Chapter 21
Iremain where I stand after Alexei leaves, poring over the prints from the folder.
The ventilation system kicks on with a sigh, circulating the air but doing nothing to ease the tight band of sweat around my ribs. My hands move as if they belong to someone else while I gather the pages, stacking them into a neat pile before closing the folder.
I trace the pattern of the wood grain on the table.
This compound is in my bones. Faint gun oil taints the air from the east wing range, the cold marble of the north corridor where I memorized our family history, the significance of this very chamber where I watched Alexei take his seat as head of the family.
My entire life, I’ve measured my worth by these walls, believing their judgment was my own.
But now compliance means destroying people who welcomed me into their midst and treated me with friendship. Compliance means committing myself to harming them through my own hands. Worse than standing by and letting something evil happen, I would be an active participant.
Refusal means confirming every suspicion Mikhail has raised and exposing myself as compromised, inviting an exile designed to ensure that my knowledge of the family remains contained.
The Blue Note and my place in the family cannot coexist. One path requires the other’s destruction.
I tuck the folder into a deep pocket inside my jacket, one designed for this purpose. Protocol says to memorize its contents and leave it here to be burned, but I can’t focus past the hole opening in my chest. The chair cools my palms as I push it back in.
I’ve never had, nor will I ever have, a place at this table. It never mattered before, though, as long as I had Alexei. But now my actions have cost me that as well.
I think of all the Omegas who work for the Blue Note Crew, and how they measure value in more than a body offered up for information.
I cross to the window and stare past my reflection into the compound’s interior stone courtyard.
Our father had it landscaped for our mother, filling every corner with roses.
Now, a security guard passes the empty pots along the eastern path, his breath pluming in the cold air, hand resting on the gun at his hip.
Winter has left the courtyard colorless, the trees reduced to gray sticks, the fountain at the center capped with snow, the water frozen solid in the basin.
My breath fogs the glass, obscuring the view for a moment before clearing.
But even in summer, no flowers will grow. After our parents died, the roses had been removed. I never asked who gave the order. I told myself it was grief, or practicality, or the gardeners taking it upon themselves to remove them, with no one bothering to replant them afterward.
Standing here now, the truth settles as my breath clears from the glass. I always knew.
And I’m standing in their very footsteps, waiting to learn if Alexei will dig me up and dispose of me as well.
I turn away from the empty courtyard and head for the door. Silence greets me in the corridor beyond, the family having already moved on to whatever comes next.
My footsteps echo on the marble as I head back to the side entrance, each step carrying me farther from the identity that has shaped my entire life.
The night air bites my cheeks as I step outside, cold enough to burn my lungs.
When I arrive at my car, no one has warmed it up for me, and snow covers the windshield. Such a petty signal that I’m out of favor.
My sigh forms a white cloud in the air as I climb inside and start the engine. The whir of the wipers flings the snow to the sides, and I turn a tight circle in front of the garage before heading out of the compound.
I drive without a destination for several minutes, following the highway east until it reaches the coastline before heading south toward Ashford Heights.
The cold steering wheel warms beneath my palms, the heater pushing back the icy cold. At the first exit ramp, my foot hovers over the brake without engaging it.
I could still turn around, go back to the compound, tell Alexei I needed time to think, and let him believe I’m considering his plan.
The ramp passes, and I keep driving.
The second exit comes and goes in the same way. My hands tighten on the wheel, knuckles white.
The choice isn’t really mine.
By the third exit, the pretense shatters. I’m following the path I was always meant to take. The destination was set the moment I left the compound, maybe the moment Alexei walked out of the council room.
The realization doesn’t bring peace. It brings a different kind of burden, the heaviness of a door closing.
The air thickens with the salt and rotting kelp blowing up from the shore as I pass Skyhaven. The billionaire mansions crouch on their hill behind high walls, every window dark.
I used to dream of someday living on that hill instead of out in the middle of nowhere, but now, when I look at those high walls, they only remind me of the compound’s gates.
An empty bus passes in the opposite lane, its interior lights casting long rectangles on the asphalt. One passenger sits slumped in the back seat, head resting on the window, completely still. Settled. The taillights disappear around the curve.
Rockhaven slips past, the historical neighborhoods with their cute boutiques glowing amber under their streetlights.
My hands cramp on the wheel, and I flex my fingers. The motion becomes mechanical, a reflex my body performs while my mind circles.
Calm stays out of reach. So does any sense of safety. This is the breathless fall after the jump, the wait for the ground to hit.
The highway curves toward Ashford Heights. Each mile marker is a stitch pulling tighter, binding me to what I’m about to do.
