Alphas' Indecent Proposal

Chapter 13

Kate's POV

The screen froze, and every molecule of air in the penthouse seemed to vanish with it.

I forgot how to breathe.

On the monitor, Ronald was still staring directly into the vent where the micro camera was hidden. No shock. No rage. Just a stillness so absolute, so eerily composed, that it made the skin on the back of my neck crawl.

Then he smiled.

It was a smile I knew by heart. The same gentle, perfectly curved smile he'd worn at the altar the day he promised me forever. Warm. Tender. The smile of a man who loved his wife.

Except now, transmitted through a surveillance feed and projected across a wall of screens, that smile slithered up my spine like something cold-blooded.

He didn't smash the camera.

Instead, Ronald rolled the tiny strip of Darius's electrical tape between his thumb and forefinger, compressed it into a ball, and dropped it casually into the wastebasket. Then he walked out of the bedroom. Brushed his teeth. Washed his face. Did everything he always did at this hour, in exactly the order he always did it.

As if nothing had happened.

As if the awareness, the predatory calculation in his eyes, had been nothing more than a trick of the light. A coincidence. A husband finding a stray piece of tape and glancing in the wrong direction at the wrong time.

"After that, his routine stayed completely normal," Damon said, killing the playback. The screen went dark. "Movement patterns consistent with every other night. No searching. No sweeping the apartment. Nothing."

Silence swallowed the room.

Nobody spoke.

Not even Damon and Darius, who had already watched the footage once before calling us in, could find words. Their faces held the same complicated, unsettled expression, the kind that surfaced when the facts refused to fit the profile.

I understood. A pharmaceutical sales manager was not supposed to possess that level of awareness. He was not supposed to detect a camera planted by a decorated military operative who had tracked rogue wolves across state lines and never left a trace.

And if Ronald had found the cameras, the fact that he could smile like that, switch back to his nightly routine without a single c***k in the performance... that spoke to a talent for deception that deserved its own category of terrifying.

Bzzt. Bzzt.

The vibration ripped through the silence like a gunshot.

I flinched, looked down. My phone, face-up on the table. The name on the screen was the one I knew best in the world.

Ronald.

Darius moved first. He crossed to the laptop in two strides, fingers flying, and within seconds every camera feed filled the wall of screens.

There he was. Ronald. Fresh from the shower, water still clinging to his hair, phone pressed to his ear. His lips curved into that same smile, soft and adoring, but his gaze drifted back toward the vent. Toward the lens.

He looked like a man calling his beloved wife to say goodnight.

And I, his beloved wife, was standing in a room with three Alphas, paralyzed.

"Don't answer." Damon broke the standoff first. His voice was sharp, every trace of his usual ease stripped away. "You pick up now and he'll know you're watching the feed in real time. If the operation's compromised, we lose everything."

"If she doesn't answer, she gives him exactly what he wants."

Damian's voice hit me like thunder. Low. Hard. Absolute.

I hadn't realized how close he was until that moment. My back was nearly flush against his chest. One breath deeper and I would have been leaning into him.

My finger hovered over the screen. The phone kept buzzing, patient and relentless, and on the monitors Ronald kept smiling, kept waiting, as though he had all the time in the world.

Then a broad, scalding palm closed over the back of my hand.

Damian didn't give me time to hesitate. One arm circled my waist from behind, pulling me against him in a motion that was half restraint, half shelter. His scent crashed over me, cedar and cold iron, dense and immediate, forming a wall so solid it felt physical. My back hit the hard plane of his chest and the impact sent a shockwave through my ribs.

The fear didn't disappear. But something in that scent, something deep and primal, pressed it down like a hand over a flame.

"Answer." His mouth was close enough to brush my ear. His voice was rough, quiet, and left absolutely no room for argument. "Act normal. You're safe. I give you my word that no one will trace you to this apartment."

I swallowed hard. In the middle of that chaos, wrapped in the cold-iron weight of his scent, I heard something in his voice I hadn't expected. A thread of softness disguised as command. A gentleness he would never admit to.

My finger slid across the screen.

"Hey, baby." Ronald's voice poured through the speaker like warm honey, amplified in the silent room, while on the screen his eyes stayed razor-sharp. "How's the business trip? I didn't hear from you tonight. Miss you."

