Alphas' Indecent Proposal

Chapter 5

Kate's POV

I came home that night feeling like I'd been fed through an industrial shredder and reassembled by someone who'd only read the instructions once.

Ronald, mercifully, was buried in his own work — late calls, spreadsheets sprawled across the kitchen table, the usual chaos of quarterly targets. He didn't notice the way my hands trembled when I poured myself a glass of water. Didn't notice me standing too long in the bathroom doorway, staring at my own reflection like I was trying to find the c***k.

But later — in that thin, treacherous hour between midnight and sleep — I lay on my side watching him breathe.

My fingers moved before I could stop them. Tracing the line of his jaw. The bridge of his nose. The familiar topography of a face I'd memorized years ago, back when memorizing it had felt like a privilege.

Do I really know you?

The thought slithered in uninvited.

Do I know everything? Or just the parts you've chosen to show me?

I pulled my hand back as if I'd touched something hot.

Stop it.

One month. Thirty days. That was all. Once the cameras proved there was nothing to find, I could fold this whole nightmare into a drawer and never open it again. Ronald and I had survived worse — the miscarriage, the grief, the silent dinners where neither of us could find the right words. This was just another c***k in the road. A small one.

We'd walk right over it.

The next morning, I kissed Ronald goodbye at the door — same as always, same smile, same have a good day, babe — and watched him disappear into the elevator.

Then I closed the door, pressed my back against it, and exhaled.

Darius arrived at ten o'clock sharp.

Except "arrived" was a generous word for what actually happened. A more accurate description would be: a six-foot-four wall of black tactical fabric materialized at my doorstep carrying what appeared to be the entire inventory of a military surplus store.

Three duffel bags. Black canvas. Each one hit my hallway floor with a dull, concussive thud that rattled the coat hooks.

Mochi — my orange tabby — launched off the sofa like she'd been spring-loaded, back arched, fur standing on end, and bolted under the coffee table.

I stared at the growing pile of equipment, then at the man responsible for it.

Darius stood in my foyer in a fitted black tactical tee with no visible brand logos, the fabric stretched across a torso that looked like it had been engineered in a lab rather than grown in a body. He surveyed my apartment with the calm, methodical focus of a man assessing a combat zone — which, apparently, was exactly what my two-bedroom rental had become.

"This is —" I gestured at the duffel bags, the sheer volume of hardware spilling out of them. "You're not converting my apartment into a Pentagon surveillance hub, are you?"

Darius unzipped the first bag.

Inside, nestled in custom-cut foam molds like jewels in a display case — except these jewels were designed to spy on my husband — were dozens of cameras. Each one no bigger than a thumbnail.

"Sixteen wide-angle micro-cameras," he said, lifting one into the light and inspecting it the way a jeweler might examine a diamond. His voice was flat. Informational. Like he was reading off a restaurant menu. "Full coverage of all primary activity zones. Four thermal-imaging sensors for the entry points and windows — tracks human movement patterns. Two acoustic receivers, effective radius twelve meters. They can pick up a whisper through a closed door."

He reached into the second bag and produced a chip smaller than a fingernail.

"Integrated relay unit. Signal penetrates up to three layers of reinforced concrete."

"You're sure this is for surveilling a pharmaceutical sales manager," I said slowly, "and not, say, a foreign head of state."

Darius looked up at me. His expression didn't change. Darius's expression almost never changed — I was beginning to understand that his face had approximately three settings: neutral, slightly less neutral, and confused by human behavior.

"Your apartment has blind spots," he said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing to tell someone. "The transition hallway between the living room and kitchen. The triangular dead zone behind the bathroom door. The interior of the primary bedroom closet. Standard residential surveillance requires a minimum of fourteen placement points for zero-blind-spot coverage."

He paused.

"I brought two extra in case of equipment failure."

Meaning he hadn't brought extra at all.

I did the reading comprehension silently in my head.

Without another word, Darius dropped into a crouch and began mounting the first camera behind the shelf panel of my bookcase. His hands moved with a precision that was almost unsettling — each motion deliberate, efficient, mechanical. Like he'd been doing this since before he could walk.

I noticed, distantly, that he'd taken off his shoes at the door.

This might have been the single most shocking event of my entire day. A man who looked like he could snap a steel pipe bare-handed — a man who spoke exclusively in mission briefings and statistical data — had remembered to remove his shoes in someone else's home.

"You did this a lot?" I leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed. "In the military?"

Darius was already up on my windowsill, screwing a camera into the inner rail of the curtain rod with a screwdriver thinner than a toothpick. "Did what?"

"This. Installing surveillance. Tracking. Infiltration. The stuff they do in spy movies."

He paused. Considered the comparison with genuine seriousness — as if evaluating whether spy movies constituted an accurate operational parallel.

