Coalition Territory

Ezra Sharpe’s mother sends folders.

This one has four alphas in it, alphabetized, annotated in green ink, with READ BEFORE SATURDAY on the front, underlined twice. His mother underlines once for emphasis and twice for compliance.

Rex King is not in the folder.

Rex King is the two-fifty pickup. A widower with three cubs, a plow route, and a truck that is in the same parking space at the same minute every school day, because two-fifty is when his daughter needs him. Ezra runs the front desk. Ezra has watched that parking lot for eight months and filed the entire thing under nothing, because filing is the thing he is good at.

Then the gathering. His mother is twenty feet away, talking to somebody else’s mother and watching him out of the corner of her eye. The Barbary lions of the northeast are all in one meadow. And a four-year-old is standing in a sheet cake.

The bond fires anyway. One in eight hundred.

Now Ezra’s careful year on his own contains a daughter who keeps numbered observations about him, a teenager who renamed the wifi from KING to KINGS and will not be discussing it, a small boy who reports the count to strangers, and a town that knew before he did.

His mother would like to talk about the folder.

Rex runs a count of everything that is his, every night, in the dark, before he sleeps. It has been three for four years.

It’s four now.

Coalition Territory is Book Ten of Bad Little Falls. Cozy, explicit M/M omegaverse in a Downeast Maine town where everyone is a shifter and nobody is surprised by anything. Fated mates, age gap, single dad, instant family, arranged match versus fate, low angst, guaranteed HEA. Every book stands alone.

Contains two wedding cakes. Nobody stands in either.