THE ALPHA'S FORBIDDEN BILLIONAIRE

The Moonfall Gala had been held at the Crowe estate every autumn for as long as I could remember, and every year my father insisted that I stand at his right hand for the first hour, smile at the right people, and say nothing that could embarrass him. I had done it for twenty-two years. I had gotten very good at it, the way a person gets good at holding a heavy bag without ever once setting it down. On the night of my twenty-third birthday, I stood in a silver gown that cost more than my first car, at the top of a staircase lined with white roses, and I smiled at a room full of werewolves who had long ago decided I was the least interesting thing about the Crowe family. The ballroom glittered beneath three chandeliers that my grandmother had bought in Venice before the war. Their crystal throws small rainbows across the walls, across the gilded frames of portraits, across the faces of the people below. Somewhere behind the string quartet, a waiter dropped a tray of champagne flutes, and the crash rang out like a warning that nobody heeded. Alphas from four states stood in tight clusters near the bar, their wives and mates draped in diamonds, their children watching the adults with the careful stillness of pups who knew that the wrong word could cost them a place in the pack. Human executives circled the edges of the room, pretending they didn’t notice the hierarchy they existed beneath, sipping their drinks and laughing a beat too loudly at jokes they did not understand. I noticed everything. Noticing was the one skill nobody in my family had ever been able to take away from me. My father called it my cold eye. Verity called it unsettling. Ondine had once called it the most irritating habit I had ever developed, mostly because I had always been right about the people she tried to charm. Peregrine was late. He was never late. Alpha Peregrine Ruthven had built his reputation on precision, on the sharp cut of his tailored suits, on the way he entered any room and made the temperature drop by a few degrees. For three years, he had been my mate in everything but ceremony. He had kissed my knuckles in front of his father. He had said my name the way other men said prayers. He had told me, more than once, that the moon itself had chosen us, and that the fated bond between us was the only thing in his life that he had never needed to negotiate. I checked my watch. Nine forty-two. “Looking for someone?” Ondine’s voice slid up beside me, honeyed and cool. My stepsister wore pale gold, and the color made her look like a painting someone had finished with great care. Her wolf had awakened at sixteen, a sleek silver she-wolf who ran fast and proud, and she had never let anyone forget it. She held a glass of sparkling water in one manicured hand, which was a tell. Ondine never drank at events where she might be photographed by the society columnists. She liked to appear disciplined, and discipline, in her view, was simply another way of looking powerful. “Just checking the time,” I said. “Of course you are.” She looked toward the entrance, and something in her expression sharpened. “Oh. There he is.” Peregrine walked in through the grand doors with his father on one side and his younger brother on the other. The room reacted the way it always did, a ripple of attention that moved from table to table like wind across tall grass. He wore black, a deep navy tie, and the look of a man who had already decided how the evening would end. I had seen that look before, on the faces of men who were about to sign contracts or end friendships or fire people, and I had always found it attractive. Tonight it made my hands go cold. He did not look at me. He looked at Ondine. And she smiled. It was a small smile, private and triumphant, the kind that belonged to a woman who had been waiting for something for a long time. My stomach tightened, not with jealousy exactly, but with a cold, sudden understanding that I had been standing on the wrong side of a door for some time without realizing it. I thought back over the last few months, the sudden late nights Peregrine had spent in meetings with his father, the way he had started answering my calls with a brisk, distracted warmth, the way Ondine had begun showing up at lunches I had arranged for the two of us, sliding into the empty seat as though it had always been hers. “Ondine,” I said quietly. “What did you do?” She turned to me with an expression of mild sympathy that was far more cutting than any insult. “Oh, Aveline. You really don’t see it, do you?” Before I could answer, Peregrine lifted his hand, and the string quartet stopped playing mid-note. The silence was immediate and complete. Two hundred conversations died in the middle of a sentence. Glasses stopped halfway to mouths. A child near the buffet let out a small, startled giggle and was hushed by a nervous parent. Every head in the room turned toward the staircase where I stood, and I understood, with a clarity that made my knees go weak, that this moment had been arranged. Someone had invited the press. Someone had invited the rival packs. Someone had made sure that every powerful wolf in North America would be watching when the Crowe family’s disappointing daughter was humiliated for the last time. Peregrine walked across the marble floor with the unhurried confidence of a king. Two of the photographers near the windows raised their cameras, and the flashes went off in a rapid white stutter that made my eyes ache. He stopped at the foot of the staircase, looked up at me, and his expression was almost kind. That was the worst part. He looked like a man about to deliver difficult news to someone he genuinely cared about. “Aveline,” he said. His voice carried through the entire room. “I want to say this properly, so there is no confusion later.” I should have stopped him. I should have turned around and walked into the nearest room and locked the door. Instead, I gripped the banister and waited, because a part of me, the stupid, hopeful part I had never managed to kill, still believed he would say the words I had been waiting three years to hear. