My Alpha Mate Chose His Stepsister

The car was warm.

That was the first thing I noticed. Ryker Voss drove a black sedan with the heat already running, the seat already adjusted to a height I would have asked for if anyone had bothered to ask me, and a folded cashmere throw on the passenger seat that he set in my lap the moment I sat down without making a thing of it.

Caelan, in another life, had let me get into cold cars for two years.

I held the throw in my hands and did not put it on.

"Three things," Ryker said.

He pulled out of the drive without looking at me.

"I'm listening."

"One. Whatever you saw last time at this party — assume the timing has moved. She knows you came back different this morning. She had four hours to redraft."

"How would she know."

"Because Caelan saw your face in the study and got back in his car and did not call the hotel to cancel anything. Which means he made a phone call to someone else."

"Two."

"Don't drink anything you didn't pour."

"Three."

He braked at the gate. He turned to look at me for the first time since I'd gotten in.

His eyes in the dashboard light were the cold color of a coin held too long in a cold hand.

"If something goes wrong tonight, and you have to choose between a door I can see and a door I can't, take the one I can see. Even if it's the longer way out. Even if she's standing in front of it."

"You think she'll have men there."

"I think my brother had four hours."

He pulled onto the road.

We drove in silence for a long time. The rain had stopped but the streets still threw the city's lights up off the wet pavement in long broken stripes. I watched them slide across the inside of his wrist where it rested on the wheel. He drove the way he had answered the phone this morning — like a man who had been doing this exact thing for a long time and had stopped needing to think about it.

"Ryker."

"Yes."

"The blue velvet cake."

His hand on the wheel did not move. His face did not change. But something at the corner of his mouth did a small thing — not a smile, the bare structural beginning of one, the kind that stops itself before it commits.

"Another time, Wren."

"You said that this morning."

"I'll say it again tonight if you ask me again tonight. There's a hotel in front of us. Eyes on the hotel."

I looked.

The Crescent rose up out of the wet street like a wedding cake somebody had set on fire from the inside. Every window lit. Valets in red coats. A line of cars I had stood in, in another life, with my hand on Caelan Voss's elbow and a borrowed silver dress riding up my thigh, laughing at a joke I no longer remembered.

Ryker pulled up to the awning.

He came around. He opened my door before the valet could.

He offered me his hand.

I took it.

The hand was warm and dry and the size and shape of a hand I had, somehow, held before in my life — though I could not, on the steps of the Crescent at five minutes to eight on the night of Seraphina Voss's twenty-first birthday, have told you when.

We went up the steps together.

The doors opened under a doorman's white glove, and the warm gold light of the lobby came out around us, and Ryker's grip on my hand tightened by exactly half a degree — and I understood, before my eyes had even adjusted, that he had seen something on the floor that I had not yet seen.

I looked down.

A trail of it. Coin-sized droplets at first, near the threshold, fattening into a smear that wound across the cream marble toward the bank of elevators on the far wall.

Not red.

Silver.

The kind of silver that catches the chandelier light and throws it back at you like mercury on a spoon.

I felt the dress go cold at my back.

Not one guest had stopped laughing. A waiter walked through the trail and tracked it six steps before the silver ran clear off the polish of his shoe. Champagne flutes clinked at the bar. A string quartet was tuning by the fountain. Somewhere two tables in, a woman in green was telling a long story about a horse.

Nobody was looking at the floor.

"Ryker," I said.

"I see it."

"How fresh."

"Under three minutes still runs silver. After that it oxidizes to red."

"And it only runs that dark a silver — "

"On a high-rank Alpha. Or a Luna."

I crouched.

I knew I shouldn't. I knew exactly the photograph it would make — the Hawthorne girl on her knees in the lobby of the Crescent in a black dress with a silver smear under her fingertip — and I crouched anyway, and I touched two fingers to the largest drop, and I lifted them.

Warm at the center. Crusting at the rim.

