BLOODBOUND TO THE ALPHA AND HIS PUPS

CHAPTER 1 — Three Hours Wren "There's no extra shift for you today. Finish up and be done with it." Denise didn't even look up from the register. "Please." My knees hit the floor before I'd decided to kneel — I felt the customers turn to look, felt my face go hot, and I didn't care. "If I can just get these extra hours, I can pay part of my brother's hospital bill. At least today's part." "You're causing a scene, damn it." Denise's voice dropped, sharp enough to cut through the noise of the bar. A couple at the end glanced over, then quickly away, the way people do when they don't want to be part of someone else's emergency. "Fine. Just today. Now get up and don't bother me again about extra hours." I didn't care that I'd just begged on my knees in front of six strangers nursing beers. I had eleven dollars in my checking account and a hospital debt with my brother's name on it, and six more hours behind this bar put a dent in that debt tonight instead of next week. That was the whole equation. Pride wasn't in it. I picked up my apron, still riding that strange, stinging kind of happy — stressed, humiliated, grateful, all at once — and went looking for bar rags in the back room. What I found stripped every bit of that happiness off me in half a second. Derek. In the bathroom. His hand fisted in Paige Mercer's hair like he'd memorized the shape of it a long time ago, her mouth against his. I didn't scream. I didn't drop anything. I just stood there in the doorway with my apron balled in my fist, shivering, my lips peeling back off my teeth in something that wasn't quite a word yet. Derek had been my boyfriend for four years — my fiancé for eight months. He was the reason I made it through the week Milo was first diagnosed, when half my friends sent one text and vanished. He proposed in a hospital cafeteria at eleven at night, holding my hands over cold coffee, and told me that watching me hold everything together for everyone else made him want to be the one thing I never had to hold together myself. I believed every word of it. I'd spent eight months building a life on top of that belief. None of that mattered to the two people currently pulling apart in front of me, unhurried, like I'd interrupted something inconvenient rather than something that had just ended us. Paige saw me first. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at me the way you'd look at gum stuck to your shoe. "Oh good, you're here," she said. "Saves me a trip." "Wren—" Derek started. "Don't." My voice didn't even sound like mine. "Don't you dare tell me this isn't what it looks like." "It's exactly what it looks like." Paige stepped closer, arms folded, chin tipped up, dragging her eyes over the apron, the flat shoes, the exhaustion I hadn't had the energy to hide in months. "And here's how it's going to go. You end your cute little engagement — quietly, no scenes, nothing in front of my dad's customers — or I tell him you started something with me. You can kiss this job goodbye before your direct deposit clears tonight." "You're threatening my paycheck," I said slowly, "because I walked in on you kissing my fiancé." "I'm protecting what's mine." Like Derek was a coat she was reclaiming from the wrong closet. "Honestly, I'd be doing you a favor. He's been miserable for months — haven't you, babe? All that martyr stuff, running yourself into the ground for a sick kid. He didn't sign up to spend his twenties playing hospital chaperone." "He's my brother," I said. "He's seven." "Sure." She shrugged, bored already. "I'm just saying. A guy like this is meant for better than doubles and stale nachos, Wren. I've just been waiting for you to notice it too." I looked at Derek, waiting for him to say something — anything — that sounded like the man who'd held my hand through eleven hours in a cardiac ICU waiting room. Instead he dragged a hand through his hair, irritated, like I was the inconvenience here. "I'm sorry, Wren." No weight behind it at all. "I just don't love you anymore. I didn't sign up to be engaged to someone who's drowning all the time. I need someone who has room for me." "Room for you." My voice came out flat, almost calm, which scared me more than crying would have. "You watched my seven-year-old brother almost die twice this year. You watched me pull doubles so he could keep breathing. And what you took from that was that I didn't have room for *you*?" "See, this is exactly what I mean." He gestured at me like I was proving his point live. "Everything's a crisis with you. I just want a normal life." Paige looped her arm through his, satisfied, like a woman collecting a package she'd been waiting months to be shipped. "So. Engagement's off?" Bright and cheerful, like she was asking about lunch plans. "Because my dad's expecting confirmation tonight, or he's going to have some very awkward questions about why his bartender is starting drama with his daughter. And honestly, at this point I'd be doing you a favor — save you the humiliation of him leaving you at the altar instead." For one terrible second I almost begged him to remember who we used to be. Then I did the math I'd been doing all year, the same math that had just put me on my knees in front of strangers twenty minutes ago. Pride wasn't a line item I could afford today. "Fine." Flat. Hollow. "It's off. Congratulations. You two deserve each other." Derek had the audacity to look relieved. I didn't cry. There wasn't time. I badged back in, retied my apron, kept pouring drinks with hands that wouldn't steady. A regular asked if I was okay when I dropped his refill. "Allergies," I said, and kept moving. Moving meant not thinking about how the man who promised he wasn't going anywhere had just stood in a bathroom and let another woman call four years of my life stale. *********** At 5:58 — two minutes before my paycheck was due, the paycheck I'd knelt on a bar floor to earn — my phone buzzed. It wasn't my bank. "Ms. Calloway?" The voice was careful in a way that made my stomach drop before she finished the sentence. "This is Dr. Anwar, on-call cardiologist for your brother. I need you to come in. His condition deteriorated faster than expected." The bar fell away — the ice machine, the low conversation, Paige's laugh near the register. All of it went distant, like I'd stepped behind glass. "How long?" I whispered, already ripping the apron over my head. "Without surgery," Dr. Anwar said quietly, "he has approximately three hours." ---