"Not exactly," he said. "Spies in movies routinely achieve precision handgun kills at distances that are ballistically impossible. They never account for bullet drop or windage correction."

"... I wasn't asking about ballistics, Darius."

"Oh." He nodded. Then, apparently deciding this was an appropriate moment to expand on his personal history, he continued in a tone that fell somewhere between a classified briefing and casual conversation.

"My last assignment in the military was tracking a lone wolf."

He dropped from the windowsill — landing with a silence that should have been impossible for someone his size — and moved to the hallway to install the next camera.

"A rogue Alpha. Severed all pack ties. Killed three hunters in the northern Rockies and vanished. Command sent two tracking teams before me. Both came back empty."

He crouched at the hallway corner, fingers working deftly through a tangle of micro-wiring.

"His counter-tracking instincts were exceptional. He'd wade upstream through rivers for over ten miles to eliminate scent trails. Smear animal blood over his footprints to corrupt olfactory tracking. He'd deliberately expose his position before a blizzard, then use the storm to mask his real withdrawal route."

I realized, without quite meaning to, that I'd slid down the wall and was sitting on the hallway floor. Listening.

Not because the story was riveting — okay, it was riveting — but because Darius had a peculiar way of telling it. His voice was flat. No dramatic pauses. No inflection. No narrative flair whatsoever. Like a GPS unit narrating a route.

But that was exactly what made it work. The complete absence of embellishment made every detail land like a hammer strike. You couldn't dismiss any of it as exaggeration, because Darius didn't know how to exaggerate.

"Seventeen days," he said. "Three-state pursuit. I located him in an abandoned mine shaft on the Montana-Idaho border."

"Seventeen days?" I repeated, half-disbelieving.

Five workdays in a week already tested my sanity. I couldn't fathom seventeen consecutive days of relentless, single-minded pursuit.

"Seventeen days, four hours, and twenty-two minutes," he corrected, pulling another camera from his pocket. "Counted from the moment I identified his first fabricated trail marker."

I watched him embed a pinhead-sized lens into a hairline gap in the smoke detector casing. Seamless. Invisible. Like it had always been there.

I sighed.

"So your skill set involves tracking a killer lone wolf across three states," I said, "and now you're using those skills to... monitor whether my husband sneaks women into our apartment."

Darius stopped.

He turned to look at me. That face — as absurdly, unfairly handsome as his eldest brother's — flickered with something that might have been confusion. As though it had only just occurred to him to consider the scale differential between these two assignments.

"Different target," he said at last. "Same core principles. Observe. Record. Don't get made. Your husband won't know these cameras exist — the same way that lone wolf didn't know I'd been on his trail for two weeks and three days until my tranquilizer dart hit the back of his neck."

He turned back to his work. Apparently satisfied that comparing my husband to a homicidal rogue wolf was a perfectly reasonable analogy.

"Darius."

"Mm."

"Don't you think this is a little... overkill? For what it is?"

His hands stilled for exactly one second. Then the screwdriver resumed.

"It's not overkill." His voice was steady. Utterly serious. "It's ensuring zero margin for error."

"But why?" I pressed. "This is Damian's problem. His engagement. His fiancée. Why are you and Damon so invested?"

Darius rose to his feet and walked into the kitchen, scanning the top of the wall cabinets for viable camera angles. His back was to me, but I caught the way his shoulders tightened — a small, involuntary contraction that lasted barely a heartbeat.

"Because Catherine is a problem."

"What do you mean?"

He jumped down from the counter. Turned to face me. His expression hadn't changed — Darius's expression almost never changed — but his eyes were several degrees more serious than they'd been a moment ago.

"Month one after the engagement." His voice was clipped. Factual. A field report. "She used the title of future Luna to request a dedicated account from the pack's finance department. While Damian was away, she used that title to advance herself eight hundred thousand dollars."

My eyes went wide.

"Month two. She terminated Damian's executive assistant — Meredith. Eight years of service."

"Wait." I cut in. "Meredith's still there. I've seen him."

"Because Damon reversed the decision within two hours." Darius's tone didn't shift. "Catherine cited 'insufficient respect toward the future Luna' as grounds for dismissal. The actual reason was that Meredith refused to hand over copies of Damian's private schedule and the company's core business contracts."

He began counting off on his fingers — a gesture so incongruous with his six-four assassin's physique that I had to physically suppress a smile.

"Month three. She attempted to amend the pack charter — specifically, the clauses governing Luna authority — to secure co-management rights over pack assets before the bonding ceremony. Damon spent an entire week closing the legal loopholes. Month four —"

"Hold on." I raised a hand. "This is only month four?"

