Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Marcus
I didn’t expect Voss to come find me so soon. He’s a wreck when he steps through the door. His shirt hangs open at the collar, gone gray with sweat, and the folder shakes in his grip. He stops three steps inside.
Jessa immediately stiffens, and that tells me everything I need to know.
“About damn time you showed your face,” I tell him.
“Marcus.” His throat works. “Let my sister go.”
Jessa’s head turns between us. “Marcus, who’s he talking about?”
I keep my eyes on Voss, who flinches under them. “I haven’t touched your sister.”
“You had her fired.” The words spill out of him. “Her firm let her go this afternoon. She worked years to get that job. Don’t do this to her.” His hand tightens on the folder. “You haven’t even spared my family. We’ve been friends for years. How can you pull your money out of my parents’ company?!”
I just stare at him dispassionately, and he continues, his voice desperate. “That company was their life’s blood and sweat. They’ll be ruined inside a month. You can’t do this!”
I walk behind my desk and lower myself into the chair. “Why not?”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes.
“Your sister decided it was fine to let herself into my house and put her hands on my woman, the mother of my child.” I lace my fingers on the blotter. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t bury your whole family for it.”
“Sloane’s foolish.” His voice breaks. “She always has been. She didn’t think—”
“I’d have believed that ten years ago.” I lean back.
“She’s thirty now, Voss, clever and cruel under all that gloss.
” A pen sits by my hand, and I turn it once.
“I have tolerated her for years out of respect for our friendship. She laid hands on my daughter, on my woman.” The pen goes still. “That’s where my patience runs out.”
“She’s in love with you.” He looks at me pleadingly. “She has been for years, and you never once gave her a chance.”
“It isn’t my job to give her one.” I hold his stare. “If she’s got feelings for me, that’s yours to manage. You’re the one who kept dragging her wherever I was.”
He looks at Jessa, then his gaze skitters away.
My voice drops low. “Take a good, long look at her. That’s the woman who was carrying my child when you and your people threw her out.”
He looks down. “I was trying to spare you. You had your career, your whole future ahead of you.”
“You of all people know how it works.” I push up out of the chair.
“A shifter child stays with the pack. I always meant to come home to take the seat, and you knew that.” I round the desk.
“So tell me the real reason you sent her away. Then tell me why I’ve got a hole in my memory where that whole night should be.
Because I don’t buy that you knew nothing about that night, not with the precision with which you managed me back then. ”
Voss goes white. “I had a few friends ask around the bars I used back then,” I go on. “They came back with a story. People remember me walking out with a woman helping me, looking drunk.” I watch the color drain from his face. “They remember her slipping something into my drink.”
“I had no idea she’d do it.” Voss can’t meet my gaze.
My eyes stay on Voss as I close the space between us. “What did your sister do to me that night?”
He won’t answer, so I take him by the jaw and force his face up to mine. “I’ll spare your family,” I tell him low. “Sloane I won’t. Give me the truth this second, and I’ll stop tearing your family’s money apart.”
He’s gone bloodless. “She’s my sister.”
“You can’t shield her anymore.” My grip firms. “Keep trying, and I’ll ruin Sloane and everything your family owns. I’m not in the alpha’s chair. I don’t need to be. When I choose to move against a man, you know how vicious I can be. No one, including my uncle, can stop me.”
Voss’s shoulders cave as the fight goes out of him.
“She got hold of something,” he says. “I don’t know what. I took it off her that night, and it made me sick for days after. It smelled sweet, sickly sweet, enough to turn my stomach.”
I go still. “What scent?”
“It was sweet and cloying.” He swallows hard. “I don’t know where she got it. She swore all she wanted was to sleep with you.”
The floor tilts under me. “What else did she tell you?”
“That she slipped it into your drink. You went groggy.” His hands tremble.
“She was going to take you to a hotel. She wanted—” He stops himself.
“She wanted to get pregnant, to trap you into marriage. She went for the car herself, and you’d wandered off by the time she got back. She panicked. That’s when she told me.”
“What kind of drug puts an alpha-born on the floor?” I already know, but I want him to say it.
He fidgets with his hands.
“It was wolfsbane.” My voice has dropped, quiet and cold. “She got her hands on wolfsbane.”
Voss’s head snaps up. “I don’t know what it was.”
“Stop lying.” I don’t raise my voice. “You knew. You knew she dosed me with it.”
“It wasn’t poison. She only used a tiny amount, mixed into something else.” His words trip over each other. “She thought it would numb your wolf toward her. That’s all she meant it for.”