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe he had planned an elaborate proposal and Ondine had only been playing a part in it. Maybe any second now he would smile, and the room would laugh, and he would climb the stairs and take my hand. “I am announcing my engagement to Ondine Crowe,” he said. A murmur swept the room. Ondine lifted her glass of sparkling water toward the crowd like a bride, and a few people applauded politely, uncertain whether they were supposed to. “And,” Peregrine continued, “I am rejecting you as my mate.” The word rejecting hit me harder than a blow. It was one thing to be discarded in private. It was another thing entirely to be discarded in front of the people whose opinions had shaped my entire life, the people who had watched me grow up and had decided, one small comment at a time, what I was worth. I heard someone gasp. Maybe it was Lady Dunmore, who had once told me at a charity luncheon that I had lovely bones and a terrible future. Maybe it was one of the human board members who had watched my father’s company lose three contracts in the last year. I didn’t look to see. I was staring at Peregrine’s face, searching it for some sign of the man who had carried me up the stairs of his father’s lodge after I broke my ankle, whispering that he would never let me fall. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was looking at a point somewhere above my left shoulder, as if the words were written on the wall behind me. “You can’t do this,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. “The bond—” “The bond was a convenience,” Peregrine said gently, the way a man might explain something to a child. “A political alignment that the elders believed in. I believed in it too, for a while. But you have never awakened your wolf, Aveline. You are human in every way that matters to our world, and a Luna has to stand beside me in front of the Council and the rival packs. I need someone who can hold that position. I need someone who can be respected.” “I have been respected,” I said. “I have been respected by you.” He flinched, very slightly. It was the only sign that he had heard me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I truly am.” And then he turned away from me, offered his arm to Ondine, and walked her toward the center of the ballroom while the guests parted in front of them like water. Ondine’s heels clicked on the marble, bright and precise, each step a small announcement of victory. She did not look back at me. She didn’t need to. I could have begged. I thought about it, for one long, humiliating second. I thought about falling to my knees on the white marble and asking him to reconsider, to look at what we had built, to remember the summer we had spent sailing along the coast, the nights we had stayed up talking about the children we would have and the houses we would never sell. I thought about the way he had cried, once, when his grandmother died, and how he had let me hold him in the dark of the study while the rain beat against the glass. But I had spent twenty-three years learning how to survive in rooms like this one. I knew that the people watching were not waiting to see me beg. They were waiting to see whether I would break, so they could tell the story later, over brandy and cigars, about how the Crowe heiress had shattered in front of everyone. So I lifted my chin, and I walked down the staircase one step at a time, and I did not look at Peregrine, and I did not look at my stepsister, and I did not look at the crowd. The silence followed me like a cloak. Somewhere behind me, the string quartet tentatively began to play again, and the murmur of conversation rose back up around the room, louder and hungrier than before. Behind me, the orchestra had found its rhythm again, a sweet, careful waltz that sounded like an apology. Nobody was dancing. The guests drifted in small knots, heads bent together, and I caught fragments of their whispers as I passed: poor girl, never awakened, Peregrine always did have a temper, and, from a woman I did not know, well, what did she expect, with that mother? I kept walking. I had learned long ago that the cruelest comments were the ones spoken just loudly enough to be heard by the person they were meant for. At the bottom of the stairs, my father’s chief of staff, a man named Ansel Pike, stepped into my path with a face like stone. He had worked for my father for nearly twenty years. He had attended my school plays and sent flowers when I graduated, and he had never once in all those years looked at me the way he was looking at me now. “Miss Crowe,” he said quietly. “Your father would like to see you in the study. Immediately.” “Is he angry?” Ansel glanced past my shoulder, toward the glittering crowd, and something in his eyes made my blood run cold.