All Chapters of HE REJECTED ME AT THE ALTER: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

I am having the best morning I have had in a very long time.The rain is doing its soft, purposeful thing against the window. My coffee is the exact temperature I prefer, which is hot enough to mean something but not so hot that I have to wait on it. Rael is across the table from me with his contracts and his expensive pen, and every few minutes he says something — a question, an observation, something that requires nothing from me except honesty — and I answer, and we go back to our respective occupations, and it is the most comfortable I have been in a shared space with another person since I can remember.This is when the door opens and Casen Wolfe walks in.My wolf goes rigid.I do not.I am a Gamma wolf. I have been through the worst thing I have been through and I came out the other side and built something new, and I refuse — I absolutely refuse — to let his presence in a coffee shop doorway dismantle any part of what I have made.I look at him.He looks at me.He looks at Rael

He brings food from the place near the old quarter and I buzz him in and he comes up the stairs and into my apartment and sets the paper bag on my table like he has always known where the table is, which he hasn't — he has only been in my building twice — but it fits, the way he moves through a new space with the quiet assurance of someone who adapts rather than imposes.I get plates. He unloads containers. We don't talk about what happened with Casen, and we don't talk about not talking about it, which is its own form of fluency.We eat.The food is what it always is from that place — mismatched bowls, something slow-cooked that doesn't have a name on the menu, bread that arrives warm and without asking. He ordered my usual, which he knows because he has been paying attention, and the paying attention lands in my chest the same way it always does."Thank you," I say. "For coming up. You didn't have to.""I wanted to." He says it the way he says most things — plainly, without dressing

I ask Delara about herself on a morning that begins like all the best mornings do — quietly, with good tea, with the rain outside doing its considered work and the tea house empty enough that the question has room.I don't plan to ask it. I am wiping down the second table when I look up and find her standing at the window looking at the street below with the particular quality of stillness that is different from her usual composure. Her usual composure is armoured. This is something else. Something that has set its armour down for a moment without noticing."Delara," I say.She turns. The armour is back — not completely, but enough."You've been somewhere else this morning," I say."I'm sixty-eight years old," she says. "I'm permitted somewhere else.""I know." I set down the cloth. "I'm not asking you to perform. I'm asking if you're alright."She looks at me for a moment — and this is new, this is something I have not seen before — with the expression of a woman who is not used to b

The supernatural community of Caldenveil does not announce itself.This is the first thing I understood when I moved here — before I had language for it, before I had anything but instinct and the particular sensitivity of a Gamma wolf in a new environment. The community is there the way a current is there beneath still water: you can only feel it if you know how to stand still long enough to let it find you.By the time it finds me, I have been in this city long enough to stop looking foreign to it.It happens first at the market.I am at the bread stall — because the bread stall is an anchor point and I go to it the way I go to most things that have become mine — and a woman appears beside me who I have not seen before. She is small and brown-skinned with the stillness of something that has been here much longer than its face suggests. She picks up a loaf. She puts it back. She does not look at me."Warden," she says.I go very still.It is not a word I have been called before. It i

He doesn't tell me it's happening.He texts at a strange hour — not late enough to be an emergency, not early enough to be accidental — and the text is three words:*She's still here.*I stare at it.I type back: *Where?**My studio.*I look at the time. I look at the window. The city is doing its between-hours thing, the dark just beginning to thin at the edges.I type: *How long?*A pause. Long enough that I put the phone down and pick it up again.*We started on the revisions. Lost track.*I set the phone on the bed.I look at the ceiling.My brother — my opinionated, croissant-carrying, cushion-throwing brother who has been circling Neva Strand like she is a structural problem he needs to solve from a safe distance — has been alone with her in his studio until whatever hour this is, working on revisions, and has *lost track.*Ozzie does not lose track of things.Ozzie tracks everything. He is the person who notices when the bread at the market comes from a different oven than usua