"Month four." Darius was unmoved. "She placed a custom order for a Bentley under Damian's name. Two million dollars. Damian cancelled the order. She wept in front of the entire Elder Council at a pack dinner, publicly accusing him of emotional abuse."

My jaw was on the floor.

"Month five. She refused to attend the pack's charity auction. Called it 'beneath her.' Month six. She removed our mother's heirloom jewelry from the family vault and wore it to a private party. Came back missing a necklace. Claimed she'd never taken it. Two weeks later, an item of identical specifications appeared in a Christie's auction listing —"

"Okay." I held up both hands. "Okay. I get it."

"I have seven more months of documented incidents."

"I have enough, Darius."

He closed his mouth. Watched me.

I leaned against the counter and let the information settle.

It wasn't that I doubted him. Honestly — and I'd only known Darius for two days — he was probably the single least likely person on the planet to embellish a fact. His brain didn't work that way. He reported data. He didn't editorialize.

What unsettled me was the collision. The image of Catherine I'd unconsciously constructed — the neglected fiancée, the pitiable victim of a loveless arranged engagement — was slamming headfirst into the portrait Darius had just painted. And those two women looked nothing alike.

"All three of you want her gone?" I asked.

"Initially, Damian was willing to maintain appearances," Darius confirmed. "He hadn't found his fated mate. And there was pressure from our father. But Damon and I identified her as unsuitable from the beginning. She has no interest in contributing to the pack. No genuine attachment to Damian. No respect for the responsibilities of a Luna. What she wants is the title — and everything it unlocks."

His tone didn't waver. No anger. No contempt. Not even irritation.

Just data. Laid out in rows and columns. Placed in front of me for analysis.

And somehow, that clinical calm made it more chilling than any amount of fury could have.

"So this isn't just about getting Damian out of an engagement," I said slowly. "This is a coordinated operation. All three of you."

And a rational cost-benefit analysis, I added silently. Spend a million on me now to eliminate the woman generating losses that far exceeded a million.

"'Coordinated operation' is more accurate, yes." Darius gave a single nod. And for the first time, something that might have been approval crossed his face at my use of military terminology — if "raising one eyebrow by approximately half a centimeter" could be classified as approval.

Then he turned and walked toward the bedroom.

"Final placement points. Your bedroom —"

"No!"

I practically vaulted across the hallway and planted myself in the bedroom doorway, arms braced against the frame like I was defending the gates of a medieval fortress.

"No cameras in the bedroom."

Darius stared at me. The confusion was real. Genuine. Total.

"The bedroom is the most critical surveillance zone. According to statistical data, seventy-six percent of extramarital activity occurs in —"

"I don't care about your statistics!" My face was on fire. "That is my bedroom. Mine and Ronald's. You are not — I won't — absolutely not."

Darius tilted his head. The movement made him look like a very large, very lethal golden retriever trying to decode a particularly baffling human behavior.

"This is an illogical decision. You're deliberately creating a surveillance blind —"

"You need to leave me at least one room where I can change my clothes, Darius!"

He blinked.

Processed.

Three full seconds of visible computation.

Then — barely perceptible, easy to miss if you weren't watching for it — the tips of his ears turned red.

"... Understood." He stepped back. "No bedroom installation."

Thank the Moon Goddess.

He cleared his throat, mounted the final camera on the hallway ceiling just outside the bedroom door, and then pulled a compact tablet from his cargo pocket. The screen lit up — sixteen split feeds, each one streaming a real-time view of a different corner of my apartment in crystalline high definition.

My entire home, reduced to a grid of surveillance windows.

"Testing signal." He tapped his earpiece. "Damian. Visual feed — status?"

Damian's voice came through the earpiece so crisply that he might as well have been standing in the next room. Cold. Precise. Every syllable a scalpel.

"All sixteen channels active. Resolution acceptable. Angles three and seven need a two-degree adjustment — Darius, the kitchen camera is crooked."

"It's not crooked. I calibrated it based on the ambient light refraction angle."

"It's crooked. Shift it right."

"That would create a 0.3-square-meter blind spot in the direction of the refrigerator."

"Shift. It. Right."

Darius exhaled through his nose — a sound of such profound, wounded offense that you'd think he'd been asked to betray a sacred oath — but he walked over and adjusted the camera.

I opened my mouth to say something — perhaps are you two surveilling my apartment or staging a home renovation show — when Damian's voice cut through the earpiece again.

But this time, the tone was completely different.

"Lobby camera."

Two words.

That was all it took.

Darius's entire body transformed. Every muscle locked. The screwdriver clattered onto the counter as he crossed the room in three strides — no, not strides. Something between a walk and a sprint. A controlled, predatory glide that ate up the distance like it was nothing.

