My Alpha Mate Chose His Stepsister

I was drowning.

Saltwater filled my mouth, my chest, the inside of my skull. My fingers scraped against rock that wasn't there. Somewhere far above the surface, a man was screaming a name that used to be mine — and then, all at once, air.

Real air. Warm. Smelling of beeswax and pipe tobacco.

I went down hard onto wood I knew. Polished oak. The grain pressed against my cheek the way it had when I was nine and had fallen off the library ladder reaching for a book I wasn't allowed to read.

My father's study.

"Wren? Sweetheart, look at me."

His voice. The way it had sounded before — before the hospital, before the oxygen tube, before the morning a nurse had called me at six a.m. to say words I hadn't been there in person to hear, because I had been somewhere else, doing what someone else had asked me to do.

I lifted my head.

He was three feet away in his wheelchair. His hands trembled around a folded paper. His hair still had black threaded through the silver. The lines I had memorized, kneeling beside a hospital bed two years from now holding a hand that had already gone cold — those lines hadn't deepened yet.

He was alive.

I crawled. I don't remember deciding to. I crawled across the rug like a child and pressed my face into his lap and cried the way I had not let myself cry at his funeral, the way a person only cries when she has been holding her breath for a very long time and her body has finally decided, without asking her, that she is allowed to stop.

"Daddy."

"Wren — baby — what's wrong, what happened —"

"You're here."

"Of course I'm here."

He held my face in both hands. His thumb came away wet. He made a small broken sound I had never heard him make.

He let me cry until the worst of it had gone out of me. Then he pressed a handkerchief into my hand the way he had pressed handkerchiefs into my hand at every funeral I had attended in his company, and he waited.

He had always been a patient man. I had forgotten how patient.

When I could breathe, I looked at the paper still folded between his fingers.

I knew it before he turned it over. Cream cardstock. Silver wax seal pressed with a wolf's head. The Voss contract.

Two names written in dark ink, separated by one word: or.

The first I had loved since I was twelve. I had whispered it into my pillow at fourteen, carved its first letter into the underside of my desk at sixteen, taken it as my own at twenty in a white dress, in front of three hundred people.

Caelan Voss.

I looked at the name and the name looked back at me, and for a long moment I couldn't breathe.

Then I looked at the second one.

The Voss family had two sons. Everyone in this city knew which one mattered. The younger was the one in the photographs, at the parties, in the society pages with my name attached to his like a charm on a bracelet. The older was a name in a ledger. A shadow at the edge of family portraits. A man I had passed in three different hallways across three different years and could not, if pressed, have described to a sketch artist.

Last time, my eyes had skipped over his name on this contract the way a tongue skips over a tooth that doesn't hurt.

This time, I read it.

I read it twice.

I held the paper out with a hand that, to my own surprise, was no longer shaking.

"The older one. Sign it for the older one."

Silence.

It went on so long I almost looked up. I didn't.

"Wren."

"I mean it."

"Sweetheart. Last week you told me that if I so much as wrote his name on a piece of paper in this house, you'd never speak to me again. You said you'd loved Caelan Voss since you were a child. You—" He stopped. "Look at me."

I looked at him.

Whatever he saw in my face made him close his mouth.

His eyes filled. He blinked it away the way he always did. He took my hand, squeezed once, hard.

"All right, baby."

He picked up the desk phone.

He was halfway through dialing when my own phone buzzed against the side table.

I knew before I looked.

Tonight. Crescent Hotel rooftop. Eight. I'll come for you at seven. — C

Seraphina Voss's birthday party. The night, in the other life, when I had stood in a borrowed silver dress and clapped along with three hundred guests while the man who would marry me raised his glass and called another woman the only family I have left.

I typed three words.

I'll be there.

Send.

I would go. Not in silver this time. Not on his arm.

Behind me, my father's voice on the phone, steady now: "—yes, Patriarch. My daughter has decided. We'll have an answer by this evening."

The receiver clicked down.

I stood. My legs held. I was halfway to the door — I needed to wash my face, I needed a hundred small ordinary things to do with my hands — when the door opened from the other side.

Caelan Voss. Black overcoat dusted with rain. Hair damp at the temples. Gold eyes fixed on my face four hours before his driver was supposed to come.

He shouldn't have been here. Mrs. Aldine hadn't announced him. The bell hadn't rung.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

And for the first time in two lifetimes of knowing Caelan Voss, I watched his face do something I had never seen it do before.

He went still. Not the practiced stillness of family dinners. The stillness of a hunter who had walked into a clearing expecting a doe and found something else standing there.

His eyes moved over me. Slowly. They paused at my hands, no longer shaking. They paused — and this was the part I would think about, later, for a long time — at the moonstone pin at my collar. My mother's pin. The one I had buried with her in another life.

"Wren," he said. Quiet. The way a man says a word he is testing the weight of.

"You're early."

"I had a dream."

The room went very still around the word.

"What kind of dream."

"The kind that doesn't go away when you wake up."

I held his eyes. He held mine. Neither of us said the next thing.

He stepped back. Inclined his head a polite half inch.

"My apologies for the intrusion, Miss Hawthorne. I'll see you at eight."

The door closed.

I listened to his footsteps go down the hall. The front door opened. Closed. A car engine pulled away.

I let my breath out. My knees almost went. I caught the desk.

And then I saw it.

On the corner of my father's desk — where Caelan had been standing, where Caelan had not put his hand on a single surface in this room — sat something that had not been there ten minutes ago.

A single earring. A long silver wire. A moonstone at the end, set in a bezel I knew the way I knew my own handwriting.

The Hawthorne moonstones. Four pieces. Pin, ring, two earrings. Locked in my mother's vault since the year she died. I had taken inventory myself, twice, in the other life. Every piece accounted for. The earrings had been my grandmother's. They had not, in four generations, left this house.

Caelan Voss had just left one on my father's desk.

And underneath it, folded once, was a square of cream paper with three words across it in handwriting I had spent two decades learning by heart.

The other one is mine.