Chapter 10 Both Boxes
The next day.
The engine sound reaches the front garden before the car does.
I'm standing on the steps when the Rolls-Royce pulls through the gate, black, unhurried, a car that doesn't need to announce itself.
The first thing that emerges is a shoe. Thin-soled, buffed to a mirror finish, a shine that takes effort or money or both.
Then the rest of him unfolds out of the car: legs that go on longer than they have any right to, suit trousers pressed into a crease sharp enough to cut, jacket fitted across the shoulders with the precision of something built specifically for this body.
His hair is set. Every strand of it, combed back with enough product that I can tell from here. He looks like he spent an hour on it.
My father descends the steps with his host's smile on. Lachlan shakes his hand, says something I can't hear, and gestures to his assistant, who begins unloading boxes from the boot.
My father looks at the boxes the way he looks at balance sheets when the numbers are good.
"Come in," he says, audibly now. "Lunch is ready."
Lachlan nods. Then he walks toward the house and his steps slow, almost imperceptibly, as he reaches me.
He's holding a box. Small, the kind of velvet that gets soft with age. He holds it out.
I take it, because refusing in the doorway with my father three meters away isn't a conversation I want to have. Inside: a necklace. The gemstone is that deep, saturated purple that doesn't photograph correctly, the kind that has to be seen to be believed.
"My mother chose it," he says. "Her mother gave it to her at her wedding. She said girls prefer the purple."
I close the box and hold it out to him. "This is a family piece. I can't —"
He reaches into his jacket and produces a second box.
I stare at it.
"The green was her suggestion too." He opens it. A deep emerald green, not a fleck of grey, the kind that makes jewelers use words like once in a generation. "She said the purple was beautiful but that beauty and sincerity should both be present."
"Lachlan —"
He doesn't say anything. But his brow draws together, and I look at his face, and there's something behind the composure that doesn't match the composure. Something that, if I had to put a word to it, is closer to anxious than annoyed. Something that in another person I might call wounded.
I exhale through my nose. I take both boxes.
He relaxes, which he does so slightly that I'm not certain I've seen it.
I look down at two pieces of gemstone in my hands and think, this arrangement is considerably more complicated than the one we shook hands on yesterday.
My father watches the exchange with visible satisfaction.
"Purple gemstone suits young women," he says, nodding at the box. "Show it to your sister later, let her have a look."
My hand closes around the box.
Beside me, Lachlan raises his eyes to my father. He's tall enough that looking up isn't required. The angle is slightly downward, and the temperature of the hallway adjusts accordingly.
"Alpha Douglas." His voice doesn't rise. "The jewelry is from my mother, for her future daughter-in-law. As long as Rowan is happy with it, that's what matters." A brief pause.
"I'd hate for something so valuable to get damaged. Or —" another pause, shorter, "— taken."
He didn't say borrowed. He didn't say claimed. He said taken.
Moira's face goes a color I don't have a name for. She pulls her composure back together in about two seconds. "Isabella is a gentle girl. She would never take something that belongs to her sister."
The sound Lachlan makes is barely a sound. A breath through his nose, shaped like disdain. "She took a man. I'd think jewelry would present less of a moral obstacle."
The hallway is very quiet.
I look up, and his eyes are already on me.
I do not know where to put my own.
Moira reconstructs herself and sweeps toward the dining room. "Let's eat first. We can go through the alliance terms this afternoon."
My father walks ahead, describing the preliminary confidentiality of the arrangement — the level is high, Isabella and Callum haven't been told yet, formal announcement pending confirmation.
I'm walking beside Lachlan, a few steps behind the others, and our shadows cross on the garden path without either of us moving to prevent it.
He's adjusted his pace to mine. He's about four inches taller and the natural stride would leave me behind, but he hasn't done that.
I think of the bruises Bran described. The pulled punches. The sessions where he absorbed what he could have delivered.
My mouth does something before I can stop it. Just a small curve at the corner. Just for a moment.
I school it back and try a different angle. "The jewelry." I keep my voice low. "It's for your future Luna. I'll return it when this is over."
He turns his head. His eyes meet mine and hold.
"You are my future Luna," he says. "There's nothing to return."
I look at the path in front of my feet.
He genuinely doesn't seem to remember we signed an agreement. Or he remembers it and has decided it's irrelevant, which is somehow more difficult to process.
The likelihood that he has felt this way for some time is sitting in my chest like something I've swallowed wrong, and I haven't decided what to do with it, and we've arrived at the dining room door.
I table it. Literally.
***
The table is set for six. Moira directs Lachlan to the seat opposite my father with the practiced graciousness. Halfway through the first course, Isabella comes downstairs.
She takes in the table, the guest, the general situation, and arranges herself in the empty chair with the naturalness of someone who was always going to be here.
She watches Lachlan for a long moment before she tries.
"Lachlan." Her voice pitched to friendly, familiar. "What brings you to the house?"
He sets down his cutlery.
Looks at the middle distance. Not at her.
"First," he says, with the calm of someone reading from a document, "we're not close enough for first names. Alpha Lachlan, or Mr. Voss, either is fine."
The color that arrives in Isabella's face is not flattering.
He picks his cutlery back up. "Second — I'm here to discuss the mating ceremony with Rowan."
The words land around the table like objects dropped from a height.
Then footsteps. Hard, rapid, from the entrance hall. Dress shoes on marble, moving faster than dress shoes should.
Callum comes through the dining room doorway still wearing his glasses, still in his full work suit, with the controlled urgency of a man who has been trying to appear calm since approximately the moment he got in the car.
His eyes cross the room and stop. They stop on Lachlan.
"Who," he says, voice precisely calibrated, "are you marrying?"
Lachlan leans back in his chair. The first smile I've seen from him all day appears, and it doesn't reach his eyes, and it doesn't need to.
His diction is immaculate. Every syllable placed.
"Your sister-in-law," he says. "Rowan."