All Chapters of HIS SURROGATE, HER ALPHA KING : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Read me the rest of it, Cael said.Not a demand. The way you'd say it to someone standing at the edge of something high, steady and quiet, come back from there.I looked down at the page.My mother's handwriting covered both sides in her tight, careful script, the kind she used when she was writing something she needed to get exactly right. She had written letters the same way she made decisions, slowly, deliberately, with every word placed like it had been considered twice before it was set down.I read out loud.She had met my father when she was twenty-three. His name was Daniel Crane, a name I had grown up with attached to the story that he had simply left, packed a bag one morning when I was four and Theo was one and never come back. That was the story she had told us. That was the story I had believed for twenty-three years.The truth was that he had been taken in the night. Three men at the door of their rental house in Bend, Oregon. He had told her to take us to her sister's,

How bad? Cael said into his phone.I was already texting Rosie. Stay in the break room. Do not move for any reason. Lena is coming.Cael's voice stayed flat but his free hand closed into a fist at his side. Which team member? How long ago. A pause. "Lock down the east wing and don't touch anything until I'm back."He ended the call and looked at me. In the space of thirty seconds his expression had shifted into something I hadn't seen from him before. Not panic. Something colder and more focused than panic, the look of a man who had just confirmed a thing he'd been bracing for.The team member who's down, I said. How bad?"Unconscious. Breathing." His jaw was tight. "They used something chemical. Fast-acting. He went down without a sound which is why it took twenty minutes to find him."They came through the east wing while we were out.While we were all out. Lena at the hospital, me driving you, most of the senior security at their posts outside the perimeter. He was already moving t

"Talk," Cael said.He had crossed the room in four steps and taken the phone from my hand without asking, put it on speaker, and set it on the coffee table between us. His voice was the quietest I had heard it. That particular quiet that meant the temperature had dropped several degrees on the inside.Marcus was silent for two seconds. The kind of silence that came from someone deciding how much to spend.I've been passing information to Aldric's people for eight months, he said. Not six. Eight. It started before the Alpha King campaign formally opened. He approached me through a third party, a man I knew from law school who I didn't realize was connected to the Eastern Coalition until it was too late to extract cleanly.What did you give him? Cael said.Schedules. Security rotations. Legal strategy on two of the land acquisition cases. Internal pack communications that weren't classified but would have been embarrassing publicly. A pause. And three days ago, when the clinic notificat

Let go of it, Vera said. Immediately. Don't pull.I already had.The moment I felt the thread I had released it, the way you pull your hand back from something unexpectedly hot. Not because it hurt. Because it was so much larger than I had been prepared for, holding it felt like trying to catch a river with both hands.I opened my eyes fully.Cael was leaning forward in his chair. Not toward me exactly, more like his whole body had oriented in my direction without him deciding to do it. The silver in his eyes was fully visible, no lamp light needed, just there, steady and bright.Did you feel that? I asked him.Yes. His voice was slightly rougher than usual. It felt like something took hold of it.I didn't pull, I said. I just found it."I know." He sat back slowly. "That's what I felt. Being found."Vera was writing something in her folder. She did it with the focused speed of someone who had been waiting for this specific data point for a long time. How would you describe the sensat

"She can't stay at her building," I said. And the daughter needs to be pulled from school before the end of first period.Cael was back in the kitchen. He had come in the moment he heard my voice change, which I was starting to understand was something he did, tracked the temperature of a room from a distance and arrived before being called.Where's the school? he asked.I relayed the question to Piper, still on the line. She gave me the name, a primary school twelve minutes from her apartment. Cael was already texting before I finished saying it.I have someone six minutes from the school, he said. Female. She'll identify herself to the office as a family emergency contact. What's the daughter's name?"Piper," I said into the phone. Your daughter's name."Clara," she said. Her voice had steadied slightly, the way people do when they are given something practical to hold onto. She's eight.I told Cael. He relayed it. Then he looked at me. What about Cross herself?"Piper," I said into