Page 17 of Alpha Charmed

The tension in his shoulders eases. Just slightly. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

For a moment, neither of us moves. The air feels charged—not with magic, but with possibility. With awareness. With all the pretending finally wearing thin.

His hand lifts. I suck in a breath. I think he’s going to touch my face⁠—

He reaches past me and plucks a fragment of glass from my hair.

“You have debris.” His voice is perfectly even. His eyes, when they meet mine, are not.

“Right.” I step back. Create space. Pretend my heart isn’t hammering against my ribs hard enough to bruise. “I should clean this up.”

“I’ll help.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

He’s already reaching for the broom propped in the corner. The silence says everything the words would have.

So we clean. Side by side, in silence, sweeping up the remnants of an attack that just made everything more complicated. He handles the larger debris while I salvage what ingredients can be saved. Our movements sync without discussion—a rhythm that feels too natural, too comfortable for two people supposedly maintaining professional boundaries.

His shoulder brushes mine as we both reach for the same fallen jar. Heat flares where we touch.

We don’t acknowledge it. We don’t move away, either.

“Tomorrow,” he says finally, straightening with a dustpan full of broken glass. “We search Mathilda’s home properly. If she hid her journals⁠—”

“We find them before whoever sent those intruders does.”

“We.” A ghost of a smile crosses his face. “Getting used to that.”

I don’t respond. I’m not sure I could trust my voice if I tried.

The chamomile, I notice as we finish, has finally stopped blooming.

That unsettles me more than anything else.

FOUR

CAIUS

Ifile the incident report at midnight and don’t believe a word of it.

Unknown intruders. Motive unclear. No suspects identified. Bureaucratic language for a scene that told a very different story to anyone who knew how to read it—a search, not a robbery. Someone looking for something specific in Mathilda Thornwood’s effects, careful enough to make it look like chaos.

Someone who knew what they were looking for.

I send two wolves to watch the property overnight and don’t tell Anouk I’ve doubled the patrol. She’d call it excessive. She’d be wrong, but she’d call it that anyway, and I’m tired enough tonight not to want the argument.

Instead I sit at my desk with Mathilda’s case file and think about the way Anouk’s shoulder felt against mine over a pile of broken glass. The way she didn’t pull away.

We. She let the word stand between us like it belonged there.

I’ve waited years for smaller things than that.

My second, Bram, drops a fresh pot of coffee on my desk without being asked—a mercy I don’t deserve given how many hours I’ve had him running down leads tonight—and lingers in the doorway with the particular patience of someone who wants to say something and hasn’t decided how.

“You’re smiling,” he says finally. “At a burglary report.”

“I’m not smiling.”