this through intermediaries." Another pause. "I know about the documents Maddox prepared. I know you have them. I'm not calling

Chapter Twenty-Seven: My Name in the Wrong Headline

I read it twice.The alert is three sentences. A name. A connection to the victim through the fertility clinic. A request for the named individual to contact police voluntarily.My name. My connection. My photograph, pulled from what looks like my hospital employee directory, sitting under the word "interest" in a way that makes my stomach drop completely.I put the phone face down on the desk.Then I pick it up because I am not the kind of person who puts things face down and pretends they say something different."They're connecting me to Maddox through the clinic," I say. My voice comes out level. I am extremely focused on keeping it level. "I was his patient. He called me personally the day of the error. I went back in to meet with him." I look at Dominic. "On paper that's a relationship. On paper that's proximity to a victim.""On paper it's also completely explainable," he says."On paper and in a headline are two different documents."He takes my phone. He reads the alert. He r

Chapter Twenty-Eight: What Petra Sees That I Don't

She arrives at eleven with two bags of groceries and a rolling suitcase and the energy of a woman who has decided that a situation requires her physical presence and has rearranged her entire week accordingly.Dominic opens the door.Petra looks at him for exactly three seconds. Then she looks at me over his shoulder. Then back at him. The full inventory of Petra Navarro, conducted at eleven at night on an estate driveway, is a thing to witness."Dominic Sinclair," she says."Ms. Navarro," he says."Petra," she says. "You're going to be calling me Petra eventually so we might as well start now." She hands him one of the grocery bags with the confidence of someone who has decided he's trustworthy enough to carry things. "Where's the kitchen?"He takes the bag without a word and leads her to the kitchen and I follow behind them watching the particular thing that happens when Petra walks into a new space. She takes it in completely, the size of it, the warmth, the detail that someone act

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Everything They Heard

The first thing I do is put my phone on the desk. Not aggressively. Just deliberately. I set it screen-up between me and Dominic and we both look at it for a moment like it's something that changed shape when we weren't watching. Every call. Every plan. Everything. Judith Crane discussing my legal situation. Nora walking through the clinic connection. Gareth Pryce's voice filling the study while we all listened. And thirty seconds ago, me telling Dominic I trusted him in the quiet of a study I thought was private. Someone heard all of it. "The sweep," I say. "Isobel swept this room after Declan's devices." "She swept for the model she found," Dominic says. He's already at the door calling her name. "If someone installed something different in a different location she may have missed it." Isobel appears in under a minute. She takes one look at our faces and goes to the cabinet by the window without being told. She pulls equipment I don't recognize and starts moving through the ro

Chapter Thirty: The Meeting We Almost Didn't Take

I show Dominic the phone.He takes it and looks at the photograph for a long time. The warehouse exterior, dark, taken from across the street at an angle that catches the building number clearly. Timestamped forty minutes ago.Someone knew the location before we did.Or someone followed Rosamund's people when they went to prepare it.Either answer is bad. They point to different problems but they land in the same place. Nowhere is clean. Nowhere is ahead of whatever this is."We cancel," Dominic says."If we cancel we lose the window," I say. "Gareth is in a hospital. Orlan knows we have the documents. Hadrian knows we're moving toward a Conclave confrontation." I look at him. "Every day we don't move is a day they get further ahead of us.""Every day you're in an exposed location is a day something can happen to you and the baby.""Something is already happening," I say. "Canceling doesn't stop it. It just means we're reacting instead of moving."He looks at me.I look back."New loc

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