All Chapters of RECLAIMED BY THE ALPHA: THE ALPHA’S HIDDEN HEIR: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

He’s at my door in forty seconds.I know because I count. Forty seconds from the phone call to the sound of his footsteps in the hall, not running, but fast, that controlled Alpha stride that covers ground without looking like urgency. He knocks once. Doesn’t wait. Uses the key.I should be angry about that. I’m not. I’m standing in my kitchen holding my phone like it’s something that bit me and I’m not angry about the key.“Show me,” he says.No greeting. No what happened. Just *show me*, because he walked in and read my face and skipped every unnecessary step between the door and the problem. That is Nicholas Blackwood in a crisis — economy of motion, economy of words, zero wasted breath.I hand him the phone.He reads the first message. His face doesn’t change. He reads the second — *which floor is the little one on* — and something happens to his jaw. It doesn’t clench. It sets. Like concrete finding its final form.“When did these come in?”“Five minutes ago. Maybe less.”“Where

I built HALE ATELIER on a cutting table in a studio apartment with a six-month-old asleep in a bassinet three feet away.People don’t know that. The press version is cleaner: “Self-funded designer launches minimalist label, gains cult following, secures first stockist within eighteen months.” What that sentence doesn’t include is the part where I hand-stitched samples at 2 AM with milk stains on my shirt, or the part where I cried in a fabric store because I couldn’t afford the lining I needed and had to use something cheaper that I knew would pill. It leaves out the part where my first fashion show was six looks in a borrowed gallery and I almost canceled because Mia had a fever and I had no one to call.I had no one to call for a long time.I have people now. A team. A studio in the Garment District with my name on the glass. Three seasons of press. A waitlist for my bridal capsule. Two international stockists. An office with a door that closes and a window that overlooks a street w

Alex is waiting outside my building when the car pulls up.He doesn’t ask why I called. He doesn’t ask why my voice sounded like that on the phone. He’s just there—jacket, takeout bag, wine, the whole Alex emergency kit—leaning against the brick wall like a man who has nowhere better to be.“Thai,” he says, holding up the bag. “The good place.”“You didn’t have to come.”“You called me at six-thirty on a Tuesday sounding like someone scraped you out with a spoon. I was coming whether you asked or not.” He falls into step beside me as we head through the glass doors. “Richard?”“Voicemail. Three callbacks. I answered the third.”“And?”“And I told him he’s inconveniently alive and to lose my number.”Alex looks at me. His mouth pulls into something not quite a smile—softer, the look he gets when I do something that reminds him why we work, even now.“That’s my girl.”The lobby is quiet, leaving just the two of us and the low hum of the elevator. I lean back against the wall and close m

The woods are wrong.I know they’re wrong because I recognize them. Silver Moon territory, the birch grove near the eastern border where the trees grow too close together and the light comes through in thin, silver slices. I haven’t been here in six years, but my body knows the path. My feet remember the roots. My lungs remember the air, cold, green, heavy with pine and something else. Something that smells distinctly like iron.I’m running.Not jogging. Not for exercise. This is the kind of running that comes from the oldest, most primal part of my brain the part that existed before language, before the invention of telling myself it’s fine, everything is fine. The kind of running that means whatever is behind me has teeth.I can hear it. Paws. Heavy. Rhythmic. Gaining. Something large, patient, and unhurried, because it already knows exactly how this ends.I run faster. The birches blur into a white wall. Branches whip across my face; I feel them, but they don’t hurt, because nothin

“No.”“Because from where I’m standing and I know where I’m standing, I know I don’t have a claim, I know you’ve never promised me anything but from where I’m standing, it looks like the man who broke your heart is sleeping in your apartment and you’re not telling me about it. And I don’t know what to do with that.”“Alex—”“I’m not angry. I just need to know where I am.”The line goes quiet. I hold the phone and I look at the plate — eggs, diagonal toast, halved grapes, the architecture of a man’s care laid out on porcelain — and I think about Alex’s face last night when Mia collapsed and Nick was the only one who could stop it. The expression of a man watching a door close.“You’re here,” I say. “You’re right here. Nothing has changed.”“Okay,” he says. But his voice doesn’t warm back up. It stays careful. Folded. Like a letter he’s written and isn’t sure he should send.“I’ll call you later,” I say.“Sure.”He hangs up. No *bye, Em.* No jokes. Just the click and the silence and the