Alphas' Indecent Proposal

Chapter 3

Kate's POV

Lunatics. Every last one of them — certifiable, irredeemable lunatics.

I stormed through the 42nd floor, my heels sinking into the plush wool carpet with every furious step. My reflection caught in the elevator's polished steel doors before they opened — eyes bloodshot, nose still red and twitching from the ugly almost-cry I'd barely swallowed back during that disaster of a meeting. A few rebellious strands of hair had escaped my clip and were doing their own chaotic thing.

I exhaled slowly.

Great. Just great.

It wasn't even close to quitting time yet. If I went down looking like this, the HR girls on four would swarm me with their concerned little head-tilts and "oh honey, what happened?" faces. I'd rather chew glass.

I bypassed the elevator entirely and shoved open the heavy fire door. The stairwell hit me with a gust of cool air from the cracked window — sharp, clean, almost medicinal in how instantly it cut through the fog in my head. I sucked in a deep breath, patted both cheeks twice — get it together, Kate — and started the long descent.

Forty-two floors was a lot of stairs. But I needed every single one of them to pull myself back into some semblance of a functional human being before I packed up my desk, said goodbye to the colleagues I'd spent four months with, and walked out of this building for good.

Now — the real question.

How was I going to tell Ronald?

"Honey, I quit my job."

Too blunt. He'd panic.

"Babe, I made a really brave decision today —"

No. That sounded like I'd joined a cult.

"Ronald, my boss is a lunatic. He accused you of cheating."

I could already picture it. Ronald would freeze for half a second, then let out that bewildered, half-amused laugh of his as he pulled me into his arms. "Cheating? Baby, where is this coming from?" His hand would settle on the small of my back, his chin resting on top of my head — always like that, every single time, no matter what insane thing I threw at him. His first instinct was never to question. It was always — "What happened? Who hurt you?"

Five years. From the high school hallway where he first grabbed my hand to the altar where he slid a ring onto my finger — he had never, not once, let me carry anything alone.

I wanted to go home. Back to him. Back to that warm, safe little world that belonged to just the two of us —

I'd barely made it down one flight when the motion-sensor light behind me clicked off.

Darkness swallowed the landing above.

Then — click — the next sensor kicked in, flooding the narrow stairwell with cold fluorescent light, and in that split-second flash —

A wall materialized in front of me.

Except it wasn't a wall.

It was a man. A massive man, standing dead center on the stairs in a black tactical compression tee that looked like it had been painted onto his body. Under the dim industrial light, his frame filled the entire width of the stairwell — shoulders like a barricade, chest and abs sculpted into hard ridges that shifted subtly with each controlled breath.

Six-two. Maybe six-three.

I took an instinctive step back.

"Who are you?"

He clearly wasn't from this building. No lanyard. No suit. Nothing about him said corporate. Everything about him said dangerous.

He looked down at me — face completely blank, voice flat and clinical, like he was reading coordinates off a tactical display.

"I arrived at this position one hundred and thirty-seven seconds before you pushed the door open."

"... What?"

"Precision anticipation. Basic recon skill."

Recon?

I stared at his face, my brain scrambling to process. He didn't look like the other two Voss brothers — not exactly. But there it was: the same dark hair, the same jawline sharp enough to cut glass. If you took Damian's ice and Damon's velvet and stripped them both away — every last drop of charm, of cruelty, of calculated warmth — what you'd be left with was this. A body built purely for combat, and a pair of eyes that held absolutely zero unnecessary emotion.

Triplets.

This was the third one.

"Move," I snapped, shoving past his arm — or trying to. "I already quit. I'm not your brother's employee anymore, and you have zero right to restrict my freedom."

I tried to squeeze through the narrow gap between his body and the railing.

He shifted. Half a step. Maybe less.

But it was enough. Like an iron gate swinging shut — the gap vanished. The exit no longer existed.

"It appears you know who I am." A statement, not a question. "Damon sent me to bring you back."

"I don't care which brother you are. I quit. You have no reason to stop me."

"Your refusal has been acknowledged." He gave a single, measured nod — as if granting my position some kind of formal military recognition. Then, without the slightest change in tone: "But you're still coming with me."

I clenched my jaw. I glared. He stared back — utterly impassive, utterly immovable. There was no persuasion in his eyes, no negotiation, no attempt to reason with me. Just a calm, absolute certainty that he would stand here until I complied — my personal wishes occupying precisely zero space in his operational parameters.

Cold. Efficient. Infuriating.

I spun on my heel, ready to bolt back through the fire door and find another way out.

And that — that — was when my stiletto heel decided to betray me.

The pointed tip caught in the metal threshold groove with surgical precision. A sharp c***k — like snapping a pencil — and white-hot pain detonated from my ankle, shooting up through my shin, my knee, all the way to the crown of my skull.

I lost my balance. The floor rushed up at me —

The cold tile never came.

An arm locked around my waist — not rough, not gentle. Precise. Zero hesitation, zero wasted motion. And before my brain could even register the shift in gravity, the ceiling and floor swapped places.

I was slung over his shoulder like a bag of tactical sand.

"PUT ME DOWN!" I screamed, hammering my fists against his back. It was like punching granite. My knuckles throbbed and he didn't even flinch. "You — Damon promised me — he said if he couldn't convince me, he'd let me go! Did he tell you that?!"

"Left ankle. Sprained. Stop moving or you'll cause secondary damage."

"I said —"

"Your heart rate is at 134. Continued resistance will accelerate ankle swelling and push your blood pressure into a dangerous range."

A human heart-rate monitor. I was being carried through the hallway by a human heart-rate monitor.

And the worst part — the part I wanted to claw out of my own memory — was that somewhere between the screaming and the struggling, draped over his shoulder with my face inches from the broad plane of his back, I caught it.