I closed my eyes. Shut down one sense to sharpen the rest. The cedar scent flooded my lungs and, impossibly, steadied me. When I opened my eyes again, my voice came out so even it surprised me.

"Everything's great. I miss you too. Why are you still up?"

"Just about to turn in." A light laugh on the monitors. Casual. Easy. Then the hook. "Oh, by the way, I found a little piece of tape in one of your vanity drawers. Did you have someone come by to fix something before you left?"

Damon's brow snapped into a hard line. Darius's fist clenched at his side, knuckles cracking like dry wood.

Behind me, Damian didn't move. Didn't make a sound. And cradled in that impossible stillness, breathing cedar, I felt my heartbeat slow instead of spike. On any other night, a direct question like that would have sent me spiraling into a guilty, over-explaining mess. That was what my lies always looked like.

But I wasn't lying.

"No? Why, did someone break in?" A beat. Then, lighter: "Do you need me to call the police?"

Three seconds of dead silence on the other end.

Then Ronald laughed, soft and sweet. "Never mind, baby. Probably seeing things. Goodnight. I love you."

"Goodnight."

The call ended, and every ounce of strength drained out of me like someone had pulled a plug. If Damian's arm hadn't still been locked around my waist, I would have folded straight to the floor.

On screen, Ronald shrugged off his robe, revealing a sculpted chest. He glanced once more at the vent. This time the certainty in his expression had dimmed, replaced by something more cautious. More watchful. Then he reached over and switched off the bedroom light.

The monitors went black.

"Son of a bitch." Damon yanked his tie loose with a sharp tug. "I've sat across from convicted felons who didn't perform that well. Is he really just a pharma sales rep? Whether he found those cameras or not, our evidence strategy just took a direct hit. And if he plants fabricated proof of infidelity or espionage in that apartment, we're finished in court."

"This was my mistake."

The voice was low and rough. Darius. His face, normally as unreadable as granite, held a flicker of something I had never seen on him before. Guilt. I knew what he was thinking. One careless sliver of tape. One invisible detail that a man like him should never have left behind.

He crossed the room in three long strides and stopped directly in front of me. His jaw was clenched so tight I could see the tendons in his neck standing out like cables. And his eyes, those steady gray-green eyes that usually reminded me of moss on a forest floor, had changed. The irises burned with a deep, molten gold.

Wolf eyes.

Alpha wolf eyes.

Locked on me.

I stared up at him. He stared down at me. Every word sounded like it had been carved from bone.

"He will never hurt you. I stake my life on it."

Damon spoke from the side, quieter now. "Darius has never made an error on a mission. We still don't know for certain whether the cameras were detected. But the possibility alone is something he can't accept."

"I know," I whispered.

I wanted to tell them I felt no threat from Darius. No fear. Not even close.

Because something strange was happening. As he stepped toward me, my wolf, my silent, absent wolf, trembled. Not in terror. In recognition. And with that tremor came a scent I hadn't noticed until now, flooding my senses with startling clarity. Dry pine and wild grass. Clean and crisp, like the air in an old-growth forest before the frost melts. The same scent I'd caught the night he installed the cameras in my apartment.

But the word died on my lips.

A bolt of pain tore through me from somewhere so deep it felt like it originated in the marrow of my bones. My vision blurred. A wildfire of heat swept over my entire body in the space of a single heartbeat, and cold sweat soaked through the back of my shirt before I could draw another breath.

I didn't even manage the next syllable before my legs gave out.

"Kate!"

Damian's arm snapped tight. He caught me, pulled me hard against his chest, and held.

And then he froze.

Half a second. Maybe less.

The motion of lifting me locked mid-air. His breathing stopped completely.

Because in that fractional instant, his wolf had caught something. A scent buried beneath layers of fog, faint as a whisper trapped under water. Clean. Pure. Sweet enough to make his entire soul shake.

The scent of his mate.

His other half.

A truth written so deep into wolf-kind's genetic code that it needed no confirmation, no proof, no second opinion.

Damian lowered his gaze to the unconscious woman in his arms. When he raised his eyes again, the dark winter-lake blue had ignited into pure, blazing, unmistakable Alpha gold.

And somewhere in the deepest chamber of his chest, his wolf let out a roar that shook the foundations of everything he thought he knew.

Mate.