Chapter 6
Six
EZRA
My office is glass on all three sides, and I watch the dawn unfold while sipping my coffee.
My hand finds the coffee cup again. Lifts it. Puts it down.
I glance at the security feed on my third monitor out of habit. The lobby is empty. The garage shows three cars parked in their assigned spots. The penthouse entrance camera scrolls through the night’s footage at triple speed until I see something odd.
It’s Julian walking through the entrance at 11:47 PM.
I pause the feed. Rewind. Play at normal speed.
He is moving slowly. Unusually slowly for Julian, who walks like he is perpetually late for something. His shoulders are loose. His head is slightly down. In his right hand, clutched between his fingers, is something pale and slender.
I zoom in. The image pixelates, then comes together.
A single flower.
I stare at it. Something cold settles in my stomach. I know, with the bone-deep certainty that this is about the flower shop. About her. I close the footage and stare at my coffee for a long time.
The steam has stopped. The ceramic is cool.
I stand. My chair rolls back on its casters and hits the glass wall with a soft thud as I determinedly make my way over to Julian’s door. His door is literally twenty steps down the hallway from mine.
I knock hard. Three sharp raps that would wake the dead.
The door opens.
Julian stands there, looking as if he has been dragged backward through a hedge.
His dark hair is damp, pushed back from his forehead.
He is wearing pajama pants and a gray shirt pulled on crooked, one sleeve riding higher than the other.
Behind him, Pepper sits on the desk in a half-asleep slump, one yellow eye cracked open.
“Asshole,” Pepper says slowly.
I do not look at the bird. “Good morning.”
Julian leans against the door frame. His eyes are bloodshot. “It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“You came home at 11:47 last night,” I growl, my voice flat. “With a flower in your hand.”
Julian’s face goes still. “You were watching me?”
“Where were you?”
“It’s none of your business where I was.”
I step past him into the room without waiting for an invitation. Julian exhales hard through his nose but steps aside, letting me in.
His room is, as always, a disaster.
Books stacked on every flat surface. His vintage record player sits silent on the side table, the arm lifted, a vinyl sleeve beside it. An empty glass with a finger of amber residue at the bottom.
Pepper preens on the desk, ruffling his emerald feathers with theatrical indifference.
“Where were you, Julian?”
A long beat. Julian runs a hand through his damp hair. Looks at the floor. Looks at me. “I was with Liana.”
“And?” I ask impatiently.
“We went out.”
“Wait, on a date?” I ask disbelievingly. Liana looked too serious to be frolicking around town with someone like Julian.
Julian’s jaw tightens. “Yes.”
I am gripping the back of his desk chair hard enough that my knuckles whiten. “We do not get involved with potential acquisitions. We do not date women we are trying to buy out of their businesses. This is not complicated, Julian. This is basic ethics.”
“Ethics.” Julian laughs. A short, sharp sound with no humor. “You sent her a letter to walk away from the only thing she has in the world, and you want to talk to me about ethics?”
“Shut it.”
“She’s an omega,” Julian says, his voice warmer.
“I’m sure of it. And it looks like she’s been alone for a long time.
And we clearly need an omega. The four of us have not even looked at an omega in years, and now there is one across from us in a flower shop, and I’m telling you she’s the one.
” His hazel eyes find mine, bright and certain. “She’s our omega.”
My shoulders have gone rigid. I can feel the muscle along my spine locking into place, vertebra by vertebra, the way it does before I say something I cannot take back.
“Julian.” My voice has gone dangerously flat. “Are you listening to yourself?”
“I am completely listening to myself. And I have never been more sure of anything.”
“You met her three days ago.”
“I know.”
“You took her on a date.”
“We went to a fair. And yes.”
“Julian.” I keep my voice level with an effort that costs me something I cannot name. “Think with your head and not with your dick.”
Julian goes white. Then red. The color floods his face from his collar to his hairline, and his hazel eyes narrow to slits. “Excuse me?”
“I will not let you blow up a fourteen-million-dollar real estate deal, an entire mixed-use development plan, and the reputation of this firm because you got an erection at a coffee shop.”
Julian takes one step toward me. His voice is soft and shaking with anger. “You fucking asshole.”
