I sent Nina a text and asked her to meet me at the palace the next morning for breakfast.
She was all excitement, saying she would have Kayden drop her off first thing in the morning. I shook my head, wondering if that meant Alexander’s Beta was already at her place right now, and planning to stay the night. Probably.
Alexander had returned from his evening training session looking destroyed. Then he spent half an hour soaking in a tub of cold water, silently brooding over something but trying to hide the dark cloud of his mood from me. He didn’t do a very good job of it.
I heard the tub draining and the shower turning on. He was heating himself back up after the ice bath, which was good news for me. I wanted him to touch me tonight with that steamy heat he usually had pulsing off his skin. I hoped he would emerge from the bathroom in a different mood, over whatever had happened on the training field and ready to give himself to me for the night.
It was not until he was turning the doorknob that suddenly I felt compelled to come clean with my fiancé and tell him about everything. Tell him what my father was asking of me, show him the letter, even.
But no. I could not betray the man who raised me like that – no matter how much he might deserve it, considering the shame he had brought upon my family and the Red Moon pack. Alexander had told me once that he could kill my father. I did not know what his reason was, but I suspected there was more to the story than I knew. That the two of them had a history I was not yet aware of.
I could not hand Alexander a reason to hate my father even more. A reason to execute him.
I had a vision of Alexander’s face in the moment he knocked his brother Lucas into bloody unconsciousness. The look in his eyes was savage. The speed with which his hammering fist was flying into the young man’s face was unbelievable. Alexander’s retaliatory attack had happened in the blink of an eye, like something out of a dream.
That had been the first time I started to really think about the rumors I had heard about Alpha Alexander, back before I knew him in the flesh. The rumors stated that Alexander was ruthless, brutally violent, and unstoppable on the battlefield. A force of nature, and someone you did not want for an enemy.
No matter how much I wanted to trust him, Alexander was not a person I could tell the whole truth about my father to.
If I didn’t want to be responsible for my own father’s murder.
I texted Nina again in the morning and called off our breakfast date.
I’d slept terribly. Whatever it was that was troubling Alexander, the ice bath did not solve it. He came out of the bathroom with the same gloom hanging over him, and though he held me through the night, his energy just did not feel the same.
It was not my place to ask him what was going on. But he was up all night, and each time I started drifting off, a restless movement of his, a soft stirring under the sheets or shifting of his weight, would startle me back awake.
Nina responded to me with a string of crying face and bloody dagger emojis. I apologized and promised her we’d reschedule.
Nina: When can we talk, though? I still don’t even know what happened to you guys the other night!!
I frowned at my phone, thinking about my father’s warning. Even if he had an agenda, he was probably telling the truth about the reason he contacted me in such an indirect way.
I was under surveillance in the palace. How much I was being watched, how many of my conversations were being listened in on, I could not know. But surely there was some truth to what my father said about communications being monitored here.
I did my best to assure Nina that everything was alright and promised I’d explain later. Her agreement was hesitant, but she let it go for now.
My reason for canceling on her was that I felt a sudden need to see my grandfather. I knew he could help me sort my mind out better than anyone. He was, after all, the true leader of our pack, the one who had led it to strength before my father took over and destroyed everything his father had worked for.
I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell him much, if anything, about my strife with my father. But somehow, I knew just speaking with Grandfather could help me figure out just what I needed to do. How to keep myself and my baby safe amid this tangled web of threats and violence that I’d suddenly found myself right in the center of.
Alexander arranged for a car to take me into town. I told him I would be back in time for dinner, and he responded with a dopey smile.
Holding back a smile of my own, I remembered my pledge to myself – that I would not encourage him too much. Our sex life was one thing. It was part of our contract, after all, and something my body was telling me it needed right now. But when he gave me those looks like he was starting to get a schoolboy crush on me, I would not let myself get caught up in it.
Because it was not real. It was a fleeting feeling for him, I knew it. I believed what he told me the day he stole me away from my wedding to Baron: that my arrangement with Alexander was a contract marriage, nothing more. And that he was going to divorce me as soon as our child was born.
The car rolled to a stop at the front of the nursing home where my grandfather resided, and my driver hurried to open my door for me courteously. I thanked him as I stepped out.
I crossed the short distance to the front door to the nursing home just as my phone buzzed in my pocket. The car was already pulling away, floating out of the parking lot slowly. I stopped in my tracks, removing my hand from the big golden handle on the glass door, and stepped to the side, pausing in the shade of a big evergreen. I figured it was a text from Nina and wanted to shoot her a quick reply before I went inside.
But the text wasn’t from Nina. It was from an unknown number. And the message was empty.
Suddenly the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.
A bubble with three moving dots appeared on the screen… telling me the person on the other end was typing.
Then another message loaded, containing no text and an image attachment. I was afraid to open it, but I did anyway.
I almost dropped my phone when the image loaded.
It was a picture of me, standing there in front of the nursing home, looking down at my phone.
I looked to my right and saw a large man approaching me. He was big in every way – tall, built, thick around the middle, thick around the neck – and his face was flat, round, and hard like a tombstone.
The giant’s narrow black eyes were locked on me. The firm set of his mouth was menacing.
I knew right away that I was in trouble.
