Alphas' Indecent Proposal

Chapter 12

Kate's POV

Neon from the storefronts bled through the car windows in streaks of pink and gold, painting my skin in colors that didn't belong to me.

I couldn't feel any of it.

Catherine's voice was still lodged in my skull like a splinter. She can't even feel her own wolf anymore. The words played on a loop, each repetition stripping away another layer of the composure I was barely holding together.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

I'd called for my wolf dozens of times since we left the restaurant. Silently. Desperately. Screaming inside my own head until the silence screamed back.

Nothing.

And for the first time, the absence didn't just feel like silence. It felt like something had been taken. I realized, with a sick lurch in my stomach, that my wolf hadn't truly responded to my call in weeks. Maybe longer. Every time she'd surfaced, it had been unprompted, unpredictable, never when I reached for her. I'd mistaken that for independence.

Now I wasn't sure what to call it.

I followed Damian on autopilot. Out of the car. Through the lobby of my apartment building. Into the elevator. But the numbers on the display kept climbing past my floor, past the twenties, the thirties, all the way to thirty-seven.

The penthouse.

Damian unlocked the door like he'd done it ten thousand times. Warm light spilled out from inside, and the first thing I saw was floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides, the city glittering beyond it like scattered diamonds. The second thing I saw was the furniture.

I froze.

The layout. The textures. The color palette. It was nearly identical to the apartment I'd been staying in downstairs.

The night we'd all crowded around the monitors for the first time, Damon and Darius had left early. Damian stayed behind. I'd assumed he'd gone home afterward. Turns out home was twelve floors up.

And the apartment downstairs, the one I'd moved into and immediately thought, This feels like the place Ronald and I decorated together... I'd been so touched. So stupidly flattered. I'd assumed the Voss brothers had designed it to make me comfortable.

They hadn't.

This was simply what Damian liked.

The realization hit me sideways. This man, whose office was all steel and glass and surgical precision, privately preferred warm wood, soft lighting, and textures that invited you to stay. The contradiction was so jarring it almost made me forget I was falling apart.

Almost.

"Sit down."

His voice came from behind me, cutting through my cataloguing of his space. He stepped around me, blocking my view, and pressed me onto the couch with a hand on my shoulder. The pressure was light, but absolute. The kind of touch that didn't ask.

Then Damian Voss, CEO, eldest Alpha, untouchable and unreachable, loosened his tie with one hand.

And knelt.

One knee on the hardwood floor. Right in front of me.

"What are you"

He didn't answer. His hands, warm and rough, closed around my ankle and lifted my right foot. The heel slipped off.

A sound escaped me before I could stop it. Half gasp, half sob.

The skin behind my ankle was raw and torn. Blood had soaked into the strap of the shoe, staining the pale leather a dark, ugly red. I hadn't even noticed. The adrenaline from the restaurant, from Catherine's phone call, from the drive here, had swallowed the pain whole.

Damian stared at the wound.

His jaw clenched. The muscle along that hard, angular line twitched once. And something shifted behind his eyes. Something dark. Something that made the air in the room thicken and press against my skin like a living thing.

He didn't speak.

He placed my foot on his knee, and his thumb traced a featherlight path across my ankle bone, avoiding the wound with a precision that shouldn't have been possible for hands that large.

I curled my toes involuntarily. The intimacy of it, my bare foot resting on his thigh, his fingers cradling my heel, was too much. I shifted, reaching for my leg. "I can take care of it my"

His grip tightened. Not painful. Not even close. But immovable.

He opened the first aid kit he'd retrieved from somewhere I hadn't noticed, squeezed ointment onto his fingertip, and began applying it to the broken skin with a gentleness that made my chest ache.

I looked away.

Because if I kept watching Damian Voss kneel on his own floor and tend to a wound I hadn't even known I had, I was going to cry. And I'd already done enough crying for one lifetime.