His scent.

Pine and wild grass. Dry, crisp, clean — like the air deep in an old-growth forest on a winter morning, before the sun hits the frost.

My body went slack for exactly one heartbeat.

I hated myself for noticing.

Bang.

The office door swung open, and I was deposited — precision-deployed — onto the same leather couch I'd stormed away from ten minutes ago.

I was panting, hair plastered to my cheeks, fully prepared to unleash verbal hell, when a cup of warm water appeared on the table in front of me.

"Please forgive my brother's... lack of social calibration." Damon materialized beside the couch as if he'd been waiting there all along. His eyes held that signature glow — warm, disarming, almost hypnotic in how effortlessly it made you want to trust him. "He's spent too many years in the field. The 'basic human etiquette' software hasn't finished installing yet."

A pause. A perfectly timed, perfectly sympathetic smile.

"Allow me to introduce him. This is our youngest brother, Darius. And Kate — how's your ankle? I can have a doctor here in five minutes."

Compared to Damian's arrogance and Darius's brute-force approach, Damon looked almost saintly right now. But I wasn't stupid. Darius had just told me it was Damon who sent him to intercept me. And Damon had promised — five minutes, he'd said. If he couldn't change my mind, he'd let me walk.

"I don't need a doctor." I sat up straighter, jaw tight. "What I need is for all of you to stop. I've said it already — you've got the wrong person. Ronald would never cheat on me. We've been together for five years. We are happy. If he'd betrayed me, my wolf would have felt it. If you want to find dirt on your brother's fiancée, go look somewhere else."

I bit down on every word. Hard. Definitive.

I meant it to be a wall. A final answer no one could argue with.

"Sustained elevated heart rate. That's counterproductive for your ankle recovery." Darius, arms folded, leaning against the far wall. Clinical as ever.

"Shut up, Darius. That's not exactly the priority right now." Damian's voice cut through the room — and with it came a smile. Not a kind one. The kind that made you feel like a specimen pinned under glass. "High school sweethearts? Please. That demographic has statistically the highest infidelity rate — because they've been bored of each other's bodies since before they could legally drink."

"You —" My vision blurred with sudden, furious heat. "You don't know the first thing about love. What gives you the right to —"

"Damian. Darius. Enough."

Damon raised one hand.

And just like that — miraculously, impossibly — both of them shut up. Two Alphas radiating enough dominance to flatten a room, silenced by a single word from the middle brother.

Damon settled onto the couch beside me. Not too close, not too far. Calculated to the millimeter.

"I understand you, Kate." His voice dropped — softer now, almost confessional. "Five years. Of course you'd trust your husband over three strangers you met twenty minutes ago. And you should. Trust is the most precious thing in a marriage. I respect your loyalty."

Finally. Someone in this room was speaking like a rational human being. My rigid shoulders dropped half an inch.

"Then keep your promise," I said. "Let me go."

"I wish I could tell you we're wrong. Truly." Damon exhaled — a quiet sigh threaded with just the right note of regret. "As a lawyer, I live by one principle: innocent until proven guilty."

He reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and produced a manila envelope. He placed it on the coffee table between us. Slowly. Deliberately.

"But would you look at what's inside? Just once. After that, I think you'll understand why we couldn't simply let this go."

I stared at the envelope. My fingers twitched against my thigh.

Don't.

Don't open it.

I opened it.

A stack of high-resolution photographs spilled out. Surveillance shots — crisp, close-range, taken at a café.

In the center of every frame: my husband, Ronald, his arms wrapped tightly around a blonde woman. She had her face buried in his chest, and his shirt — his shirt — was darkened with her tears. And Ronald — my Ronald, the man who panicked when I nicked my finger chopping vegetables — was stroking her hair with an expression of such raw tenderness that my lungs forgot how to work.

His lips were pressed to her forehead.

The blonde woman was Catherine. Damian's fiancée.

I recognized her immediately.

Something inside my chest detonated. No — not detonated. Imploded. Like a fist had reached in, found my heart, and crushed it into powder. My stomach heaved.

"No..." My voice came out fractured, barely a whisper. "This — this doesn't prove anything. She's crying. Ronald is a good person. He was comforting a friend who was falling apart. Since when is a hug between friends evidence of — you can't just take a few photos of two people embracing and use it to —"

I was clawing for words. Anything. Any combination of syllables that could patch the gaping hole this photograph had just blasted through the center of my chest.

The office went silent.

Three seconds. Four.

Damon watched me. Something shifted behind his eyes — genuine pity, yes, but layered beneath it, something else. Something sharper. A flicker of calculation, as if my reaction had given him a data point he hadn't expected.

"How long are you going to keep lying to yourself?"

Damian moved.

He rose from behind his desk in one fluid motion, long legs carrying him around the polished wood until he was standing directly in front of me. The air in the room compressed. His presence was a physical force — gravitational, suffocating, designed to make lesser beings fold.

He leaned down.

Cold fingers caught my chin and tilted my face upward — not gently, not violently. Precisely. Forcing me to meet those ice-blue eyes that cut like surgical steel.

"He might have just been comforting a friend," Damian murmured. His voice had dropped to something low and rough, each word a scalpel laid against an open wound. "I'll give you that."

He bent closer. His breath ghosted over my ear — warm against my skin, obscenely intimate for a man this cold.

"But don't you want to ask yourself one little question?"

A pause.

"The day those photos were taken —"

Another pause. Longer. Crueler.

"— wasn't that the exact same Valentine's Day you just spent the last ten minutes lecturing me about? The one where you accused me of neglecting my fiancée so badly that she had to cry on a stranger's shoulder?"

The words hit like a blade slipping between my ribs.

Every molecule of air evacuated from my lungs.

Because I remembered now.

Valentine's Day.

Ronald had told me he was working late.