All Chapters of RECLAIMED BY THE ALPHA: THE ALPHA’S HIDDEN HEIR: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

EMILYThe first thing I register is that his hair is wet.The second thing I register is the t-shirt.Black, plain, soft from washing, clinging to him in all the places a shirt clings to a man who just toweled off in a hurry. Across the chest. Over the shoulders. A patch at his hip where the water from his hair has bled through. His feet are bare.The third thing I register is the glasses.He is wearing them. Actually wearing them, perched on the bridge of his nose, the black frames catching the hallway light, turning his grey eyes into something softer behind the lenses, something close and readable in a way I have never in my life associated with Nicholas Blackwood. He looks like a man who just put down a book. He looks like he should be holding a cup of tea. He looks, and this is the part I am going to have to reckon with later, like mine.I have been prepared for a lot of things tonight. I was not prepared for this."Can I come in?"He steps aside.His apartment is not what I expe

I go downstairs.His door opens in three seconds. Sweats. T-shirt. Mason asleep on the couch behind him.“You knew I’d be at the gala.”He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t step back. He holds the door open wider and looks at me with the steady grey eyes of a man who’s been waiting for this.“Come in.”“I don’t want to come in. I want an answer.”“Then ask inside. Mason’s sleeping.”I walk past him into the kitchen. He follows. Leans against the counter. Crosses his arms. Doesn’t offer coffee. He knows this isn’t a coffee conversation.“Catherine Wells,” I say. “She gave you the last-minute invitation to the Kensington gala. You weren’t a donor. You had no connection to the foundation.”“Correct.”“She knows my father. I found a photo — fundraiser in Connecticut, four years ago. Richard Hale and Catherine Wells at the same table.”Something shifts in his face. That part is news. But the rest, the gala, the tip, showing up, that’s not news. He’s known this was coming.“Who told you I’d be there?

We assemble. Sauce everywhere. Cheese in clumps. Mason puts every single pepperoni in one corner. Nick slides the pizzas in the oven, sets the timer, and my kitchen fills with the smell of bread and garlic and something warm underneath both.“You have flour,” Nick says. “Here.” He reaches toward my face. His thumb brushes my cheekbone. One stroke. Light. Gone.My skin hums where he touched it. I turn to the counter before he sees.“Olive oil,” I say. “Top shelf.”I reach for it. My socked foot slides on the flour I spilled earlier, the flour I never cleaned, and the ground vanishes.I fall. Not fast. Slow enough to register every inch. My heel slips. My knee bends. The air rushes out of my lungs. And then his arm is there, not catching me, but stopping time itself. His hand on my back. His chest against my ribs. His breath on my mouth before my feet even remember the floor exists.I’m pressed against him with my palms flat on his chest and his face right there, flour on his jaw, grey

The intercom buzzes.Mason sits up on the couch. “That’s Mom.”Nick is on the floor with Mia and three crayons and the Wolf Council, which is Mia’s political system involving Agnes and a complex set of laws that change every five minutes. He looks at me. I look at him.“I forgot she was picking him up,” Nick says. He’s already standing, already moving to the door. “I’ll take him down. Give me two minutes.”“Nick, it’s fine, just let her—”He’s already at the intercom. “Jessica, I’ll bring Mason down.”“I’d like to come up.”“I’ll bring him down.”“Nick, I’m his mother. Let me up.”He looks at me again. His hand is on the intercom button. I can see him calculating a fight in the lobby versus a controlled visit upstairs. He mouths sorry and buzzes her in.“Two minutes,” he says to me. “I’ll have her out.”Jessica is at my door before Nick can get Mason’s shoes on. Cream coat. Silent heels. She steps inside the way she always does — like the room was expecting her.“Mason, shoes.”“I’m p

NICKMason is finally asleep.It took forty minutes. He cried for the first twenty not loud, not the thrashing kind, just the kind that a five-year-old does when he’s too tired to sob but too upset to stop. He asked me three times if Mia was really his sister. I said yes three times. On the third one he nodded and said, “Good, because I promised to protect her from spiders and I don’t break promises,” and then he rolled over and fell asleep with his fist curled around the corner of his pillow.I sit on the edge of his bed for a while after. Listening to him breathe. Thinking about how my five-year-old son screamed at his own mother to stop being cruel, and how my ex-wife flinched at the volume but not the words.*It’s a good thing you were saved.*I close Mason’s door. Walk to the kitchen. Pour a whiskey. Don’t drink it.Cole lets himself in at eleven. He has a the code becaud he is my best friend first and my beta after. He finds me at the kitchen counter with the glass untouched and