Then, deep inside me, so deep I nearly missed it, my wolf stirred.

A single, thin whimper.

My breath caught. The sound pulled at something in my chest, a terrible, intoxicating gravity that made my ribs feel too small for whatever was expanding behind them.

And then she was gone again.

Exhaustion, I told myself. That's all this is. The emotional voltage of today had been off the charts. Of course my body was misfiring.

Damian finished with the ointment, slid a pair of soft house slippers onto my feet, and stood. He was still close. Close enough that I caught his scent. Not the cologne. Beneath it. Cedar and cold iron. And something deeper, something wilder, something that belonged at the edge of a forest at midnight, not in a penthouse living room.

He looked down at me. I looked up at him.

Neither of us spoke.

The silence was so complete I could hear my own pulse. And underneath it, the unnamed thing that had surfaced when my wolf whimpered didn't fade. It grew. Swelling. Thickening. Filling the space between us until the air itself felt carbonated.

Damian's lips parted.

The front door slammed open.

"We have a lead."

Damon's voice arrived two full seconds before he did. He walked in unhurried, steady, every step deliberate. Behind him, Darius planted himself against the doorframe, arms crossed, eyes already locked on us.

The atmosphere in the room shifted instantly.

One Alpha was suffocating enough. Three Alphas in one enclosed space was something else entirely. The air turned dense. Heavy. A wall of heat closed around me from every direction, pressing against my skin like a tide rolling in.

I was grateful.

Because without Damon and Darius crashing through that door, I had no idea what Damian had been about to say. Or what would have happened if we'd stayed alone in this apartment one second longer.

Darius's gaze hadn't left me. It moved over me once, head to toe, not cataloguing the mascara probably smeared halfway down my face or the exhaustion carved into every line of my body. His attention snagged on the discarded heels. On the blood dried into the straps.

His expression went cold. Battle-ready. The same look he'd worn the night he was installing cameras in my apartment and got word Ronald was on his way up. A soldier who'd just identified a threat.

He said nothing. He simply crossed the room in three long strides and positioned himself at my left side, standing like a sentry. Close enough to touch. Not touching.

Damon, meanwhile, had already set a slim black laptop on the marble island. His voice was clipped, efficient, stripped of every ounce of his usual charm. "Intercepted from your living room ten minutes ago."

My stomach dropped. Catherine's phone call flashed through my mind. The drug. The wolf she'd laughed about. I bit down hard on my lower lip, bracing for the worst.

Damon moved fast. He didn't give me time to run.

Ronald's face filled the screen.

Damon glanced back at me once, then spoke. "Relax. Ronald didn't bring anyone home tonight. Clocked in, clocked out, ordered takeout, watched TV. Completely clean."

I exhaled. The knot in my chest loosened by exactly one degree.

"Then what did you find?" Damian had moved behind me. Not touching, but close enough that I could feel his body heat against my back like a second skin.

"Short clip. You'll see."

On screen, Ronald stood in our bedroom. No warmth in his face. No trace of the man who sent me voice messages about roses. His posture was rigid. His eyes were sharp, scanning the room with the cold focus of someone conducting an inspection.

He circled the space once, then stopped at my vanity.

He opened the top drawer. Hair ties, bobby pins, the little jewelry box my mother gave me. He examined each item with clinical attention, then replaced them in exactly the same position. Second drawer. Same process. Third drawer.

He pulled it open one inch and stopped.

His head tilted. He was staring at the gap between the drawer and the frame.

Slowly, deliberately, he reached inside and extracted a tiny, irregular strip of black electrical tape.

My heart stopped.

I recognized that spot. Darius had opened that same drawer when he was scouting locations for the cameras. That residue was from the installation.

Ronald held the fragment between his thumb and forefinger and lifted it to the light. He turned it. Studied it. The timestamp on the screen said he stood there for one full minute, motionless, processing.

Then, very slowly, he raised his head.

And looked directly into the camera.

He knows.