All Chapters of Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

REINAI should have taken the main road.That's the thought that keeps circling back to me now, sitting on my bathroom floor with my back against the cold tub and my knees pulled to my chest. I should have taken the main road. It adds seven minutes to the walk home from the bakery, and after a nine-hour shift my feet always hate me by the time I reach the front door, but seven minutes and sore feet is a small price to pay for staying alive.I should have taken the main road. But I didn't today.I press the back of my head against the tub and close my eyes and try to put the last forty minutes in order because my brain keeps skipping over certain parts like I’m beginning to develop amnesia.I was almost home. The bakery smell was still in my hair and I was thinking about nothing more significant than whether there was anything left in the fridge worth eating when I heard them.Not footsteps. Not voices. Something lower than both. A sound that didn't belong on a city street, in a reside

REINAMy father has a tell.Most people who know him wouldn't catch it. But I've been watching him my whole life and I know the tell. It's in his hands. When things are bad, really bad, he sets them flat on the table in front of him like he's trying to hold something down.Both hands. Flat on the table.That's how I know, before he says a single word, that whatever is in the letter he's been staring at since I came downstairs for breakfast is not something either of us is going to recover from quickly.I pour my coffee, sit down across from him and wait.My father is not a weak man. I want to be clear about that because what happens next could make him look like one and he isn't.He is a man who made one terrible decision twenty years ago when he was desperate and young and didn't fully understand what he was agreeing to. He has been paying for it in installments ever since, in sleepless nights and careful conversations and the specific way he flinches every time someone mentions the

REINANobody tells you what it actually feels like.The movies give you nerves and flowers and a father crying at the end of the aisle and a groom who looks at you like you just answered a question he's been asking his whole life. The reality…my reality is a borrowed dress and eleven minutes and a man who signs a document with the same energy he'd bring to a parking permit.It took Eleven minutes and I was legally, permanently, irrevocably the wife of a man who didn't look at me once during his own vows.Not once.I watched Zaden Cole during those eleven minutes the way I watch everything that threatens me.He is tall. Broader than I expected, though I don't know what I expected. He wore a black suit that fit him the way expensive things fit people who are used to expensive things. Dark hair, cut close on the sides. A jaw that looked like it had never accommodated an uncertain expression.And his eyes.His eyes were the coldest thing in the room, which is saying something because the

REINAI learned something about wolves in my first week inside Zaden's house.They don't need to say anything out loud.Back home in my real life, in the world I understood, hostility announced itself. It had volume. It had words. People who didn't like you told you, or told someone else who told you, or at the very least made a face that left no room for interpretation. It was loud and uncomfortable and you always knew exactly where you stood.Wolves are quieter than that.The hostility in Zaden's pack moves through a room like a change in temperature. You feel it before you can point to it. A conversation that stops two seconds before it would naturally stop. A space that opens around you in a crowded room, not given generously, just maintained, like proximity to you might be contagious. Eyes that find you and then find somewhere more interesting to be, which would be anywhere that isn't you.I noticed it the first time I was required to be somewhere the pack was gathered.A meeting

REINANobody told me about dinner.I mean that literally. Nobody said, hey, dinner happens at this time, in this room, here's how it works in this house. There was no welcome packet. No house rules pinned to a fridge. No human being who sat me down and said here is your life now, here is what it looks like on a Tuesday evening.I found out about dinner the same way I've found out about everything in this house, by figuring it out myself.A woman named Mrs. Voss runs the kitchen. Fifties, efficient, warm in a carefully professional way that tells me she's worked for people like Zaden long enough to know that warmth has limits and she respects those limits. She told me, without being asked, that dinner was served at seven. Said it the way you'd tell someone the bus schedule. Informational. Take it or leave it.I took it.Big mistake.The dining room is… okay, look. I grew up in a three bedroom house where the dining table sat six people comfortably and eight people if everyone was frien