All Chapters of Alpha, Let's End This Bond!: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

214 Chapters

Ledger Closed

- LUCAKenian buzzed through twice before Ivy made it past the front desk, which told me exactly how much warning I was about to get and exactly how little good it would do me.She came through the door without waiting for an answer, coat still on, hair pulled back like she hadn't stopped to think about it that morning, just grabbed it out of her face and left."You went behind my back." Her voice was already raw, like she'd been crying in the car and made herself stop somewhere around the parking garage. "A family meeting. About my father. Without telling me. I had to hear about it from Petra, at lunch, like gossip.""I'm sorry you heard it that way." I set down my pen, deliberately, the way you set something down when you want both hands free for a conversation you know is about to need them. "I should have told you myself, before the room. That part was a mistake. I won't pretend otherwise.""That's it? Not the actual thing you did — cutting off my family, my mother—""After everyt

What's Left To Lose

- LUCAThe office had emptied out hours ago. Kenian usually left with everyone else, but tonight she'd stayed, watching me sit motionless behind my desk with the lights dimmed and a glass of something amber I hadn't touched in twenty minutes."You're allowed to go home," I said, without looking up."So are you." She dropped into the chair across from me without waiting for permission, a habit that had become, over the years, tolerated rather than overstepped. "You've looked like that since the Ivy thing this afternoon. I assume that's not paperwork.""It's not paperwork.""Do you regret it? Cutting her family off. I'm not asking because I think you should. I'm asking because you look like a man doing math on something, and I'd rather know which number's bothering you."I turned the glass slightly, watching the light catch in it. "I don't regret the decision.""Then what's the number.""How long it took me," I said finally. "Twenty-six years since her father died for me, and it took un

The Open Hand

- BRANDONI'd represented enough men through ugly divorces to recognize most of their tricks on sight — the lowball settlement dressed as generosity, the custody offer with a poison clause buried in subsection nine. I'd built half my career catching those tricks before they reached my clients.I had not, in any of those years, had the other party's husband walk into my lawyer's office unannounced and sit down across from him without a single lawyer of his own in the room."Mr. Stormbourne." Andrew didn't stand. "I have to assume there's a reason you're here instead of having someone call ahead.""There is." Luca set a folder on the desk, not slid, not tossed, just placed, the way you put down something you want handled carefully. "I wanted to deliver this myself. I didn't want it to arrive as a legal maneuver from a lawyer Aria has no reason to trust."I'd been reviewing unrelated paperwork in the corner and went very still the moment he walked in. I didn't know what this was either,

Reading The Fine Print

- ARIAWinnie laid the document out across her kitchen table in three neat stacks — custody, financial, miscellaneous — the way she organized everything when she wanted to think clearly instead of emotionally. Aldrin had offered to sit in. She'd told him, gently, that this needed to be just the two of us, lawyer and client, without a husband in the room who might soften any of it out of kindness."Andrew's gone through it twice," she said, sliding a coffee toward me neither of us would drink. "I went through it a third time this morning, before you got here. I wanted to be the one who found the catch, if there was one, before you had to.""And?""I didn't find one. I want to walk you through it line by line anyway, because I don't think you'll believe me unless you see it yourself."She started with the studio. Full equity, no clawback, no language tying ownership to the marriage's status or to any relationship I might have later. Then custody — not the standard split his lawyers woul

Ghosts In The Lobby

- ARIATasha called first, her voice tight in a way I'd only heard a handful of times in the years we'd known each other."There's a woman in the lobby," she said. "She's saying she's your mother. She's also saying if I don't get you down here in ten minutes, she's going to start telling the receptionist your whole life story for free, and I genuinely cannot tell if that's a bluff."My stomach dropped, the old, familiar drop I'd felt every time the word mother surfaced over the last several weeks, ever since Martha's first call from Oakhaven. I'd let myself believe, foolishly, that ignoring it long enough might make it go away."I'm coming down."The woman in the lobby looked smaller than I remembered from the one blurry photograph Martha had texted weeks ago — smaller, and somehow harder, the way certain people age not into softness but into something more brittle at the edges. Diane. I still had trouble attaching the name to anything resembling a memory; twenty years was a long time