One exit would take me off this path. The thought surfaces, a final, primal urge to survive, but my hands don’t turn the wheel. The car stays in its lane.
By the time I take the exit for Ashford Heights, the first buildings rising into view, I’ve stopped checking the rearview. Whatever I leave behind me is gone.
I don’t go to the Blue Note Lounge.
I don’t go to my apartment, either.
Instead, I drive the extra twenty minutes to a five-story, red-brick building with narrow windows and an iron fire escape winding up the east side.
All the way here, one question repeated. Would he be here at this hour? Would I have the nerve to stay and wait if he wasn’t? But his dark sedan sits in his parking spot, and I drive through the lot until I find an unnumbered place to park.
I cut the engine and sit with the keys still in the ignition. The street is quiet around me, with only the soft hum of the laundromat’s dryers next door and the occasional car passing on the cross street.
Warning Orien will cost me everything I was raised to be. The family. The structure. My identity.
But Alexei’s plan asks me to use my own hands to destroy people who never wronged us, to harm innocents, and I cannot do it.
I can’t walk both paths anymore. The road forks here, and I have to choose.
My hand finds the door handle, and I push it open to step out into the night air. Snowflakes catch in my lashes and melt down my cheeks as I cross to the entrance, the crunch of my footsteps the only sound on the empty street.
Salt crunches beneath my shoes as I walk up the front steps and stop in front of the buzzer. A soft yellow light glows from within the panel, illuminating each apartment number in the darkness. I find 3C and jab it once.
It connects on the other end, and Orien’s voice crackles through the speaker. “Who is this?”
I lean closer. “It’s Lev— Lee. May I come up?”
A beat of silence follows before the door buzzes.
I slip through the entrance. The stairs are three flights of purgatory, each step a final choice. When I reach his door, my knock echoes on the wood, louder than I intend.
Footsteps approach from inside, unhurried, and my pulse jumps in response. The lock disengages with a soft click, and the door swings open.
Orien leans on the frame with one hand braced high, his body filling the doorway. The scent of soap and steam clings to him, his hair still damp from a shower.
He stands barefoot on the entryway tile in a thin black T-shirt that molds to his chest, and his sweatpants hang loose on his hips, drawing my attention to the hard V of muscle visible above the waistband before I can stop it.
He regards me with the same calm appraisal he’s worn since the night we met, with no flicker of surprise or questions about my sudden appearance.
His stillness is anticipatory rather than startled, as if he’s been waiting for me to arrive.
I take a deep breath. “I need to talk to you.”
Orien opens the door wider.
I meet his stare and step forward without waiting to be invited in. As I do, his pheromones wrap around me, and a knot of tension in my gut loosens.
He takes my jacket before I think to remove it, his movements economical. He hangs it by the door, letting any snow melt drip onto the tiles.
I unlace my shoes, the simple task feeling surreal, and set them aside.
Orien’s hand on my back urges me toward the kitchen, where he pulls two glasses from a cabinet and a bottle of whiskey sour from the fridge. He pours without asking.
I stare at my preferred drink, stunned that he remembered, then at him. “You’re not surprised I’m here.”
“No.” He sets the bottle down.
I follow the line of his jaw, the unhurried way he moves, searching for a clue to what he’s thinking. “Why were you expecting me?”
Orien studies me back, his eyes moving over my features as if committing them to memory. “What do you want, Levon?”
My breath catches. “How long have you known?”
“Long enough.” He places the glass in front of me. “That’s not why you’re here. What do you want, Levon?”
A humorless laugh escapes me. He’s right.
That’s not why I’m here.
“My family figured out that I gave you the information about their plans. They’re questioning my loyalty.”
He steps forward and takes my jaw in his hand, tilting my chin up. His thumb drags across my lower lip. “And who are you loyal to, trouble?”
Not Lee. Never Lee, though that’s how I introduced myself to him. As with my refusal to meet him on Thursdays, he refused to call me by a name he recognized as a lie.
But he doesn’t use my real name, either, as if he somehow understands that name has also become a lie.
His pheromones coil in my gut, demanding a response. “It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” His grip tightens. “Strip everything else away. Who do you belong to?”
The word leaves me as a confession. “You.”
A guttural sound rises in his throat as he pulls me flush to him, his mouth finding the curve of my neck. “Took you long enough.”
I surge into him, my hands fisting in his shirt, and his arm locks around my back, warmth and solid muscle surrounding me.
The first night I walked into the Blue Note and recognized Orien as my Alpha, I should have run. But even then, it was already too late.
This patient, dangerous man was always going to be my downfall.
It had just taken giving everything else up to accept it.