The Serial
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- 1Read chapter one right here, right now.
- 2Chapter two arrives in your inbox tomorrow morning. One chapter a day, every day, until the very last page.
- 3When the book ends — and it always ends well — it joins the free library, and your next serial begins.
The Wolf Chooses
Tessa Reyes works the night desk at the Pinecrest Motor Lodge—twelve rooms, a coffee pot that burns everything, and a mountain nobody in Silver Hollow will hike after dark. At 3 a.m. on the first night of the October moon, a man walks in bleeding through his shirt and asks for a room with no windows facing the ridge. Everyone knows the Marricks own the mountain. Nobody says out loud what else they are. Cade Marrick is the alpha of the Blackridge pack, and the scent the rogue came down the ridge hunting tonight was hers. Pack law says an alpha cannot bind himself to a human without giving up the mountain. He decides in the first hour to protect her without telling her why. She decides in the first hour that a man who tips forty dollars on a fifty-dollar room and won't let a doctor near him is trouble she can't afford—and can't stop looking at. One lunar month. A town that keeps its secrets. A mate bond neither of them asked for. Steamy, never explicit; the door closes.
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Read the opening of chapter one
The coffee had been burning since nine.
Tessa Reyes knew it the way she knew the hum of the ice machine and the tick of the wall clock over the key rack — by the back of her mind, not the front. She could have poured it out. The pot sat six feet behind her on the little brown counter, and it would have taken ten seconds. But if she poured it out she’d have to make more, and if she made more she’d have to drink it, and if she drank it she’d be awake at seven in the morning with her heart going like a bird in a shoebox.
So she let it burn. The smell had gotten into the carpet years ago anyway. It had gotten into the wood paneling and the fake-leather chairs in the lobby and the ugly framed print of an elk that had hung by the door since before she was born. The Pinecrest Motor Lodge smelled like burnt coffee the way other places smelled like pine cleaner. It was just what it was.
She pulled the cash drawer and started the count.
Twenties first. She flattened them one at a time against the desk, faces up, faces the same way, the way her mother had taught her when she was eleven and standing on a milk crate to reach the register. *Money likes to be neat, mija. It won’t stay if you treat it sloppy.* Six twenties. Then the tens. Then the fives, then the ones, then the roll of quarters she’d broken for the trucker in room 3 who needed change for the vending machine and had stood there talking about his grandkids for twenty minutes while the quarters got warm in her hand.
She added it twice on the desk calculator and once in her head.
Three dollars and forty cents short.
Hold Fast
June Callahan is the new children's librarian in Harbor Point, Oregon, hired to save a branch the county wants to close. She talks to strangers in line, names the spider plants, and has never once been able to leave a sad person alone. Her first program is a fire-safety story hour, and Station Nine sends the one man who least wants to be there: Lieutenant Gray Donnelly, who lost a probationary firefighter two years ago and has been a locked door to everyone since. He answers the children in single syllables and leaves. She sends a thank-you card to the station. Then another. Then she starts bringing the crew books she thinks they'd like. Gray tells her to stop. She does not stop. When the only apartment in town she can afford turns out to be above the garage of the house he's slowly rebuilding—for a reason he won't say—the town, the crew, and a county board vote all start closing in. Grumpy meets sunshine on the Oregon coast. Steamy, never explicit; the door closes.
One chapter a day, free. Unsubscribe anytime, one click. We send the chapter and nothing else.
Read the opening of chapter one
June Callahan needed forty people in the children’s room by nine o’clock, and at seven in the morning she had exactly one. Herself.
She counted herself anyway. It felt like a start.
The Harbor Point branch of the Tillamook County Library sat at the bottom of Front Street, where the town ran out of sidewalk and turned into gravel and then into the bay. It was a low brick building with a green door and windows that faced the water, and June had been its only full-time employee for eleven weeks. Before her, there had been a woman named Carol who ran it for thirty years and then retired to Arizona and took, as far as June could tell, every single patron with her.
June let herself in the side door and flipped the lights. Half of them came on. She flipped them off and on again, and the other half considered it and came on too.
“Good morning,” she said to the building. “Big day.”
The building did not answer. It smelled like old paper and the ocean and the industrial carpet cleaner she’d used on the children’s room rug the week before, trying to get a stain out that turned out to be part of the pattern.
She dropped her bag behind the circulation desk and pulled out the bucket of sidewalk chalk. She had bought it at the hardware store with her own money, twelve dollars and forty cents, because the branch’s discretionary budget for the quarter was a number she’d read three times and then closed the spreadsheet on. The chalk was the good kind, fat sticks, bright colors. She took the bucket back outside and knelt on the cold concrete in front of the green door.
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