Alphas' Indecent Proposal

Chapter 14

Damian's POV

Mate.

The word didn't surface. It detonated. A depth charge buried in the marrow of my bones, ripping through every wall I'd ever built.

And my wolf, that cold, calculating beast I'd kept leashed since adolescence, the one who spoke only in clipped tactical assessments and never once raised his voice, was roaring.

Not a warning. A declaration. Vast, absolute, and so violent it dismantled the architecture of my skull from the inside out. I felt my entire nervous system rewiring in real time.

My heart slammed against my ribs like a battering ram. Kate's skin was ice against my forearm, but her scent, a delicate, intoxicating sweetness like jasmine after rain, erupted through my senses and obliterated everything else in the room. My vision bled gold. I pulled her tighter against me. My fangs throbbed beneath my gums, lengthening, scraping the inside of my lower lip. Claws shredded through the lining of my suit jacket and bit deep into my palms.

I was breathing too fast. I dipped my head, lungs heaving like bellows feeding a furnace, and pressed my nose closer to her. Every inhale was a desperate attempt to drag more of that raw, fading scent into my body.

Mark her. Claim her. Now.

My wolf was screaming. But I locked my jaw until something in the joint cracked.

No.

Because there was something my wolf was too far gone to understand.

Ronald.

Just the thought of that mediocre, pathetic excuse of a man, a man whose layers of masks couldn't hide the rot I could sense without a shred of evidence, breathing the same air as her, sharing years of her life, sent a wave of bloodlust crashing through my veins. I wanted to go back to her apartment. I wanted to tear his throat out with my bare teeth.

But beneath the rage, a different kind of poison surged. Guilt. Massive, paralyzing, and inescapable.

Of all the people connected to Catherine, I had handpicked Kate. She had been, to the man I was before this moment, the easiest piece on the board to justify. The most convenient tool to catch Catherine's infidelity and dismantle my arranged engagement.

And now I could smell my mate on her skin. The mate I'd been searching for all those years.

What had I done.

"Damian, her breathing is wrong."

Darius's voice cut through the chaos, but something was off with him too. The Alpha aura he'd unleashed during his oath still hadn't retracted. It collided with mine, two tectonic plates grinding against each other, and the pressure in the room became suffocating. He was already moving, closing the distance between us in three quick strides. His hands reached for the woman in my arms with an urgency that bypassed rank, protocol, and every unspoken boundary between brothers.

"My aura. I lost control of it during the oath. The pressure spike must have..."

His fingers touched her shoulder.

I didn't mean to snarl.

But the sound that ripped from my throat was involuntary, primordial, torn from somewhere so deep it felt like something had been uprooted from inside me. Low, guttural, vibrating at a frequency that had nothing to do with communication and everything to do with territorial declaration. The air between Darius and me crackled with a hostility it had never carried before. My wolf seized my vocal cords without warning.

"Touch her again and I will end you."

Darius froze.

His hand hung in midair. His wolf's golden eyes, still blazing from the oath he'd sworn to Kate, locked onto mine without yielding an inch. His pupils dilated. Not from fear. Darius didn't know fear. From shock.

Across the room, Damon, who had been pressing his phone to his ear to contact our private physician, went completely still.

The silence in the penthouse became asphyxiating. Both my brothers stared at me as though I had lost my mind.

A sliver of reason clawed its way back.

I had to kill this. Immediately.

The pack elders had predicted it when we were born. The three of us would share a single fated mate.

If they realized Kate was mine, was ours, I couldn't begin to calculate the war it would ignite.

I needed to know everything before I told them anything.

And beneath that logic, there was a selfishness I would never admit out loud.

I wanted to know her first. I wanted to be the one who reached her first.

I burned through every last reserve of willpower in my body, every cell straining against the instinct that howled to claim, and forced the gold from my eyes. I crushed my aura down. I swallowed the possessive roar clawing up my throat and buried it alive.

"Don't touch her." Calmer this time. But the voice was still a blade. Cold, precise, and capable of drawing blood.

I didn't look at Darius. I couldn't. If I looked, if I let myself remember that he had just tried to take Kate from my arms, I would snap his neck where he stood.

Ignoring the weight of their silence, I carried Kate to the velvet sofa and lowered her gently onto the cushions. My wolf howled at the loss of contact.

I understood. We couldn't resist her.

So I leaned down under the pretense of checking her vitals, monitoring whether her breathing had steadied, and buried my nose in the curve of her neck.

I inhaled deeply, craving that jasmine sweetness. But as her scent flooded my lungs again, my senses, sharpened to a razor's edge, caught something that hadn't been there before. A discordance beneath the intoxication.

Bitter. Metallic.

Chemical.

My thoughts snapped into focus. Years of running an empire, of making split-second decisions worth millions, slotted back into place like a loaded magazine. I breathed in again, isolating the foreign note. It wasn't perfume. It wasn't a cleaning product. It was seeping from her pores.

Why couldn't she sense us? Her true mates? Why had she spent years beside Ronald, that repulsive fraud, offering him a trust he never deserved?

Why had Darius's aura, a force that should only unsettle certain Betas, Omegas, or humans, sent her into near-fatal shock?

One name surfaced in my mind like a bullet casing ejected from a chamber.

Ronald.

Pharmaceutical sales manager.

He was drugging her.

The realization hit me like a freight train. Cold. Nauseating. That bastard wasn't just manipulating her life with lies. He was poisoning her.

Kate let out a faint, pained whimper. Her head rolled weakly against the pillow, cold sweat beading on her pale forehead. Even unconscious, something inside her body was causing her pain.

But then her hand trembled outward. In her fog of half-awareness, her fingers found the collar of my shirt and seized the fabric, knuckles white, grip desperate. She turned her face slowly toward my chest. Her nose pressed against my skin, breathing me in, as if even in the dark she was searching for my scent.

And as her face settled against me, the storm raging inside my chest began, impossibly, to quiet.

I pulled my jacket from the back of the sofa and draped it over her. Then I straightened, letting my palm linger one last moment in her hair, fingers threading through the softness. I lifted my gaze past my brothers to the massive surveillance screen mounted on the wall.

Every feed from Ronald's apartment had gone black.

"Damon." My voice was flat. Toneless. The people who truly knew me understood this was the most dangerous version of my anger. Quieter than any roar and infinitely more lethal.

Damon spoke carefully, his eyes sharp, dissecting every micro-expression on my face. "Doctor will be here in two minutes."

"Good." My gaze stayed locked on the dead screens. "When he arrives, I want you to launch a full investigation. Find out exactly which pharmaceutical company Ronald works for. Trace every shipment of illicit compounds that moved through his territory in the past five years, especially illegal neural suppressants. I want his bank records, his medical files, his family connections. I want to know what he had for breakfast the day he was born."

Darius frowned. "Damian, what's going on? Why are we investigating her husband like this?"

I turned and looked at my brother. My wolf didn't struggle. But I gave Darius no explanation. Instead, I gave him a task.

"You have work to do as well. The restaurant where Kate and I had dinner tonight. I want every second of surveillance footage from the time we arrived to the time we left. I need to know exactly what Catherine said to her in that restroom."