The alpha's contract

The question he shouldn't have asked

"Who is he?"

Kael's voice, when they were finally alone in the car afterward, carried none of the possessive warmth from earlier in the evening. It was flat. Controlled. The voice of a man deciding, in real time, how much damage he was willing to absorb before he cut something out of his life entirely.

"A guest," Sienna said. "I don't know him."

"You know him well enough that he found you in a hallway with no one around to overhear, and well enough that whatever he said made you walk back into that ballroom looking like you'd seen a ghost." Kael's eyes stayed fixed on the road, his knuckles pale where they gripped the wheel. "I've built an entire career on reading people who lie to my face for a living, Ms. Vale. You're not as good at it as you think."

She said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't either confirm his suspicions or bury her deeper in a lie she was running out of room to maintain.

"His name is Renzo Castellano," Kael said, into the silence she'd left him. "I recognized him the moment he walked into that ballroom, because my security team flagged him at the door and I told them to let him through — because I wanted to see exactly what he'd do once he was inside. And what he did, Ms. Vale, was walk straight to my wife."

The car had stopped. She hadn't noticed. They were parked outside the estate's gates, rain streaking the windshield, the security cameras above them recording everything with the same patient indifference they'd recorded every other secret this house had ever kept.

"I can explain," she said, and knew, even as the words left her mouth, that she had absolutely nothing true to offer him.

"Then explain." Kael turned to face her fully for the first time since the gala, and whatever composure he'd maintained through the empty container, through her search of his office, through the entire performance of the evening, had finally, visibly cracked. "Explain to me why my wife of two days is meeting privately with a man from a rival shipping family, three days after federal agents found sixty tons of missing cargo on my dock. Explain why you photographed documents in my office. Explain why, every single time I ask you a direct question, you answer it with another question instead."

"Kael —"

"Tell me the truth, Sienna." His voice dropped, low and rough, closer to pain than to anger. "Or tell me nothing at all, and I will assume the worst version of every answer you refuse to give me — and I promise you, the worst version is not one either of us will enjoy living through."

She opened her mouth — to lie, to deflect, to buy herself one more day the way she'd bought herself every day since Renzo first showed her that photograph of Mara's hospital bracelet — and found, for the first time since signing that contract, that she couldn't make the lie come.

"There's a ledger," she said instead, the words leaving her before she could stop them. "Someone sent me to find it. And I think whatever's in it is the reason your family's cargo has been disappearing for six years."

The silence that followed was worse than anything he could have said. Kael simply stared at her, rain drumming against the roof of the car, his expression shifting through something that looked, for one unguarded second, like betrayal — before the gates ahead of them buzzed, flooded suddenly with harsh white light, and three unmarked vehicles pulled into the estate's private drive with a speed that meant only one thing.

"That's not customs," Kael said quietly, his eyes narrowing on the vehicles now blocking the gate. "Those are Castellano cars."

And as the first car door opened and a man Sienna didn't recognize stepped out into the rain with a gun visible beneath his jacket, she understood, with a horror that eclipsed every fear she'd carried into this marriage, that she had run out of time to decide whether Kael Ashford was her enemy — because someone far more dangerous had just arrived to make that decision for both of them.