Lahat ng Kabanata ng Eyes of the Alpha: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I know how to be watched.That's the first thing you need to understand about me. Before Kenny. Before the supernatural world cracked open underneath my ordinary New York life like a fault line I never knew existed. Before I understood that the attention I'd spent my whole life performing for had a price I hadn't agreed to pay.I know how to walk into a room and make people look. How to hold a conversation and make the other person feel like the most important thing in it while simultaneously making sure everyone around them notices me noticing them. How to dress and move and laugh at exactly the right volume. I grew up in New York. The city teaches you that visibility is survival before you're old enough to understand what either word means.I just didn't know that for some people visibility was literally everything.I didn't know that until Kenny.It's been eight months since the night he told me the truth. Eight months of learning to navigate a world that exists underneath the one I

We got home at midnight.Kenny was fed well tonight. I felt it in the elevator, his hand gripping my waist too tight, his breathing heavier than usual, his eyes already burning full amber before we'd cleared the lobby. Three hours of visibility and dominance and carefully orchestrated attention, and now he was home, and all that power needed somewhere to go.It always came to me.The elevator doors closed, and he had me against the wall immediately. No preamble. No buildup. His mouth was hard on mine and his hands were already pulling at my dress, and I tasted the charge of his power on his tongue like something electric and alive."You were perfect tonight," he said against my mouth."I know," I said.He pulled back and looked at me with those burning amber eyes and gripped my jaw and kissed me again deeper this time, and I felt it move all the way down my throat and settle between my thighs immediately. My body knew him. Had learned him. Responded to the charge of his power like a sw

I saw him again on a Tuesday.Not at a supernatural event. Not at one of Kenny's carefully orchestrated visibility performances. Just on a Tuesday afternoon in the West Village, three blocks from my apartment, standing outside a coffee shop with a cup in his hand, looking at nothing in particular.I almost walked past him.Almost.He looked up at exactly the wrong moment, and our eyes met, and I felt it again. That particular quality of being seen that had nothing to do with performance or visibility or the attention system that ran the city underneath its surface. Just a man looking at a woman and actually seeing her."Cindy," he said. Just my name. Like a fact."Michael," I said.He held up his coffee cup slightly. "Do you have time?"I had time. I was between Kenny's morning requirements and his evening ones. A window of ordinary life that I'd learned to move through quickly and efficiently and without drawing attention to how much I needed it."Sure," I said.We sat inside at a sma

Kenny's pack met every Thursday.I'd been attending for six months. Not as a member; I was human, so that wasn't possible, but as Kenny's public face. His visibility anchor. The human woman whose presence at his side communicated something about his power that supernatural displays alone apparently couldn't.I'd never fully understood why until last week.I understood it now.We met at a warehouse in Brooklyn that the pack had converted into something between a headquarters and a temple. Industrial on the outside. Inside, warm light and heavy furniture and the particular charged atmosphere of forty supernatural beings in one space feeding off each other's energy.I sat beside Kenny at the head of the long table and watched his pack and thought about what Michael had said.That's Kenny's world talking. Not every interaction is a transaction.Around the table, thirty-eight wolves of varying rank moved through the meeting with the practiced efficiency of people who understood exactly wher

I found it by accident.That's the thing about truths people hide from you. They don't announce themselves. They don't come wrapped in dramatic revelation or preceded by warning. They just sit in ordinary places waiting for the moment you're not looking carefully enough to avoid them.It was a Sunday morning. Kenny had left at four as usual. I was in the penthouse kitchen making coffee in the particular silence of his absence when I knocked his laptop off the counter, reaching for a mug.It fell open.I picked it up, and the screen was already unlocked, and I wasn't trying to read anything, but the document that was open was large and clearly formatted, and my name was at the top of it, and I am a literature professor. I read things. It's a reflex.Cindy. Human. Visibility index 94/100. Attention generation capacity — exceptional. Current yield — 340 units weekly. Projected annual yield at current performance level — 17,680 units. Recommended continued investment.I stood in the kitche