“I am asking you, as the alpha of this pack, to step back from a woman you don’t know, and not let your hormones make decisions for the four of us.”
“Don’t do that.” Julian’s voice cracks. “Don’t pull rank on me.
You don’t get to call yourself the alpha of this pack and then sit in a cafe and insult a woman you’re trying to evict from her flower shop while she’s near tears.
” He takes another step. His scent spikes, lemon sharp and hot.
“And don’t you dare pretend this is about my dick when we both know exactly what’s happening here.
You smelled her too. I saw your face. You’ve been thinking about her for three days, same as I have, and the only difference between us is that I’m honest about it and you’re hiding behind a fucking computer. ”
A very long silence.
Pepper has gone completely still on the desk. His bright yellow head is lowered, his feathers flat against his body. He is watching us with both eyes wide open, unblinking, and somehow sensing the tension.
The room door opens, and Cole stands there, fully dressed and holding two coffees. He extends one to me without comment.
“You’re shouting,” Cole says.
“I am not shouting.”
“You were,” August says from behind Cole’s shoulder. He is still in pajama pants, his sandy hair sticking up in three different directions, his bright blue eyes wide and worried behind his glasses. “I heard you from my room.”
I accept the coffee through gritted teeth. The ceramic is hot against my palm.
“Cole, have you found out anything about her?” I snap.
“Liana?”
“Of course, I mean fucking Liana!”
August’s eyes go wide. The honey scent brightens by several degrees. “...oh.”
“I did,” Cole says. No inflection. Flat as concrete.
My head snaps to him. “Tell me.”
Cole sets his coffee on Julian’s desk. He reaches under his arm and pulls out a slim leather folio I had not noticed until this moment. He opens it on Julian’s bed, and the four of us gather around it like men around a campfire.
“I started looking into her two days ago,” Cole says. “The minute the cafe meeting ended.”
“Okay,” I say. “Continue.”
“Liana Marsh. Twenty-four years old. Sole proprietor of Marsh Florals, LLC. The shop has been open three years. She acquired the lease and opened the doors with thirty-four thousand dollars in cash deposited into a brand-new business account the day before.”
“Cash,” August says. The word hangs.
“Cash. Untraceable to any prior account or financial history.”
Julian’s voice is slow. Careful. “Where did the cash come from?”
“I don’t know yet. But the timing is interesting.”
“Family,” I say.
Cole looks at me. “Her family is deceased.”
The room goes quiet.
“How?” I ask.
“That’s where it gets thin.” Cole turns a page.
“The official record says her family died six years ago in an upstate New York incident classified as a ‘feral animal attack.’ There were others who died with her parents. I’m still pulling names.
A grandmother. An uncle. Possibly the entire household. ”
“Her entire family?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
I absorb this. Piece by piece. The cafe meeting rearranges itself in my memory — the defiance in her eyes, the shaking hands she hid under the table. I had thought she was being theatrical. I had thought she was negotiating.
Cole has clipped her business license photograph to the front of the folio. I look at it for the first time.
At the time of the picture, she is twenty-one. Her face is pale. Thin. Her dark auburn hair is pulled back in a severe bun that does nothing to soften the angles of her cheekbones. Her eyes are braced for something.
She had just opened the shop. With cash. Both parents recently dead. Her grandmother dead. Her uncle dead. The entire household.
“She has no one,” I say quietly, trying to absorb all this information.
The room is silent. Julian’s hand is on the edge of the folio, his fingers pressed white against the leather.
“It’s horrible,” Julian says very softly.
“It wasn’t an animal attack,” I say. The words come out before I’ve fully formed the thought.
“No animal kills an entire household of our kind just like that. Not without purpose. Not without someone directing it.” I look at Cole.
“Keep digging. I want to know exactly what happened. I need to know who did this. Everything.”
Cole nods once.
My brothers talk among themselves while I still stare at the photograph.
She was twenty-one, walking into a flower shop with a secret stack of cash, no family, and building a business out of nothing.
I am thinking about myself at nineteen. I had just inherited Frostwood Holdings from the last of our dead fathers.
I had suddenly been responsible for three younger brothers, a building, a company, and the weight of a name that felt too heavy on my shoulders.
I had thought, for years afterward, that I had carried the heaviest weight a man could carry at that age.
