All Chapters of MY BULLY STEPBROTHER IS A HOCKEY ALPHA: Chapter 21 - Chapter 28

The office was quiet. The secretary at the front desk smiled at me and said the vice principal wanted to speak with me about my transfer paperwork, something routine that had apparently been flagged by the system. I sat down in the waiting area and pulled out my phone. I texted Nadia. Office. Paperwork thing apparently. Her reply came back fast. Is it actually paperwork. I looked around the ordinary school office. At the secretary typing. At the motivational poster on the wall. At the grey afternoon through the window above the front desk. Probably, I typed back. I put my phone in my pocket. The waiting area had two chairs and a small table with a plant on it that needed water. I sat in the one closest to the door because Jaxon's habits were apparently contagious. Three minutes passed. The front door of the office opened. A woman walked in. She was perhaps fifty, slim, dress

By nine o'clock the house was full of people and quiet purpose and the low vibrating hum of a pack gathered in one place, their bonds to each other filling the rooms like something warm and structural.I sat on the stairs halfway up.Jaxon found me there at half past nine. He came up the stairs and sat beside me without asking, the way he had started doing things, the way I had started expecting him to. His shoulder against mine. His presence doing the thing it always did, settling the restless edge of the power into something steadier."How are you?" he said."Honest answer?""Always.""Terrified," I said. "And also more like myself than I have ever been in my life." I looked at him sideways. "Which is a strange combination.""It suits you," he said quietly.We sat for a moment. Below us the house moved with people and low voices and the extraordinary ordinary sound of a pack being a pack."I felt you," I said. "This afternoon. In the garden when

Selene," he said. Low and quiet and just for me. "You walked into my house and dismantled every wall I had built and made my wolf certain about something my entire life had told me to be careful about." He looked at me with those open green eyes. "I don't want careful anymore. I want this. I want you." A pause. "If you'll have me. All of me. Including the parts that handled the beginning badly and are going to need you to be patient with the rest."The lamp light was warm. The house was quiet.I looked at the boy who had just said more honest words in thirty seconds than I had heard from him in weeks and felt the bond between us clear and warm and certain, the most real thing I had ever felt."Yes," I said softly.He exhaled. A small thing. Like something he had been holding released.Then he leaned in slowly. Giving me every moment of the approach. His forehead came to rest against mine first, the way it had that night in the bar in reverse, close and warm and s

He left us alone.My mother looked at me across the table. Her eyes were full but she wasn't crying. The particular composure of someone who had been strong for so long it had become structural."He loved you," she said. "From the first moment. That was never the question.""I know," I said quietly. And I did. I felt the truth of it the way I felt bonds now, not as information but as something known below the level of thought."Are you angry?" she asked.I thought about it honestly. "I don't know yet," I said. "Ask me after I've seen him."She nodded. Reached across the table and put her hand over mine.We sat like that until we heard the front door.Jaxon came in from his perimeter check at half past nine with Reid behind him and the focused quality of someone who had found something worth reporting.He came to the kitchen first. Looked at me. Read my face."You know," he said."Victor told me," I said. "About my father."Somethi