"Ronald just entered the apartment building lobby." Damian's voice was ice. Pure, distilled, subzero ice. "He's waiting for the elevator. You have approximately ninety seconds."

My blood stopped moving.

Ninety seconds.

I turned to Darius. Darius was scanning the apartment with a terrifying calm — his eyes sweeping every wall, every exit, calculating escape vectors with a speed that should not have been humanly possible.

His gaze landed on the window.

"No!" I lunged and grabbed his arm. The instant my fingers made contact, they nearly recoiled — because the surface beneath his T-shirt didn't feel like a human body. It felt like a heated iron plate wrapped in cotton. "We're on the tenth floor!"

"I've jumped from twelve." His expression didn't flicker. "Snow landing. Absorbs impact force. It's March — no snow — but the lawn below your building —"

"Sixty seconds," Damian supplied.

I stomped my foot. Hard.

My brain went into overdrive. The three canvas duffel bags were still splayed across the living room floor — no time to haul them out. I seized the nearest two and crammed them under the sofa, then kicked the third behind the dining chairs.

My other hand was still fisted in the hem of Darius's shirt — because I did not trust this man not to hurl himself out of a tenth-story window the second I looked away. This wasn't the wilderness. There was no snowdrift waiting below. Just concrete sidewalk and the startled gazes of every resident coming and going from the building.

My eyes raked the apartment. Bathroom — too small. Kitchen — no cover. Under the bed — no. At six-four, he'd warp the bed frame.

The closet.

The walk-in closet in the bedroom.

"Follow me." I hauled him toward the bedroom.

I yanked open the closet door. Inside: my clothes, Ronald's clothes, a few shoe boxes, a stack of off-season blankets on the floor. It was not a large space. But if Darius folded himself —

"Get in."

He looked at the closet's interior. Then he looked at himself.

His expression — if I'd had the bandwidth to register it — carried a distinct note of affront. As if I'd just asked a lion to squeeze into a rabbit hole.

"Thirty seconds," Damian said.

I shoved Darius from behind, and he went — reluctantly, impossibly, defying several known laws of physics as he compressed his massive frame into the narrow space between my winter coats and Ronald's dress shirts.

I shut the closet door. Stepped back. Scanned the bedroom.

Nothing visibly out of place.

Then I sprinted back to the living room, snatched Darius's tablet from the coffee table and stuffed it under the sofa cushion, kicked his miniature screwdriver into the gap beneath the sofa leg, and did one final sweep of the entire space — checking for any trace, any evidence, any whisper of a six-foot-four Alpha was in here fifteen minutes ago turning your apartment into a surveillance command center.

The lock turned.

"Kate?"

Ronald stood in the doorway. Briefcase in one hand. Tie loosened. That familiar smile on his face — the one that used to make my chest feel warm and full.

"Hey." I pulled a smile from somewhere. Stitched it onto my face. My heart was slamming into my ribs at roughly a thousand beats per second, but my expression had to say everything is fine, nothing to see here, just your wife standing in the living room for absolutely no suspicious reason.

"You're home?" He set down his briefcase at the entryway and walked toward me, bending to press a kiss to my forehead. "I thought you had a work trip today?"

Right. The trip. I hadn't told him yet — no, wait, according to the plan I wasn't supposed to tell him until tomorrow, but he was already asking, so —

"Flight got moved to tomorrow," I said. The lie came out smooth. Automatic. "Last-minute change."

"Oh, that's great." His smile widened. He moved toward the kitchen. "Have you eaten? I brought —"

"Mrow."

We both froze.

Mochi — my traitorous, orange, absurdly perceptive cat — had emerged from under the coffee table at some point and was now sitting in the bedroom doorway. Her round amber eyes were fixed on the closed closet door with the unblinking intensity of a laser sight.

"Mrrrow —"

Louder this time. More urgent. Her tail began to lash. She stood, padded to the closet door, and dropped her nose to the gap at the bottom, sniffing furiously.

My heart flatlined.

"What's wrong with Mochi?" Ronald leaned out of the kitchen, following the sound toward the bedroom.

"Nothing." My voice came out remarkably steady. I surprised even myself. "Probably another bug. You know how she gets when —"

"MROWWW!"

Mochi arched her back and began clawing at the closet door — frantic, sharp, percussive scratches punctuated by a string of high-pitched yowls that sounded nothing like her usual I spotted a moth performance.

"Mice again?" Ronald set down his glass with a frown and walked toward the bedroom.

We'd had a mouse problem when we first moved in. The closet had been ground zero.

"There's no way it's mice again —" I tried to intercept.

But Ronald was already there. He scooped Mochi up with one hand and set her aside — she squirmed, hissed, strained back toward the closet — and then he straightened.

He reached out.

His fingers closed around the closet door handle.

Tightened.

Started to pull —