My Alpha Mate Chose His Stepsister

Caelan's hand closed on my wrist before Seraphina's did.

Not the careful grip from the study this morning. Bone grip. The kind that leaves prints on a Hawthorne daughter that a society photographer would have to ask the family lawyer about by Monday morning.

"Come with me."

"Let go of me, Caelan."

"Now."

He pulled.

I had expected pull. I had not expected the angle. He didn't take me toward the staircase, where the lobby would have seen us go up. He took me sideways, behind a marble column, through a velvet rope a bellhop had unhooked half a second before we reached it — unhooked, prepared, waiting — and into the side corridor that ran behind the cloakroom toward the service elevators.

The bellhop hooked the rope back behind us.

Nobody in the lobby saw us leave.

That was the second thing tonight that had been arranged in advance.

I twisted my wrist in his grip the way my father had taught me when I was ten and we'd had a kidnapping scare on the east coast — thumb against the weak point of the joint, sharp downward — and Caelan let me go without seeming to mean to. He didn't reach for me again. He kept walking. He expected me to follow.

He was right. I followed.

If I screamed for Ryker now, the bellhop would say I'd had too much champagne. The hotel manager would offer my father a discount. And whatever was waiting at the end of this corridor would still be waiting tomorrow, in another room, in a different city, with a different bellhop on a different rope.

You do not fight a trap by refusing to walk into it.

You walk into it the way the trapper does not expect, with your eyes open and your hand on the latch.

"Where are we going."

"A private suite. Three minutes. Then you can go back down and ruin her birthday all you want."

"I'm listening."

He stopped at a door at the end of the corridor.

Brass number on the lintel. 312.

He turned the knob without knocking.

The door swung inward — and it swung the wrong way.

That was the third thing.

A hotel room door opens into the room. It opens away from a man standing in the corridor. This door swung toward Caelan, into the corridor, the way a stage door swings, the way a door swings when the room behind it has been redressed by someone who needed the angle of opening to put the person walking in facing the bed and not the dresser.

I saw the bed before I saw anything else.

That was the point.

The bed was turned down. One lamp was on. On the edge of the mattress, one knee crossed over the other, sat a man in a dark suit and a low-pulled cap. Stranger's hands. Stranger's shoulders. He was thumbing the buckle of his belt. He looked up when the door hit the stop and he did not stand.

"Took you long enough," he said.

To Caelan.

Not to me.

Behind me, soft footsteps on hotel runner. Cream silk. A click.

Seraphina had followed us. She had thrown the deadbolt.

She leaned her shoulders against the door, dabbed her dry cheeks with a knuckle the way a child wipes a face that hadn't been crying, and smiled at me for the first time tonight without bothering to put the costume back on.

"Sister." Her voice had gone level. Almost bored. "Smart girls really do cost more."

I turned slowly to Caelan.

He had walked over to the wall and lifted his phone. The camera light was already on, a small red eye. He was not looking at me. He was checking the framing. He had filmed something in this room before. His hand knew the angle.

"Caelan." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "What is this."

"Photographs."

"Of what."

"Of you in a room with a man who isn't me." He didn't look up from the phone. "Your father will withdraw the contract by tomorrow morning. The Hawthornes will release a statement. The engagement to my brother will end before it's signed. No one has to be hurt."

"And if I don't cooperate."

"You don't have to. Brock won't really touch you. Just enough for the frame."

"Caelan." Seraphina's voice had gone sing-song. "Brother. You know that's not what we discussed."

He looked up at her then.

For one full second.

And I watched his face do the small breaking thing it had done in my father's study this morning — the crack in the mask — only this time the crack went deeper, because this time he was looking at her, not at me, and what was behind the crack was the face of a man who had just understood that the script he was reading from had a different ending than the one he had been promised.

"Seraphina."

"You said photographs." Her smile widened. "I never did."

The man on the bed — Brock — lifted a small silver atomizer between two fingers. Cut wolfsbane. I knew the shape of the bottle before I knew the smell.

He pumped it once.

A fine pale mist bloomed across the lamp.

I had two seconds before my lungs took it.

I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper and I used the half breath I had left.

"Caelan. Do you know what's in the atomizer."

His head jerked up.

"What."

"You said photographs. She bought wolfsbane cut with something stronger than wolfsbane. Look at the color of the mist. That isn't dock-cut. That's pharmacy-cut. That's the kind a man uses when he doesn't intend the woman in the room to be able to say what happened in the morning."

