Thirteen
THIRTEEN
Mia
I SAT ON THE BATTERED couch in the TV room, my knees drawn up to the pillow I was hugging to my chest. I hadn’t even bothered to turn on the television; I was just sort of staring into the middle distance.
This whole thing had such a ripped from the headlines feel to it. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe that it was an actual thing that was actually happening to me and the people I cared about. Was it possible that I’d been watching one too many detective shows, and this chain of tenuous circumstantial evidence was all inside my head?
But... there was Luca. His fear was very real, and he had a damned good reason for it. SSG gang members had tried to snatch him from the first cage fighting venue. They’d tried to follow Emiel home from the Spivey Building, after discovering that Luca and Emiel were related somehow.
It wasn’t as though Emiel would have misidentified those gang tattoos at the Bella Vita when we went there for lunch. This was real. It was happening, whether I liked it or not.
As though my thoughts had conjured him, Emiel paused in the room’s doorway, his dark eyes landing on me. Princess trotted past him, hopping up on the couch with me.
I swallowed, trying to raise some moisture in my dry mouth. “Hey, there. Nat left a few minutes ago. Is Luca okay?”
There was a faint pause; one that was becoming familiar when speaking with Emiel, as though he was rehearsing the words in his head before saying them out loud.
“Yeah, he’s just upset.”
I nodded. “I know. He’s got cause to be. Thanks for talking to him.”
Emiel raised a shoulder and let it drop. “S’okay. He thought you might be upset, too. He said I should—”
He cut himself off abruptly. The pause was longer this time.
“He said I should tell you he needs some time to himself tonight. I think he’s okay, though.”
I was quite sure that wasn’t what he’d originally intended to say, but I also figured that pushing would only make him shut down completely.
“All right,” I told him, trying to hide how badly I didn’t want to be alone right now. I thought wistfully of the time I’d spent tangled up with Luca in his nest... and more recently, with Emiel in my bed. Neither of them owed me anything, though—least of all, intimacy.
“Might email this place over in Frontenac that does counseling,” Emiel said, in an uncharacteristic rush. “Tomorrow, I mean.”
Helpless affection swelled in my heart, expanding until my ribs hurt.
“That’s great,” I told him, trying not to let too much emotion creep into the words. “And if you don’t click with them, you can always try other places. I did counseling off and on while I was in culinary school. It took me three tries to find the right fit.”
“Yeah,” he said, apparently having hit the limit of his tolerance for talking to people about emotional stuff. “G’night, Mia.”
“Goodnight, Emiel,” I replied, allowing the warmth I was feeling to leak into my voice a bit more.
Princess hopped down from the sofa and loped after him as he turned and headed toward the stairs. Oppressive silence fell over the room again, broken only by the low sound of Byron and Zalen still conversing in the kitchen. I stared at the remote sitting precariously on the couch arm, trying to muster up the motivation to turn on the TV, if only for the background noise. It might as well have been two miles away from my hand, rather than two feet away.
Unable to cope with more time alone inside my own head, I tossed the pillow aside and got up. I was actually kind of pissed off with Byron, who’d seemed to take the evening’s meeting as an excuse to be an ass to Nat. I wasn’t even certain why it had bothered me so much, but it did. Shouldn’t I have been happy that one of the alphas I lived with was going after the guy who’d upended my life with his selfish bullshit?
Whatever the case, inserting myself into Byron and Zalen’s conversation sounded better than staying here, or worse yet, going back to my room alone.
The two alphas looked up as I walked into the gorgeous, state-of-the-art kitchen that definitely hadn’t been the main reason I’d left Nat.
“Hey,” I said. “Luca’s okay. Just taking some time for himself tonight. And, um, Emiel went up to bed, I think.”
I wasn’t sure why I said it, since neither of them had asked.
“That’s good,” Zalen said, diplomatic as ever.
“Did your deadbeat ex find his way safely off the property?” Byron asked.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’d appreciate it if you weren’t a complete shit to him, you know. We do still have to work together.”
Byron raised an eyebrow. “Still not your therapist, pet. Definitely not your marriage counselor.”
“No,” I said evenly. “Just a bit of an asshole, apparently.”
Byron pasted on an amused expression that didn’t quite ring true. “Well, if you’re only figuring that part out now ...”
“Byron,” Zalen said tiredly. He’d been watching the exchange with careful neutrality up until this point, but at that, he tipped his chin toward the door. “That’s enough.”
Byron smirked. “Fine. I can tell when I’m not wanted. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, you crazy kids.”
I made a concerted effort not to let him get to me, holding his gaze without blinking until he turned with a careless gesture of one hand and wandered out of the kitchen.
Zalen sighed. “I don’t know what’s got into him tonight.”
I firmly put Byron out of my mind. “Doesn’t matter. Sorry—I know it’s getting late, but could I pick your brain a bit more about the legal stuff? If I try to go to bed right now, I’ll be staring at the ceiling until morning.”
Saying it aloud felt uncomfortably vulnerable, but somehow, I felt like Zalen, out of everyone here, would understand.
