Tempting My Stepsister’s Alpha

CHAPTER THREE — LEANDER

Control was not something Leander Thorncrest practiced.

It was something that was a part of him.

Six years as Alpha of the most powerful pack in the werewolf realm had not built his self control — it had simply confirmed what had always been true. That he did not lose his composure. Did not act without calculation. Did not allow anything — politics, provocation, personal feeling — to move faster than his ability to manage it.

He had been Alpha at twenty years old in a realm that had been waiting for him to fail and he had not failed and he had not flinched and he had not once in six years been caught off guard by anything.

Until about forty minutes ago.

Until a girl on her knees polishing marble had looked up at him with amber eyes and looked away again like he was mildly interesting at best.

He stood at the window of his suite on the Summit estate’s highest floor and looked out at the city below and had a very calm, very controlled internal conversation with his wolf about appropriate behavior.

His wolf was not participating constructively.

Go back, it said. With the absolute authority of something that had never once been denied anything it considered non-negotiable. Go back right now.

“No,” Leander said quietly to his own reflection in the glass.

She’s still in the building.

“I’m aware.”

Then why are we up here.

He didn’t answer that. Partly because he didn’t have an answer that satisfied him and partly because Kael had just let himself into the suite with the particular quality of silence that meant he had been waiting to do so for some time.

Kael was his Sentinel. Had been for four years. A wolf sharp enough to be genuinely useful and loyal enough to be genuinely trusted — a combination rarer than most Alphas admitted. He was also, at this precise moment, doing that thing where he stood very still and said nothing in a way that communicated everything.

“Don’t,” Leander said without turning.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re thinking loudly.”

Kael moved to the small bar along the wall and poured two glasses of expensive vodka. Set one on the table near Leander. Took his own to the chair by the window and sat with the ease of someone who had long since stopped being intimidated by the quality of silence his Alpha could produce.

“The Mosswood girl,” Kael said finally.

Not a question. A careful offering. The kind Kael made when he had already formed a conclusion and was giving Leander the opportunity to reach it independently.

Leander picked up the glass.

“What do you know about her?” he asked.

A pause. Brief but specific — the kind that meant Kael was selecting his words with more care than usual.

“Omega rank,” he said. “Pack staff. Been managing Mosswood events for a few years. Keeps to herself.” Another pause. “The pack doesn’t pay her much attention.”

“The pack.” Leander turned from the window. “Or the family.”

Kael met his eyes steadily. “Both.”

Leander moved to the chair opposite and sat. Turned the glass in his hands. His wolf was doing that thing it had been doing since he walked through the entrance hall doors — that low continuous pull in a direction it refused to stop pointing.

He had felt it before.

Twice.

The first time had been two years ago in a dark forest on a route he had taken to avoid the main roads between territories. Three rogues and a girl who had fought back with no wolf and nothing but cold nerve and a branch she’d apparently considered using as a weapon. A girl who had thanked him in the most composed voice he had ever heard from someone who had just survived an ambush and walked away before he could draw breath.

His wolf had reacted with an immediacy that had genuinely alarmed him.

He had spent the next three hours trying to locate her through scent traces and pack markers and had come up with nothing specific enough to follow. A direction — Mosswood territory, probably — but nothing more.

The second time had been tonight.

Walking through the entrance hall doors and finding those amber eyes looking up at him from the marble floor.

His wolf had gone absolutely still. Not the restless exhausted stillness of something that had been running too long. The specific complete stillness of something that had finally, after a very long search, found what it had been looking for.

Her, it had said. With a certainty that brooked no argument whatsoever.

He had not argued. He had simply stood there holding the weight of that certainty and looking at a girl who looked back at him for three deliberate seconds and then returned to polishing the floor like he was an interruption she had already accounted for and moved past.

He had gone to find her on the terrace some minutes later.

“She talked to you,” Kael said. Not quite a question.

“She did.”

“What did she say?”

Leander considered. “She told me I was stating the obvious. She told me she was taking a moment. She told me my future mate has worked very hard for the ceremony.” He paused. “She said it like she was handing me something and watching to see what I’d do with it.”

Kael was quiet for a moment.

“And what did you do with it?”

Leander looked at the glass in his hand.

What he had done was say “has she”in a tone that revealed more than he had intended. What he had done was watch her face while he said it with the particular focused attention he gave to things he was trying to understand. What he had done was stand on a terrace in the cool night air talking to a girl who had absolutely no reason to command his attention and find himself unwilling to end the conversation.

What he had not done was think about Celestine. Not once. Not for the entire time they were talking.

That was the part he was managing.

“Find out about her,” he said. “Everything. Family history, rank, how long she’s been in that pack, anything that should be on record.”

Kael nodded once. No commentary. That was one of his better qualities.

“There’s something else,” Leander said.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.

The bracelet was exactly where it had been for two years. He had moved it — wallet to jacket pocket to bedside table to jacket pocket again — more times than he could account for with any satisfying logic. He had told himself each time that he was simply waiting for an opportunity to return it. That he was being responsible about found property. That there was nothing significant about the fact that he had carried a stranger’s bracelet across two years and a hundred separate occasions when he could have set it down and didn’t.

He set it on the table between them now.

Thin silver chain. Small amber stone. Old in the way of something loved for a long time.

Kael looked at it. Then at Leander.

“Two years ago,” Leander said. “Forest between Mosswood and Greyvale territory. Three rogues and a girl who walked away before I could return it.”

Kael picked it up carefully. Turned it in the light. His expression shifted by something very small — a tightening around the eyes that on anyone else might have been nothing and on Kael meant he was working through something he hadn’t finished yet.

“Mosswood territory,” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

Kael set the bracelet back on the table.

Looked at Leander with the steady careful gaze of a man connecting two points on a map and not entirely certain he liked where the line was landing.

“And tonight,” he said slowly. “The girl in the entrance hall.”

“Mosswood pack,” Leander confirmed. “Omega rank. Amber eyes.”

The silence that followed had weight.

“You think it’s her,” Kael said.

Leander looked at the bracelet on the table. At the amber stone catching the light the precise color of the eyes that had held his for three deliberate seconds and looked away.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that I would like you to find out everything there is to know about Elowen Mosswood.”

Kael stood. Pocketed his question along with everything else he wasn’t saying.

At the door he paused.

“Leander.” Carefully. “The ceremony is in four days.”

“I know.”

“Whatever this is—”

“I know, Kael.”

His Sentinel left.

Leander sat alone in the suite with his untouched glass and the bracelet on the table between two chairs and his wolf doing that low continuous pull in the direction of a floor below where a girl with amber eyes was probably doing something mundane and composed and entirely unbothered.

He picked up the bracelet.

The amber stone was warm from the table. Or maybe it had never fully gone cold. He had never been able to tell.

Who are you, he thought. Not for the first time.

His wolf’s answer was immediate. Certain. The same thing it had been saying for two years in the patient relentless way of something that already knew and was simply waiting for him to catch up.

Ours.

Leander closed his hand around the bracelet.

Outside the window the city glittered and below him somewhere in the Thornfield Summit Estate a girl who had no idea he existed two years ago was sleeping in whatever room they had given the Mosswood staff.

No idea that the stranger from the dark forest was four floors above her.

No idea that he had her bracelet.

No idea that his wolf had spent two years saying her name like a destination.

Four days until the ceremony.

Four days until he stood beside a woman his wolf had never once settled for and made it permanent in front of every powerful wolf in the realm.

He looked at the amber stone in his palm.

Four days, he thought.

It didn’t feel like enough time to understand what was happening.

It didn’t feel like enough time to stop it either.