THE ALPHA’S REGRET

CHAPTER SIX

Catherine poured herself a brandy, her hands perfectly steady, as if she hadn’t just spent twenty minutes destroying a girl upstairs. The crystal caught the lamplight as she carried it to her chair, and she took her time settling into it, smoothing her skirt, arranging herself like a woman with nowhere else in the world to be.

Tony loosened his tie and dropped into the chair across from her, less careful about it, the knot ending up in a heap on the side table.

“That was quite the performance tonight,” Catherine said.

“She made it easy.”

“She always does.” Catherine took a slow sip, savoring it, her eyes on him over the rim of the glass. “Did you see her face when I called her common? I thought she might actually faint.”

“Pathetic.” Tony’s laugh was short and empty, gone before it finished.

“Useful, though. For now.” Catherine set her glass down with a soft, deliberate clink, the sound of a woman closing one subject and opening another. “I spoke with the warden today.”

Something in Tony’s posture changed, small but unmistakable. He looked up.

“And?”

“Your step brother isn’t eating well.” Catherine’s voice was almost gentle, the way it might be discussing a mild inconvenience. “Barely leaves his cell. No visitors, no calls, nothing to hold onto but four walls and whatever he can’t stop thinking about.” Her mouth curved. “He’s breaking, Tony. Slowly. Completely.”

“You’re certain the charges hold.”

“The evidence is airtight and the witnesses were very cooperative once properly motivated.” She let that sit in the air between them, unhurried. “He isn’t walking out of that cell. Not with his name intact, and not before we’re finished consolidating everything that used to be his.”

Tony stood and crossed to the bar, needing something to do with his hands. He poured his own drink, more than he usually took, and didn’t turn around right away.

“Do you ever think about him?” he asked, to the bottles instead of to her. “Or Father?”

“Think about them how?” Catherine’s eyebrow lifted, a fraction of an inch, the only sign she’d noticed the shift in him. “They’re dead, and he’s finished. There’s nothing left to think about.”

“I know. I just wonder sometimes if there was another way.”

“Another way.” The words came out flat, each one placed like a stone. “You mean a slower way. A riskier one, where he stays free to ask questions and hire lawyers and remind the board what a real Blackwell heir is supposed to look like.” She set her glass down harder than before. “Your father built his entire world around that boy. The rightful heir, the golden son. You were the spare he tolerated at holiday dinners and forgot about the rest of the year. I fixed that. Don’t you dare sit in my study and ask me to regret it.”

Tony turned back to face her, jaw tight, drink barely touched in his hand. He didn’t answer. Whatever was behind his eyes, he kept it there, and Catherine watched him not answer with the patient interest of a woman who trusted she already knew every thought her son was capable of having.

She let the silence stretch a moment longer, then let it go.

Catherine rose and crossed to the mahogany desk in the corner, where a framed photograph sat facedown, exactly where it had been for months. She didn’t turn it over. She rested two fingers on the back of the frame instead, almost fond.

“They thought family meant safety,” she said. “That was their mistake. They never once looked at us and saw a threat.”

“How long until everything’s fully consolidated?”

“It already is.” She turned to face him, and there was real satisfaction in it now, the kind she rarely let show. “Confirmation came through this afternoon. Every account, every property, every share, transferred the moment the death certificate was signed. Because you were the stable one. Married. Reliable. The only version of you the board would ever approve to sit at the head of that table.”

“Which is why I’m still married to her.”

“For ten more months.” Catherine returned to her chair. “The board doesn’t just want a Blackwell name on the paperwork, Tony. They want to believe the chaos is over. A young Alpha with no wife looks like a man still finding himself. A married one looks like a man who’s already arrived. That’s the only reason Leslie exists to them at all. Once the ten months are up, the contract ends, she’s paid, and she disappears wherever girls like that disappear to. You’ll be free to marry someone who actually belongs at that table.”

“Ten months of pretending to tolerate her.”

“You barely have to see her. She stays in her room, you stay in yours, you appear together when it matters.” Catherine’s eyes hardened, all the warmth gone in an instant. “What I need is for her to understand her place. After tonight, our name was attached to a spectacle. People laughing. Photographs everywhere by morning, mark my words.”

“It wasn’t her fault someone set her up.”

“I don’t care whose fault it was.” Catherine’s voice went flat and final, cutting through whatever sympathy had almost made it into his tone. “I care that it happened, and that it doesn’t happen again. Make her smaller. Make her afraid enough to disappear into that house and stay there until we no longer need her to exist.”

“I can manage her.”

“See that you do.” Catherine studied him a moment longer than the words required, the way she might study a column of figures that almost, but didn’t quite, add up correctly. There was something in her son lately she couldn’t quite name, a stillness where there used to be eagerness. She filed it away rather than voiced it. “The board sees a stable heir with a stable marriage. That image is the only thing standing between us and someone asking questions neither of us wants asked.”

Tony held her gaze and said nothing, and for once, she didn’t push.

She raised her glass instead. “To the second wife who became the only wife.”

Tony raised his, a beat slower than he should have. “And the brother rotting for a crime he didn’t commit.”

They drank.

Outside, the gardens sat dark and silent under a thin moon, the estate finally, entirely theirs.

Catherine believed the last threat to her family had been sealed behind concrete and steel two hundred miles away, forgotten, harmless, finished.

She had no reason yet to wonder about the look on her son’s face when he thought she wasn’t watching.

And she had no way of knowing that in a visiting room two hundred miles away, a man she’d buried alive had already started digging his way back out, one photograph of Leslie Grant at a time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​