Alphas' Indecent Proposal

Chapter 15

Damon's POV

The private physician arrived, checked Kate's vitals, confirmed she wasn't in immediate danger, drew a vial of blood, and left in a hurry.

Darius and I lingered for a few minutes after that, but there was nothing else to do. So we left.

The elevator slid downward in silence.

I stared at our reflections in the polished steel doors. Two faces that looked almost identical to Damian's, blurred and distorted by the brushed metal. People always said Darius resembled Damian the most. The bone structure, the jawline, the set of the eyes. But their personalities were so wildly different that most people never noticed the resemblance at first glance.

I was the brother who understood Damian.

And what I'd seen upstairs was something I couldn't file away.

When the doctor had been examining Kate, I hadn't been watching the examination. I'd been watching Damian. He had stood exactly four feet from the sofa where she lay, spine rigid, hands locked behind his back, and he had not sat down. Not once. He hadn't even blinked. His eyes had stayed fixed on her pale, unconscious face with an intensity that went far beyond professional concern or strategic calculation.

I knew that expression. That was Damian in the act of concealing a total loss of control.

What I couldn't figure out was what had triggered it. Something had happened in a single, split-second moment that neither Darius nor I had been present for. Something seismic.

No.

Not just me.

Darius's aura had spiraled out of control in that same instant. That was its own kind of fracture. Less visible than Damian's, but a fracture nonetheless.

Though knowing Darius, even if he'd sensed it, he probably had no idea what it meant.

So I was the only one who'd been left completely in the dark.

What was it?

Something to do with Kate. A woman who, if it weren't for the need to dismantle Catherine, we would never have crossed paths with in a thousand lifetimes.

The elevator opened onto the underground garage. I glanced at Darius, who had been silent the entire ride, and just before he turned toward his car, I spoke.

"Last week, Damian called me at two in the morning. Asked me to draft an amendment to Kate's contract."

Darius stopped mid-stride. His brows drew tight. "What kind of amendment?"

"A personal compensation clause. Completely bypasses her marriage to Ronald. The funds will be deposited into a private, hidden account in her name once the surveillance operation concludes." I kept my tone casual, as if I were merely making conversation. But something in my gut had told me that whatever had happened tonight with Damian and Darius would trace back to Kate. And I happened to hold this one piece of information Damian had entrusted to me. "He doubled the original amount."

Darius went rigid.

He spent most of his life in the wilderness tracking targets and studying animal behavior, and he'd probably logged more hours with wolves and wildlife than with actual people. But even he understood the weight of what I'd just described. "...Why?"

"I assumed it was risk management. Protecting the corporation from future litigation." I leaned my head against the glass wall and tilted my face upward, toward the penthouse floors I could no longer see. "That explanation is perfectly logical. Very Damian." A beat. "But after tonight... I'm not so sure anymore."

I shifted my gaze to Darius, watching for a reaction. Testing whether pointing out the cracks in Damian's composure would produce anything useful.

But Darius looked the same as always. To him, everything Damian did was correct by default. The same blind, absolute trust he extended to me.

I watched him scratch his head in frustration, open his mouth as if to say something, then close it again without a word.

I gave up. Sighed internally.

Too many years sparring with Catherine had made me paranoid. Occupational hazard of being a lawyer.

Even if Damian had sensed something extraordinary tonight, Darius was never going to be the one to c***k the code.

"Forget it. Go home and get some rest. I'm probably overthinking this." I clapped him on the shoulder, offered a resigned smile, and turned away.

I'd find the right moment to ask Damian directly.

It was probably nothing.

But what I didn't see, as I started the engine and pulled out of the garage, was Darius still standing in the same spot. And on his face, rare and unmistakable, was a look of complicated hesitation that almost never belonged there.

Ronald's POV

The bedroom was pitch black, but my eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling.

Sleep hadn't come. My mind kept replaying the data.

That smart lock.

Years ago, when Kate had been handling the renovation of our apartment, I'd taken over on the day the front door was installed. I'd pulled the contractor aside and, with an embarrassed laugh, explained that my work schedule kept me out late, so I wanted the lock upgraded to one that logged every time the door was opened. The data fed exclusively to my phone.

Kate had never known.

For years, her movements had been practically transparent to me. There was never anything worth checking. So I'd gradually stopped looking.

But these past two days, unsettled by her absence, I'd opened the app on impulse and scrolled through the logs from the day she'd left for her business trip.

Kate's departure time: normal.

