My Alpha Mate Chose His Stepsister

I was drowning.

Saltwater filled my mouth, my chest, the inside of my skull. My fingers scraped against rock that wasn't there. Somewhere far above the surface, a man was screaming a name that used to be mine — and then, all at once, air.

Real air. Warm. Smelling of beeswax and pipe tobacco.

I went down hard onto wood I knew. Polished oak. The grain pressed against my cheek the way it had when I was nine and had fallen off the library ladder reaching for a book I wasn't allowed to read.

My father's study.

"Wren? Sweetheart, look at me."

His voice. The way it had sounded before — before the hospital, before the oxygen tube, before the morning a nurse had called me at six a.m. to say words I hadn't been there in person to hear, because I had been somewhere else, doing what someone else had asked me to do.

I lifted my head.

He was three feet away in his wheelchair. His hands trembled around a folded paper. His hair still had black threaded through the silver. The lines I had memorized, kneeling beside a hospital bed two years from now holding a hand that had already gone cold — those lines hadn't deepened yet.

He was alive.

I crawled. I don't remember deciding to. I crawled across the rug like a child and pressed my face into his lap and cried the way I had not let myself cry at his funeral, the way a person only cries when she has been holding her breath for a very long time and her body has finally decided, without asking her, that she is allowed to stop.

"Daddy."

"Wren — baby — what's wrong, what happened —"

"You're here."

"Of course I'm here."

He held my face in both hands. His thumb came away wet. He made a small broken sound I had never heard him make.

He let me cry until the worst of it had gone out of me. Then he pressed a handkerchief into my hand the way he had pressed handkerchiefs into my hand at every funeral I had attended in his company, and he waited.

He had always been a patient man. I had forgotten how patient.

When I could breathe, I looked at the paper still folded between his fingers.

I knew it before he turned it over. Cream cardstock. Silver wax seal pressed with a wolf's head. The Voss contract.

Two names written in dark ink, separated by one word: or.

The first I had loved since I was twelve. I had whispered it into my pillow at fourteen, carved its first letter into the underside of my desk at sixteen, taken it as my own at twenty in a white dress, in front of three hundred people.

Caelan Voss.

I looked at the name and the name looked back at me, and for a long moment I couldn't breathe.

Then I looked at the second one.

The