All Chapters of FAKING IT WITH THE ALPHA CAPTAIN RIVAL : Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

Elena“That is not possible,” Halloway said, and her voice cracked on the last word. For the first time since we had walked through that door, the calm on her face split down the middle. “Martha Reyes has no brother. I read her file myself. Twice.”“You read the file somebody wanted you to read,” Marcus said. His voice was thin and cracked, but his eyes stayed locked on mine, and I could see him fighting through the fog she had poured into him for weeks. “My father buried her name before I was old enough to ask where she went.”The monitor beside his bed was screaming now, a high and steady alarm, the green line jumping in sharp, ugly spikes. Eleanor grabbed his other hand and cried out his name, and Victoria let out a sound I had never heard from her, small and terrified.“His heart cannot take this,” Halloway said, and she sounded almost annoyed, like a teacher watching a lesson fall apart. “The compound was never meant to break this fast. Someone get away from the bed before you ki

Elena“You are not allowed to be here,” Ryder said, and he moved between the doorway and the rest of us before I had even finished standing up. “Elder Thorne ordered Martha placed under Article Four protection less than an hour ago.”“I read the order on the way up.” Cassian Cross leaned a little on his silver cane, calm and courteous, as though he had come to visit a sick friend. “It is a fine order, young man, and it protects Martha Hart from the Council. It does not protect her from me, because I am not the Council. I am the holder of an oath.”“What oath,” Marcus asked from the bed. His voice was weak, but I heard the old alpha under it, the one who had walked into rooms full of elders and made them go quiet.“A blood oath, Marcus, sworn at your sister’s own kitchen table twenty-one years ago, before a witness, with a drop of her own blood on the paper.” He smiled again, and it was a patient smile, the kind that had never once been in a hurry. “You may know it as the oldest law in

ElenaRyder’s face had gone the color of the marble floor.I held the paper out so he could see it properly, the brown smear of Martha’s blood and the two signatures side by side under the fluorescent light. His eyes moved over the heavy cross-stroke on the G the way a man looks at a wound he already knows is fatal.“Elena,” he said again, softer this time. “That’s my father’s signature.”“I know.”He came the rest of the way down the stairs like someone walking through water. Marcus’s guards shifted but did not stop him. Behind us the medics were still shouting orders around Cassian’s gurney; the sound felt far away, like it belonged to a different hospital.Ryder stopped in front of me. He did not take the paper. He only stared at it.“He never told me,” he said. “Not once. Not even after the cabin. Not after Halloway. Nothing.”“Cassian said to read the bottom. All of it.”I turned the page over. The back was almost blank except for three lines written in the same slanted hand, sma

Elena“Let me make sure I’ve got this right,” Dennis said, leaning on his mop in the fourth floor family waiting room. “It’s one in the morning, and you want me to stand here and watch a rich guy confess to something. And I’m not getting overtime.”“You’re getting my thanks,” I said.“I’m getting a story for the guys at the Elks Lodge. That’s worth something.” He pushed his reading glasses up into his hair. “Nineteen years in this building and nobody’s ever asked me to witness anything. Mostly I get ‘watch the wet floor.’”The waiting room had a fish tank that bubbled too loudly, a TV playing a cooking show on mute, and a lighthouse puzzle on a card table with about forty pieces missing. Joanie from the front desk had brought her lanyard upstairs and kept twisting it around her fingers. Walt sat in a vinyl chair with his coffee, still wearing the Bulls hoodie, and every few minutes he checked his phone for word from his wife’s room down the hall.“Gallbladder’s fine,” he told us for t

Elena“No,” I said.It came out before I’d decided to say it, and the gold in my chest hummed one clear note under it, like a bell somebody had struck once. It was true. I couldn’t have made it gentler if I’d tried.Aiden’s face didn’t change. He nodded slowly, the way you nod when a doctor tells you something you already guessed.“Good,” he said. “That’s what I thought.”“Wait,” Ryder said hoarsely. The gray had reached the base of his throat, and he was swaying a little on his feet. “You asked her that to see whether she’d lie?”“I asked because I needed to know whether I’d still do it if the answer was no.” Aiden looked down at the ring in his palm. “I would. I wanted to hear it out loud first, so nobody could say I was doing it for a reward.”“Aiden, you don’t have to,” I started.“Yes, I do. It’s the only thing in my whole family I’ve ever been able to fix.” He tried to smile, and it wobbled. “Where’s the paper?”I pulled the yellow sheet out of my pocket. It was warm, almost fev