No Blood Owed

- ARIAWe moved to the small conference room off the lobby, the one Tasha usually used for vendor calls, because Diane refused to "air family business" in front of the receptionist, and I didn't have the energy to argue about where the truth got told, only that it finally got told somewhere.Tasha came too. I didn't ask her to stay outside, and she didn't offer to."You want the truth," Diane said, settling into the chair across from me. "Fine. I left because I was twenty-six, married to a man already drinking himself into someone else, raising a kid I didn't ask to have that young, in a town with one road in and one road out. I left because someone offered me a life that didn't involve any of that, and I took it." She met my eyes, the performance finally dropped. "I didn't agonize over it for years afterward, if that's the honesty you asked for. I got a new life, and most days, I didn't think about the old one at all."The room was very quiet. I'd braced myself for tears, for excuses

Asking First

- LUCAAldrin laid the file on my desk with the particular care of a man who already suspected how this conversation might have gone a few months ago, and wanted to see, in real time, whether it would go that way again."Diane Calloway," he said. "Three outstanding debts, two past due — a landlord in Millbrook, a collector who's already filed a small claims notice. No criminal record, but a pattern of moving towns roughly every two years, usually right around the time people stop being useful to her. If she's run out of money this fast, she'll likely try the studio again, or try Aria directly, within the month."I read through it once, twice, feeling the old instinct rise almost immediately — the clean, efficient pull toward handling it. A call to the landlord. A quiet settlement with the collector, structured so Diane never resurfaced in this city again. I had the phone half-raised before I stopped myself mid-motion and set it back down."I'm not doing that," I said, mostly to myself

Signed In Full

- LUCAThe final draft arrived from Andrew's office on a Tuesday morning, three days before the hearing. Aldrin read through it twice before bringing it into my office — not because he expected to find anything wrong, but because some part of him still expected to find a version of me who'd quietly asked for a single concession to be added back in.There wasn't one. The document was exactly what I'd described in Andrew's office weeks ago, unchanged, every clause as one-sided as it had been the day I'd first delivered it."You understand what you're about to sign," Aldrin said, setting the folder down. "I've read the pack succession statutes twice this week, just to be thorough. There's no precedent for this — an Alpha voluntarily relinquishing this much in a separation. Combined with the inheritance waiver and the public nature of the hearing, this reads, formally, as something very close to forfeiting whatever standing Aria would have had as Luna. You're not just letting her go. You'

What The Wolf Didn't Take

- ARIAAurora fell asleep in the car on the way over, the way she always did lately, like the motion itself was permission to stop fighting exhaustion. I opened the door before Luca had to knock, lifting her out of her seat the second he set it down, settling her against my shoulder."She didn't eat much at dinner," I said. "I packed extra snacks in case she wakes up hungry.""I'll let you know if she does." He crouched to help Adrian out of his shoes, the small, ordinary motion of it almost unbearable to watch, knowing how few more times I might see exactly this configuration."Daddy, are you staying for the movie?" Adrian asked, already halfway to the couch."Not tonight, bud." Luca kept his voice light, even though something in his shoulders pulled tight. "I have to be up early tomorrow. You can tell me everything about it this weekend."Adrian accepted it with the easy resilience of a four-year-old who hadn't yet learned to read the weight underneath adult sentences, already reach

The Night Before

- ARIAThe apartment was quiet in the particular way it only got after both children were finally asleep — not silence exactly, but a held kind of stillness, the hum of the refrigerator and the distant traffic outside doing most of the talking now that the day's noise had settled.I sat on the couch with a mug of tea long since gone cold, scrolling without purpose, trying and failing to land on a single thought that would hold still long enough to be examined.I kept landing, instead, on his back disappearing down the hallway.Not dramatically. Not a slammed door, not a parting line designed to wound or win. Just a man walking away because I'd asked him a question and he'd answered it honestly, and the honest answer had cost him something he hadn't tried to hide.I thought about the studio equity, signed over with no strings Winnie or Andrew, scouring every page twice, had been able to find. I thought about the call about Diane — I wanted to tell you before I decided anything — a sent

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