My morning commute, followed by a return trip to grab forgotten documents: normal.

But between those two entries, between the moment I left for work and the moment I came back, there was an additional log.

Someone had entered the apartment while I was out. Stayed briefly. And left without using the front door.

That was why I'd torn the apartment apart today. And I'd found it. A tiny scrap of adhesive tape on Kate's vanity. Something I could say with absolute certainty did not belong there.

Afterward, I'd gone straight to the bathroom. Not just to shower. To check the hidden compartment behind the cabinet.

The small vials of colorless liquid were all accounted for.

Untouched. Intact.

That had eased my nerves. Kate hadn't discovered the drugs. So what had prompted the intrusion? Or perhaps Kate herself didn't even know someone had been inside.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand, dragging me back. The screen lit up the dark room.

Catherine.

"You won't believe this," her message read, dripping with venomous amusement. "Guess who I saw tonight? My 'principled' Alpha fiancé, having a cozy little dinner with another woman. And he has the nerve to judge me? Nothing but a hypocrite."

I stared at the glowing text. The corner of my mouth twitched.

My fingers moved across the screen on autopilot, tapping out the kind of response that would keep Catherine satisfied.

But my mind had already drifted back to the phone call with Kate. The one before my shower.

"Did someone break in? Do you need me to call the police?"

Her voice had been too calm. Too steady. The old Kate would have stammered, panicked, tripped over herself to explain at the faintest hint of my displeasure.

Kate was supposed to be transparent. Easy to read. Easy to manage.

And yet, on that call, I couldn't read her at all.

I exchanged a few more messages with Catherine, then locked my phone and set it down. The usual pleasure I got from their conversations had evaporated.

I didn't like Kate slipping out of my control.

I still had plenty of unused vacation days. Maybe in a few days, while Kate was still on her "business trip," I'd pay my darling wife a little surprise visit. See what had changed her so much. See exactly whose cage my little bird had flown into.

Damian's POV

The next morning.

Kate was still asleep in the guest room, her breathing shallow and even. In the main living area, I had just showered and changed, toweling the water from my hair, when the physician arrived. He swiped through his tablet and pulled up the blood work.

"Talk." A single command. But the urgency coiled inside my chest was worse than anything I'd felt running the Voss empire or leading the pack.

The doctor swallowed hard. He'd served the Voss family long enough to know that all three brothers, despite being Alphas, were reasonable men. The salary alone outpaced anything a hospital could offer. But today, for reasons he couldn't name, Damian Voss made him nervous.

"Mr. Voss... her blood contains a foreign compound."

The temperature in the room plummeted.

"Explain."

"It's not commercially available." His fingers trembled as he swiped through the data. "I believe it's a highly synthesized, custom-engineered neural suppressant designed specifically for werewolf physiology. Tailored to her body, specifically. It produces long-term suppressive effects, paralyzing a wolf's sensory functions."

He hesitated.

"Including the ability to perceive a mate bond."

Silence swallowed the room whole.

The doctor looked up at me with dread. My eyes had already shifted before he'd finished speaking, the irises collapsing into deep, spiraling vortexes that pulsed with concentrated, undiluted killing intent. Battle instinct surged through my body like voltage through a live wire, every nerve ending igniting.

In one violent instant, every unanswered question snapped into alignment.

It wasn't a malfunction. My senses hadn't been wrong.

I crushed the killing intent down. But the fraction of a second it had leaked, the raw, suffocating weight of Alpha dominance, was enough to make the doctor flinch. A strict NDA bound this man to the Voss family, but certain things needed to stay buried. Even from him.

So I did what I always did. I gave orders. Identify the compound. Synthesize an antidote. Report back immediately.

The doctor left.

I walked into the guest room.

Kate lay on the bed, pale and still. I crouched beside her until my eyes were level with her face. And then, unable to stop myself, I reached out and traced the line of her cheek with the pad of my thumb.

The touch was featherlight. Reverent.

"...After all these years. I finally found you."

My gaze dropped to her lips. Colorless. Bloodless. And yet, to me, they looked like the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. I leaned closer, jaw locked, fist clenched so hard the knuckles blanched white, fighting with every fiber of my being not to close the distance and press my mouth to hers.

I turned my head at the last second. My lips grazed her skin as I pulled away, and even that whisper of contact sent a violent shudder through my entire body.

I stood. My fist came down on the bedside table. The wooden corner exploded into splinters.

"I will find out who did this to you. That fraud will answer for every single day. You are mine, and I will never let you slip away again."