Sure enough, he nodded without a hint of hesitation. “Of course. Why don’t you come upstairs to my room.” Then he seemed to realize how that might sound, covering a wince. “That... wasn’t a proposition, just to be clear. It’s just that my laptop and notes are up there.”
I huffed out a breath of laughter. “Understood. Don’t worry, I’ve got Byron for all of my proposition-related needs.”
He made a noncommittal humming noise. “I should probably say up front that I was a finance guy, not a lawyer. Beyond some basic googling, the best advice I can give you and your husband is to talk to someone who actually is in the legal profession.”
He gestured me to come with him and headed toward the stairs.
“Finance guy, huh?” I asked, following him up to the second floor and trying not to stare at his ass. Because, I mean, it was right there . Good thing my body was still sore from my heat.
He gave a rueful laugh. “Yeah. Stockbroker, specifically. Everything you saw in The Wolf of Wall Street is unfortunately pretty accurate.”
I tried to picture it. In some ways—namely, the hyper-competence and the way he filled out a well-tailored suit—it didn’t feel like much of a stretch. In others, it did.
“I didn’t know there was much call for stockbrokers around St. Louis,” I said curiously.
He ushered me into his room, which was actually a suite. The front room was done up as an office, with a closed door on one side that presumably led to the bedroom.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, indicating a charcoal gray couch that appeared to be in much better condition than the well-loved one in the TV room. “And as it happens, there are a fair number of brokerage jobs around here. One of the major online trading platforms had a hub in St. Louis until they went under a few years ago. But, no—I was in New York.”
I settled onto the comfortable cushions.
“Sounds like the big leagues,” I said. “You’re from here originally, though?”
“From across the river, yes.” Zalen opened his laptop and sat behind the minimalist steel and wood desk that dominated one corner of the room. “When I was growing up, I couldn’t get away from East St. Louis fast enough. But after what happened in New York, it just seemed right to come back.”
I wasn’t sure if I should ask or not... but Zalen was a careful kind of man. If it was a forbidden topic, I didn’t think he would have let that slip.
“What happened in New York?” I asked quietly.
He reached for a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and put them on, keeping his attention focused on the computer screen as he typed something on the keyboard.
“I met my mate there. Julie. She was a consultant for the company where I was working at the time.”
The ‘was’ felt ominous. The others had mentioned that Zalen had been mated, and that it had ended tragically.
Zalen still didn’t look up, pretending to be absorbed in whatever he was doing. “Her little brother was a troubled teen. Jake was a good kid, but he got mixed up with the wrong people. The family eventually cut him loose, rather than dealing with the fallout from his drug and alcohol addictions.”
Given Zalen’s current crusade, I could read between the lines when it came to who those ‘wrong people’ might have been. I sincerely hoped the story wasn’t heading where I thought it was.
“Julie... respected her parents’ decision,” he went on. “But she didn’t cut off communication completely. We had to piece together the details with text and phone records afterward, but... well... I was in Boston on a business trip when Jake called Julie in a panic because members of a rival gang were threatening to kill him. Of course, Julie dropped everything and rushed to pick him up, so she could get him away to safety. Unfortunately, she was too late. She was killed when the rival gang gunned them both down in a drive-by shooting.”
He was still typing, the story delivered in an emotionless monotone. My mind immediately filled in the blanks—he would have felt the mating bond snap, while stuck hundreds of miles away in a different city.
My heart grieved for this houseful of men, all of them nursing their own private tragedies. I’d shed tears for all of them—but something about Zalen’s carefully controlled demeanor made me think that my tears would not be welcome, in his case.
“So, you came back home and opened a youth center to try and save future Jakes from the same fate,” I said softly.
He tilted his chin in acknowledgement. “New York stockbrokers make an obscene amount of money. This seemed like a better use for it than sticking around in a city inhabited by ghosts. Now, I was looking up some of the evidentiary requirements for money laundering cases earlier. It seems like the biggest hurdle is proving that the money being laundered came directly from illegal activities, purposely undertaken by the defendants in order to commit financial fraud...”
I rolled with the abrupt subject change and tried my best to pay attention to the dry recitation of legal theory, rather than what I’d just learned. I asked relevant questions, listening to the rapid clack of laptop keys as Zalen continued to research. We talked long into the night. At some point, I stretched out full length on the couch to get more comfortable, my eyelids growing heavy.
When I woke up, it was light out, and there was a fuzzy blanket tucked around me that smelled of lime and coconut carried on a warm sea breeze. No sound came from the attached bedroom, but there was a sticky note stuck to the arm of the couch.
Didn’t want to wake you , it said. There’s coffee downstairs .
I rubbed gritty eyes and rolled into a sitting position. My phone poked me in the ass, still nestled in my back pocket. I pulled it out to check the time, wincing at my nine percent of remaining battery. There was a text from Nat; I’d apparently slept right through the buzz of notification.
Can you come in today? There’s news on the restaurant. Also, we really do need to talk.
My stomach sank, even though neither of those things was explicitly ominous.
Yeah, sure , I texted back. I’ll be there in two hours .