Lahat ng Kabanata ng Hunted By Alphas, Claimed By The Alpha King: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 74

The drive home takes six hours.I sleep for four of them.Not planned. My body simply makes the decision for me somewhere in the first hour, pulling me under with a completeness that suggests whatever the final ability cost me, it cost more than I fully registered in the field, and I wake up when the vehicle slows and the trees around the house are visible through the window in late afternoon gold.Thalrion is beside me.He looks worse in daylight than he did in the mountains. The cut above his eye has been cleaned and closed and there is bruising starting along his jaw and he is holding himself slightly differently, his left side protected in the specific way of someone managing pain they have decided not to discuss."How bad?" I ask."Manageable," he says."Thalrion."He meets my eyes. "Two ribs. Possibly three. Nothing displaced.""You have broken ribs?" "Cracked," he corrects."That is the same thing with a smaller word," I tell him.The amusement that moves across his face is wa

Six months later.The bakery puts something out at six thirty every morning and I get there first every day.Not because I have to. Not because there is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do and no other option except the step and the pastry and twenty minutes of being nobody specific. But because I want to. Because wanting things is something I am still learning and the bakery is where I practice it, every morning, in the specific quiet of the hour before the city gets loud.Thalrion comes with me sometimes.Not every day. Some mornings the empire requires him before six thirty and I go alone and bring something back and leave it on his desk and he finds it an hour later and the expression on his face when he finds it is one I have never seen him make for anyone else.This morning he is beside me on the step.Both of us with coffee and pastries and the city doing its waking up thing below us and the early light coming in gold from the east and neither of us talking because we have