My Alpha Mate Chose His Stepsister

The earring was warm.

That was the first wrong thing.

I picked it up. The silver wire was warm the way a coin is warm when it has just been in someone's palm — and Caelan Voss, who had walked into my father's study without touching a single surface, had been holding this in his fist the entire time he'd looked at me.

Three words on the paper underneath.

The other one is mine.

I knew his handwriting. I had spent twenty years learning it. Birthday cards. Notes tucked into the spine of books he'd lent me. The single line he'd written on the inside of my wedding ring, in another life, that I had read every morning for two years without ever asking him what it meant.

This was his hand.

But it was older than it should have been. The slant a little tighter. The downstroke on the m deeper, the way a man writes when he's been writing the same word for a long time and has stopped paying attention to it.

I sat down in my father's chair.

I sat down because I needed to, and because if I kept standing I was going to do something I couldn't take back.

The earring lay in my palm. The pin lay at my collar. Two pieces of the same broken set, one of them in a Voss pocket for — how long. How many years. How many lifetimes.

He had walked into this house this morning to give it back.

Not as a gift. As a signal.

"So you came back too."

I said it to the empty room. The empty room didn't answer.

But somewhere, in a black car driving away from this house in the rain, a man who had let go of my hand on a wet rock above black water knew that I knew.

And he had not stayed to talk about it.

That was the second wrong thing.

Last life, Caelan Voss had been a man who finished what he started. He had sat at my hospital bed for three nights when I had pneumonia at twenty-two. He had walked me through every paragraph of the prenuptial agreement at twenty before I signed it. When he had something to say to me, he said it. He did not leave earrings on desks and walk out into the rain.

Unless he was afraid.

Unless he had walked into this room expecting to find a girl he knew how to handle, and had found someone else, and had needed five minutes alone in a car to decide what kind of enemy I was going to be.

I closed my hand around the earring.

Then I picked up my phone.

I scrolled past Caelan's name. Past two years of saved messages I had cried over in another life. Past contacts I had deleted on the morning of the funeral I should have been at. I went to a number I had never dialed in either lifetime, a number I had memorized once, in the other life, off a folder pushed across a desk in a south tower office by a man I had never thanked.

It rang twice.

"Ryker Voss."

His voice was lower than I remembered. Gravel and smoke. The voice of a man who had been awake for some time before this phone rang.

"This is Wren Hawthorne."

A pause. One second. Two.

"I know who it is."

My pulse did something I didn't have time to look at.

"My father is calling your family head this morning. To formalize. I'm choosing you as my Alpha."

The silence on the line went long enough that I checked the screen.

Still connected.

"Are you sure," he said.

Not a question. A flat, careful sentence laid down between us like a plank over water.

"Yes."

"I'm not Caelan, Wren. I won't coax you. I won't take you to the orchid show in May. I won't remember that on your birthday you want the blue velvet cake from the bakery on Aldemere Street, three layers, no fondant, the cream cheese piped around the bottom."

The air went out of the room.

Blue velvet.

The bakery on Aldemere had closed when I was seventeen. I had cried about it once, alone, in my mother's old sewing room. I had never told anyone. Not my father. Not Caelan, in twenty years of Caelan.

"How," I said. My voice came out wrong. "How do you know that."

"Another time."

"Ryker—"

"Tell me what you need today."

I closed my eyes. I filed it. I put it on a shelf next to every other impossible thing this morning had handed me.

"The Crescent Hotel. Tonight. Eight. Seraphina Voss's birthday. I need you there. On the floor. In the photographs. Beside me when she faints into your brother's arms at nine-fifteen and he gives a toast about the only family I have left."

Another pause. This one had weight.

"You've seen this before."

"Something like that."

"All right. I'm already in the car." No questions. None. "Wren. Listen to me. Whatever you see tonight, whatever Caelan says, whatever she does — don't go into a room alone. Not a powder room. Not a balcony. Not a service hallway."

"Why."

"Because the last time my brother had you alone in a hotel," he said, "you didn't come down the stairs. They carried you."

The line cut.

I sat with the dark phone in my lap for a long count.

Then I stood up and went to dress.

The red dress was at the back of my closet. Silk. Wine-dark. Caelan had picked it out the spring of my twentieth year and told me I looked like something he wanted to drink.

I pulled it off the hanger. I dropped it on the floor.

I stepped over it.

The black one I'd had made last month — before any of this, in a fit of restlessness I hadn't understood at the time — hung in its garment bag like a held breath. I cut the bag open with the sewing scissors. The silk poured out cold against my palms.

Backless to the dip of my spine. High at the throat. Long sleeves. A funeral dress with a slit up the left thigh.

I put it on.

I pinned my hair up tight enough to ache. Mother's moonstone went at my collar where it had always gone. And then, slowly, deliberately, I lifted Caelan's earring to my left ear and slid the silver wire through.

It hung cold against my jaw.

The empty hook on the right caught the lamplight like a question.

Two pieces of a four-piece set. One of them just walked back into this house in a Voss pocket. The other three accounted for in my mother's vault, where they had been since the year she died.

Which meant somewhere — in a Voss safe, in a Voss drawer, in a Voss hand — the fourth piece was still missing.

And whoever had it had been waiting a very long time to bring it home.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

The girl in the glass was not nineteen.

The girl in the glass had buried people.

Downstairs, the front bell rang.

Six-forty-three.

Ryker Voss was early.