I have him off his feet and against the wall before I’ve decided to. “That’s poison, you fool. You should have come to me the second you knew.” My forearm pins his chest. “Where did she get it?”
“Somebody gave it to her.” He gasps it out. “I don’t know who. I swear to you I don’t.”
I drop him. He hits the floor, and I pull out my phone while he stays down.
“Adrian. Send two of the men and pick up Sloane.”
“Don’t.” Voss drags himself half upright. “Please. It was years ago. She’s changed.”
“She hasn’t changed a day.” I pocket the phone. “Are you blind? Look at Jessa’s face. Look at what your sister did to her.”
Voss closes his eyes, looking helpless. “Marcus, I—”
I look down at him. “How did you get me home that night?”
He shudders. “I searched for hours and found you on the street, still half under it. I took you back and washed you.” His voice drops. “This woman’s scent was all over you, so I got rid of it.”
Jessa makes a small sound behind me. I don’t turn.
“And when she came looking for me.” My throat closes. “When she stood in that lobby with a test in her bag. What did you do?”
He looks at Jessa and can’t hold it. “I didn’t mean any harm by it. I knew if the two of you met, my sister was finished. It would have destroyed her.”
I hit him. My fist catches his jaw with a hard smack and drops him. It does nothing for the fury in me.
“You took my child from me so your sister could have a chance.”
Voss stays down. “I’m sorry.”
The wolf wants his throat. I’m reaching for him again when Jessa’s hand lands on my arm.
“Stop.” She steps between us. “Marcus. That’s enough.”
“Stay out of this.” The words come out rough.
“I won’t.” She doesn’t budge. “I was part of this too. Remember?”
“He humiliated you.” My chest heaves. “He made you feel like—” The word won’t come.
“Like a whore,” she says evenly.
My grief curdles into rage. “Ten years. I lost ten years with our daughter, and I don’t get a single one back because his family couldn’t stand to lose.”
“And now you get everything after them.” She holds my eyes. “We’re here. All three of us. Leave it because I won’t have his blood on your hands.”
I drop my head. When I speak again, it’s to Voss, not to her. “Get out of my sight.”
He hauls himself up the wall. “I gave you my word that I’ll stop messing with your family’s company, and I’ll keep it.” I don’t look at him. “But I want Sloane brought to me. She’s going to tell me where the wolfsbane came from and how she dosed an alpha-born without killing him.”
Voss stumbles out the door.
I sink onto the couch and drag both hands down my face. The wolf paces, hungry to finish what my fists started.
Jessa lowers herself into my lap, and I don’t question it. My arm bands around her and holds on.
“How are you this calm?” I ask into her hair.
“I’m not calm.” Her fingers curl into my collar. “I don’t want to keep clawing at the past. I’m trying to move forward with you, with Mia and Bella.”
She tips my chin up and kisses me.
It catches me off guard. I go still, then gather her in and kiss her back, hard. When I draw back an inch, my mouth still brushes hers. “I can’t make sense of you,” I murmur. “You shove me off, then you crawl into my lap and kiss me stupid.”
“Do you have to understand everything?” Her lips graze mine.
“No.” I kiss her again. “I suppose not.”
My hands slide under her shirt. I’ve got her tipped back onto the cushions, then up once more with my hands beneath her thighs, and I set her on the edge of the desk while I drag my tie loose.
“No.” She catches my wrist. “We’re at the academy.”
“I locked the door.”
“The doors out there aren’t.”
That stops me dead. I drop my forehead to her shoulder and groan. “You’re cruel.”
She laughs breathlessly. I pull back enough to take her jaw in my hand. “You kissed me this time.” My eyes hold hers. “I want you to remember that.”
“I remember.”
I search her face. “And what does it mean?”
“Didn’t we just settle this?”
“Maybe I need constant reassurance. I might be a very clingy lover.”
She can’t fight the smile. “That’s going to be a problem.”
Then she leans in, setting her mouth to my throat, and the urge to mark her roars up in me.
My wolf shoves for the surface, snapping to be let loose.
Her scent floods my head. The animal fixes on the curve of her throat, desperate to sink its teeth in and brand her as mine.
It slams into something I can’t see, then drives at it again, wild to get past.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Give me a second.” My breathing’s gone ragged. I force the wolf back down, and it fights me the whole way.
I step back and drop into my chair, the desk between us. She’s perched on the desk still, flushed, watching me.
“You’ll be the death of me,” I tell her.
“What did I do?”