All Chapters of The Alpha Who Saved Me : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

He nods, once, like that confirms something. "Do you have somewhere to go?"The question sits in the rain between us. I think about my apartment — the one Daniel now knows the address of because he's been there, because he has a key I changed the lock on twice and he found ways in anyway. I think about Priya's place across the city, and how I can't drag her into this at eleven at night, and how Daniel knows where she lives too. I think about my mother three states away who doesn't know any of this is happening because I have spent four years making everything look fine.I think about how I have nowhere to go that he doesn't already know about."I—" I start. Stop. "I'm figuring it out.""You're not."It should make me angry, someone I've never met saying that to me with such certainty. And some small part of me does bristle — the part that still insists I'm managing, I'm coping, I'm fine. But a larger, more exhausted part of me looks at this man standing in the rain with his calm face

I sit at the table. He moves to the front door and I hear the locks — one, two, three — each one a clean small sound in the quiet apartment. He checks the window in the kitchen. Then the one in the bedroom. He comes back through and I watch him do it and I think about how I used to check the locks in my own apartment — once, twice, sometimes three times, my hand on the deadbolt in the dark making sure, making sure — and how I told myself I was being careful rather than afraid."You check them three times," I say.He glances at me. "Habit.""From the military?""From knowing what happens when you don't."I look down at my mug. "Has anyone ever gotten through?""No.""Because of the three times?""Because of everything before the three times." He sits on the couch and leans forward with his elbows on his knees and looks at the floor and then at me. "The locks are the last thing. By the time someone reaches a lock I'm already aware of them."I study him. "How?""The same way you knew he

Thursday arrives quietly.No phone calls. No new information. No Daniel sightings reported by Priya who has become, in the last twenty four hours, my unofficial eyes on the outside world. Just a Thursday morning that comes in grey and slow through the gap in the blackout curtains and finds me already awake sitting cross legged on the bed with my sketchbook open on my knees and my pencil moving before my brain has fully decided to be conscious.This is how I have always worked. Daniel used to hate it. He would wake up and reach across the bed and find empty space and come to the doorway of wherever I had settled and look at me with that particular expression — not angry, not yet, just a careful patience that had temperature behind it — and say *you could have stayed in bed with me* in a way that was not quite a question and not quite an accusation but lived in the space between the two.I learned to wait until he left for work.I learned to make my mornings small and quiet and finished

He turns around and leans against the counter and looks at me with his even eyes and the coffee cup in his hand and I stare at him because I did not know he had been watching closely enough to notice the difference between yesterday's drawing and today's. I did not know he had been watching at all."You noticed that," I say."Yes.""You never said anything.""It wasn't mine to say anything about." He takes a sip of his coffee. "She's better today. Looking straight ahead."Something moves through my chest. Quiet and warm and a little dangerous. "She's supposed to be brave," I say. "She's been coming out wrong for months. Too scared. Too small.""What changed?"I look at the drawing for a moment. At her chin and her hands and her eyes that are finally going in the right direction. "I don't know yet," I say honestly. "But something did."He nods once, like that is a complete and satisfying answer, and he takes his coffee back to the table and sits down and opens his file and we go back t

The kitchen is so quiet."Damien," I say softly."I would have called back," he says. "Eventually. I always did, eventually. That was the thing about Marcus — he understood that about me. That I needed time. That I didn't—" He stops again. Starts again differently. "He never took it personally. He just waited and then called again and filled whatever silence I'd left with enough noise for both of us."He picks up his phone. He looks at the dark screen. He puts it back down."He died yesterday," he says. "Heart attack. Forty one years old." The words come out flat and clean, the way he delivers all information, but there is something underneath the flatness that is not flat at all. "His wife called tonight. She said he talked about me. That he told her I was the most—" He stops. His voice does something careful and controlled at the edges of the next word. "That I was the most steadfast person he had ever known."I put my mug down on the counter."And you're standing here thinking abou