A waiter offered me a folded napkin without looking me in the face. I let him drop it into my palm.

I stood up.

I was wiping my fingers on the linen — slowly, very slowly, the way a woman wipes her fingers when she has decided she will not be hurrying for anyone tonight — when the voice came down the staircase.

"Oh my Goddess. Wren Hawthorne. You came."

Sweet as cut sugar.

She drifted down the curving staircase one hand sliding along the banister, cream silk pooling at her ankles, a rose-gold collar at her throat that I had watched Caelan clasp on her in another life, in another year, in another room. Caelan stood at the foot of the stairs in a black tuxedo with the bow tie undone and laid loose around his collar, the way he wore it when he wanted a photograph to look candid.

He took her hand without looking up.

"Caelan, sweetheart. Thank you for all of this. I love you."

She said it loud enough for the whole room.

A clutch of girls at the nearest table whooped. Someone whistled. Three phones went up.

I felt Ryker's hand leave mine.

Not pulled away. Released. Deliberate. He took one step back and he set his shoulder a quarter-turn behind mine — not retreating, positioning, the way a man positions himself when he wants the next photograph in this room to be of someone else's face and not his.

Smart.

I stepped forward into the trail of silver.

Seraphina was three steps from the bottom of the staircase when she saw me.

She saw the dress first. Then the earrings. Both of them. The matched moonstones at my jaw catching the chandelier light in a way that had not, in twenty years, been seen in this city.

She stopped on the third step.

Her smile stayed where it was. Her eyes did not.

Her eyes went to my left ear, then my right, then to the moonstone pin at my collar — three of four, the math already running behind the corners of her face — and then, for one full second, past my shoulder, to a man standing along the far wall by the cloakroom whom I had not yet looked at.

I did not turn my head.

I held up the napkin instead. Silver-streaked. Bright.

"Seraphina," I said. My voice carried clean across the lobby the way a coin dropped on marble carries. "You dropped this."

The whoops at the nearest table died.

A glass clinked down somewhere too hard and stayed clinked.

The string quartet, which had been midway through tuning a violin, did not pick the next note up.

Seraphina's face went the color of skim milk. Just for an instant. Then the color rushed back in pink patches and her free hand fluttered to her throat and her eyes filled — fast, professional, beautiful.

"I — I don't know what you — "

"Caelan," I said. I had not taken my eyes off her. "You'll want to tell your sister to roll her left sleeve down. She's bleeding through the cuff."

The whole staircase went silent.

Caelan, at the foot of it, did not look surprised.

That was the thing.

That was the only thing I had needed to see. He did not look down at her sleeve. He did not look up at her face. He looked, very briefly, at the man by the cloakroom — the same man Seraphina's eyes had touched, half a second ago, on her way down — and his jaw did the small locking thing under his ear that I had known, in another life, meant the plan is still on.

Behind me, Ryker shifted his weight one inch.

It wasn't a step. It was a notice.

The man by the cloakroom met Ryker's eyes across the lobby, held them for a count of one, and then turned and walked, unhurried, toward the service corridor behind the elevators.

A door closed somewhere I couldn't see.

Seraphina laughed.

It came out wet and high and not quite right. She came down the last three steps in a rush, both hands lifted, and she crossed the lobby toward me with the napkin between us already turning in her mind into something else — a misunderstanding, a stain from the kitchen, a sister's cruel joke at a birthday party.

"Wren. Sister. You're scaring everyone. Come — come upstairs with me, just the two of us, let's talk — "

She reached for my wrist.

Caelan was already moving across the marble behind her.

And from the top of the staircase, where she had not been ten seconds ago, a woman in a high-collared grey gown with both hands folded over the head of a black cane had appeared at the railing — and was looking down at the four of us in the lobby with the quiet attention of a woman who had paid for the chairs in this room and intended to watch what happened in them.

Lila Voss had come to her stepdaughter's birthday party after all.