My Alpha Mate Chose His Stepsister

The bell rang again.

Six-forty-four.

I did not run down the stairs. I had run down stairs for Caelan Voss in another life — twice a week for two years, in slippers, in nightgowns, hair still wet from the bath — and I had decided, somewhere between the cliff and the rug in my father's study this morning, that I was finished running down stairs for any man with that surname.

I picked up my coat.

I went down at a walking pace.

Mrs. Aldine was already at the door, both hands flat against her apron in the way she pressed them when a guest had arrived who outranked her ability to politely refuse.

"Miss Wren—"

"It's all right, Marta. He's expected."

"It's not — " She stopped. "It's not Master Ryker, miss."

I paused on the second-to-last step.

"Who, then."

"The old Patriarch's driver. He says he won't come in. He says he was told to put it in your hand directly."

She held out a velvet box.

Black. Hinged. The size of a deck of cards. No card. The velvet was warm from her palms — and from someone else's palms before hers, because it had come across the city in the rain in a pocket close to a heart.

I took it.

"Did he say anything."

"Only that the old master said—" Marta frowned, getting it word for word. "Tell her the third one comes home today. The fourth one will find its own way."

I went very still.

The third one.

I stood in my own front hall in a black silk dress with a stranger's earring at my left ear and the velvet of a Voss box warm in my hand, and I understood, in a slow cold way, that the men of the Voss family had been counting these earrings for longer than I had been alive.

The third one comes home today.

Caelan had brought one this morning. Two pieces of a four-piece set. The pin had been at my collar since I was small. Add a third — the one my fingers were about to find in this box — and that left exactly one moonstone unaccounted for in a vault, in a drawer, in a palm somewhere in this city.

The fourth would find its own way.

A promise. Or a warning. I couldn't yet tell which.

I thumbed the velvet open.

It lay on white silk. Long silver wire. Moonstone at the end, set in the same hand-cut bezel I had been looking at for an hour upstairs in the mirror. The mate to the one in my left ear. The mate so exact that the small nick on the underside of the bezel — the one my mother had made the winter I turned six, when she had dropped its twin down the marble stairs and cried — was on this one too.

Which was impossible.

Two earrings could not have the same scratch.

Unless the scratch had been put there twice.

Unless someone, four generations ago or four hours ago, had known the Hawthorne moonstones well enough to forge their flaws as carefully as their setting — and had been moving these pieces around in the dark for a very long time.

I closed the box.

I slid the second earring through my right lobe.

Cold. Heavy. The pair of them now framed my jaw the way my mother's had framed hers in every photograph I had of her after her wedding day. The set was still incomplete. But for the first time since the year she died, I was wearing two of them — and I knew, somewhere underneath the part of me that thought in sentences, that the woman in the mirror tonight was going to look enough like Elara Hawthorne to make at least one person in the Crescent Hotel ballroom drop a glass.

Mrs. Aldine made a small sound behind me.

"Miss Wren. You look just like — "

"I know, Marta."

"Your father shouldn't see that."

"My father will see exactly that, and he will drink a finger of brandy, and he will pretend he didn't."

She didn't argue. She had been in this house since I was seven. She knew what could and couldn't be said about Elara Hawthorne in front of Horace Hawthorne.

The bell rang a third time.

"That'll be him," I said. "The real one this time."

She opened the door.

Ryker Voss was standing on the step.

I had seen this man at three different functions across three different years. I had stood in the same room as him at my own mother's memorial. I had passed him in a hallway at the Voss winter gala in the other life. I had not, in any of those encounters, looked at him.

I looked at him now.

He was a hand taller than Caelan. Broader at the shoulder. Dark hair already going faintly silver at the temples though he could not have been more than thirty-two. The Voss gold eyes — but cooler, set deeper, the eyes of a man who had been watching rooms instead of being watched in them.

He had a long black umbrella in one hand. The rain had stopped ten minutes ago. He had brought it for me anyway.

He took me in.

The black silk. The pins in my hair. The two earrings.

His eyes stopped at the second earring for one beat longer than the first.

"He brought one," Ryker said.

Not a question.

"This morning."

"And the old man sent the third."

"Just now."

"Which leaves."

"One."

Something moved behind his eyes. It was gone before I could name it.

"Your father?" he said.

"In his study. He'd like to see you before we go."

"I'll keep it short."

He stepped past me into the hall. I caught the scent of him as he went by — cedar, cold rain, gun oil, and something else underneath I could not place. Not bergamot. Not Caelan. Something quieter and older. A scent I had, somehow, smelled before in my life, in a room I could not remember being in.

He paused at the study door.

He didn't turn around.

"Wren."

"Yes."

"The folder."

"What folder."

"The one I gave you, in the other life, three weeks after you married my brother. Perimeter security. East wall. The motion array."

The hall went very quiet.

I had thrown that folder in his trash. On the way out of his office. With my wedding ring still scraping against my knuckle and my mouth still full of the cold thing he had said to me.

Congratulations.

I had thrown it in his trash and a man with a knife had come over the east wall of my father's house six weeks later and gotten as far as the rose garden before something dropped him in the dark.

A motion array I had never installed.

A motion array that had been there anyway.

"You put it in," I said.

"I put it in the night you threw the folder away."

"Without my permission."

"Without your knowledge. There's a difference."

He still hadn't turned around. The line of his shoulders under the wet coat was very still.

"There were two more after that one," he said. "The sniper on the roof opposite, the year you turned twenty-three. The car at the south gate, the spring you turned twenty-five. You didn't know about those either."

"Ryker—"

"We're going to be late."

He opened my father's study door and walked through it before I could make my mouth shape the next word.

I stood in the hall with my mother's earrings cold against my jaw and my hands empty at my sides, and I understood, finally, why a man I had never properly looked at had answered his phone on the second ring this morning and said I know who it is before I had told him.

He had been waiting for this call.

He had been waiting, possibly, a very long time.