I look at Liana Marsh’s photograph and feel, for the first time, something hot and unfamiliar crack open behind my sternum.
“Cole,” I say. “I want a full report by tonight. Cause of death of the family. Where she has lived for the past six years. Everything you can pull.”
“Done.”
August looks at me. His blue eyes are earnest behind his glasses. “Will you apologize to her?”
I look at him. “I’ll consider it…”
“Good,” August says. He turns and walks out. Cole follows him, the folio under his arm, his coffee in his other hand.
I am left alone in Julian’s room with Julian. I glance around Julian’s room out of habit. Looking for what I can criticize. The cigar in the ashtray. The mess of books. The empty glass.
My eyes stop. My eyebrow lifts.
There is a delicate pair of pink panties on the floor near the foot of Julian’s bed. Cotton. Simple. Partially hidden under a gray T-shirt Julian has dropped there.
“Julian,” I say.
Julian, who has been staring at the empty space in the folio on the bed, looks up. “What?”
I nod at the floor. “Why the fuck are there panties on the floor of your room?”
Julian goes utterly white. He follows my gaze. He sees the panties. He sees me seeing the panties. The color drains from his face so completely I can track his pulse in the vein at his temple.
“...those aren’t mine,” he says.
“Yes, Julian, I know they’re not yours,” I say calmly. “Whose are they?”
Julian scrambles. He grabs the shirt and drops it over the panties, covering them with a gesture so panicked it would be comical in any other context. “It was accidentally in the laundry, I think.”
Pepper, from his perch on the desk, chooses exactly this moment to clear his throat. He tilts his bright yellow head ninety degrees and says, with crystal clarity: “I shouldn’t have taken those.”
A long, terrible silence.
Pepper, helpful: “Where the fuck did I put them?”
Julian closes his eyes. His jaw works. I can see him calculating the distance to the nearest window and whether Pepper would survive the fall.
I slowly turn my head to look at Pepper. I slowly turn my head back to Julian.
“Julian Frostwood,” I say.
Julian opens his eyes. “Ezra. Don’t.”
“Julian.” My voice is very quiet. The precision of a knife. “Did you knot her?”
Julian’s head snaps up. “What?”
“Did. You. Knot. Her. Last night.” Each word separate. Measured. “Did you knot Liana Marsh?”
Julian goes pale. Then red. Then pale again. His hand is gripping the edge of the bed so hard the sheets crumple. “Are you fucking kidding me right now…?”
“Yes or no, Julian.”
“I have known her for three days, Ezra.” His voice is rising, cracking at the edges. “We went to the fair. I asked permission to kiss her on a sidewalk. What kind of person do you think I am?”
“I think you’re a person who has a pair of women’s panties on his bedroom floor and has not yet explained how they got there.”
“It was an accident,” Julian says weakly.
Pepper, very pleased with himself, puffs his chest and announces: “Bad bird.”
I shake my head. Slowly.
“You should tell her the truth.” I meet his eyes. “Maybe then she’ll reject you, and we can all move on with our lives.”
I turn.
I walk out of Julian’s room without commenting further. As I close the door behind me, I can hear Julian in the room muttering threats at the parrot, his voice low and furious. “I am going to cook you, Pepper. I am going to pluck every feather on your body and make a fucking hat.”
I roll my eyes. I shake my head again.
I start down the hallway back toward my own office. I get three steps.
I stop.
I stand very still in the hallway. The overhead lights are dimmed for morning. The hardwood stretches in both directions, empty and quiet.
Those panties. The pale pink. The size. The cotton. Liana Marsh’s panties are on the floor of my brother’s bedroom. My brother apparently stole them at some point in the last forty-eight hours. My brother has been smelling them.
Fuck.
The coffee cup is in my hand. I am gripping it hard enough that the ceramic creaks. Why am I standing in my own hallway at 6:15 in the morning thinking about a 24-year-old woman’s underwear when I should be in the gym?
I shake my head and walk down the hallway toward my office. I do not look back, but I am thinking about Liana’s photograph in Cole’s folio. I am also, against my will, wondering what color her panties are today.
My cock hardens. Full. Throbbing. Pressing against the seam of my trousers with an urgency that makes me grit my teeth.
Cold shower. Now.