His eyes flicked to Brock.

To the bottle.

To Seraphina.

"Sera."

"Don't," she said sweetly. "Don't ruin it now, brother. You wanted her gone. I'm getting her gone."

"I said photographs."

"And I said smart girls cost more." She tilted her head. "You should have asked what I was paying him with."

The mist hit me.

It hit my eyes first, then the back of my throat, and the heat dropped down my chest and rolled out into my belly and lower, the way a struck match drops down the inside of a curtain. My knees softened. My skin pulled tight on the bone. The room went very far away at the edges and very close at the center, and the center was the bed, and the man on the bed was already standing up.

I bit my tongue.

Hard. The pain cut a line through the fog and I held on to it with both hands.

"Caelan." My voice scraped. The wardrobe was the only thing holding me up. "Last time. You sat at her grave. You told me your debt to her was paid. You remember saying that."

His head came up.

The phone tipped two inches in his hand.

"What you owe me," I said, "starts tonight. I'm going to count every hour."

The color went out of his face.

For one heartbeat — one full heartbeat — he was the boy who had kissed me at fourteen on the south lawn of my father's house, and his eyes were the eyes I had loved into two graves, and his hand was already moving.

Toward Brock.

Toward stopping it.

Seraphina screamed.

Not a word. A high white sound. She threw her whole weight into Caelan's elbow and the phone flew. It hit the corner of the dresser screen-first. Glass spider-webbed. The red recording light winked out.

No witness.

No record.

No leash on Brock now.

He came at me.

I had one hand left that would still close. I found the moonstone earring at my left lobe — Caelan's earring, the one he had laid on my father's desk at ten o'clock this morning with three words on cream paper — and I tore it free with the wire still through my ear and I drove the sharpened silver point two inches into the side of Brock's neck.

He howled.

He went sideways into the bedpost and down on one knee, both hands clamped to his throat. A thin ribbon of blood ran out between his fingers. Red. Just red. Not silver. Not an Alpha worth the name. A bought hand. A docks hand. Whatever Seraphina had paid him with, she had not paid for quality.

I slid down the wardrobe.

The carpet came up to meet my cheek.

Footsteps in the corridor.

Not one set. Five. Six. The thunder of expensive shoes on hotel runner, coming fast — and not from the direction of the lobby, not from the direction of Ryker, but from the other end of the corridor, from the service elevators. From the direction the bellhop had gone after he hooked the velvet rope back behind us.

The witnesses Caelan had stacked.

They were arriving on Seraphina's cue, not his.

She had moved them up.

Of course she had. Smart girls cost more.

I tried to push up on my elbow and the room slid like a deck. My fingers found the carpet and the carpet was the wrong texture under my fingertips — too coarse, too deep, too new. Hotel carpets are walked through by ten thousand feet a year. This one had not been.

This room had been redressed today.

The thought landed somewhere I couldn't reach.

Seraphina was kneeling beside me. I hadn't seen her cross the room. Her cream silk was pooled against my hip. Her face was very close to mine — close enough that I could see the ring of green at the edge of her brown irises that I had once, at eight years old, told her was the prettiest thing in the world.

She lifted her left hand.

Slowly. The way a magician lifts a card before the reveal.

The cuff of her dress had a small dark stain at the wrist where the silver had soaked through. She had cut herself in a bathroom an hour ago to lay the trail across the lobby floor. Her own blood. Her own arm. A Hawthorne daughter could only lay a silver trail if a Hawthorne daughter had Luna-rank blood — which I had thought, all my life, was mine alone.

Her wrist was bleeding silver.

The same shade as mine.

The same Luna-rank silver as mine.

She watched me see it.

She watched me understand.

"Oh, sister," she whispered. The footsteps in the corridor were almost at the door. "Did Lila never tell you. Did Daddy never tell you. Did Mother never tell you, before she died — "

The deadbolt rattled.

A key turned from the outside.

Someone — not Caelan, not Seraphina, not Brock — was opening this door from the corridor with a master key, and the witnesses Caelan had stacked were now witnesses to something Seraphina had moved, and the last thing I saw before the door swung in was her smile.

"— that there were two of us."

The room went sideways.

The door began to open.

And in the half second before the corridor light hit the carpet, with my cheek in a redressed hotel rug and a dying earring in my fist and a sentence in my ear I could not yet make my mind close around, I understood the only thing about this night that mattered.

The trap had not been set for me to be ruined.

It had been set for me to die.