Chapter 119 The Double Storm

They cleared him a little before midnight. No findings, no hold, go home.

"What about Serena?"

The agent walking him out didn’t break stride. "Miss Winthrop’s still with us."

"Meaning what."

"Meaning she’s not cleared." He held the door. "You’re welcome to stay and keep cooperating. Otherwise, elevator’s on your left."

Alpha Sebastian took the elevator.

Nine hours. Four questions in eleven costumes. He had nothing left to be polite with.

Jordan was waiting at the curb, engine idling. The Hale Pack’s Beta.

Alpha Sebastian got his phone out of the property envelope and turned it on, and it went off in his hand all the way to the car. Fourteen missed. Six from his father.

He didn’t open a single one.

"Sterling," he said.

"Yes, Alpha."

He’d had that at two o’clock. Nobody else had the balance sheet or the clearance to take that contract off Hale Group, and Sterling hadn’t sent a subsidiary to do his dirty work. Put the family name on the bid and walked in himself.

Losing was the easy part. The hard part started in eight hours, in a room with fifteen people who’d want it explained to them slowly.

"Does Alpha Carter know?"

"Finn Carter called him at three. We’ve been at headquarters since." Jordan pulled into traffic. "Comms killed two stories tonight. Nothing’s public."

"But everybody in the business knows. The bid, and the other thing." A beat. "You and Miss Winthrop."

Alpha Sebastian looked out the window.

"He wants you at the house tonight. He said tonight, not in the morning."

Alpha Sebastian put two fingers on the bridge of his nose.

Then, out of nowhere, Eira.

She’d been in that building today. Sterling had dropped a file in front of half the room. Somebody would have gotten to her by now, in a hallway, with that face people make.

"Was she there?"

Jordan’s hands moved on the wheel. A Beta doesn’t lie to his Alpha. He can take his time, though.

"Yes, Alpha."

"Does she know?"

There was no answering that.

"Alpha Sebastian." Jordan kept his eyes on the road. "Pull up the news. Any of it."

Alpha Sebastian’s phone died before the article finished loading.

He plugged it in. The screen stayed black.

Jordan caught that in the mirror and figured it was just as well. Let him take Alpha Carter’s storm first. The other thing could sit an hour.

He wasn’t sure his Alpha could take both in one night.

"Alpha." Jordan kept it even. "Alpha Carter’s not angry about the bid. He’s angry it was personal. He spent a fortune tonight and called in favors he’d been sitting on for years, and he did it burying something that had nothing to do with the company."

Alpha Sebastian’s eyes moved. "Office first. The Shaw patent proposal, it’s on my desk."

"Yes, Alpha."

They swung by Hale Group for the file and were through the Carter gate by one, with the family still at the table and the estate manager standing at the end of it.

"Alpha Sebastian is here. His Beta’s with him."

Finn and his sister Fiona both looked up. Something flickered across Fiona’s face before she could hide it.

Alpha Carter didn’t put his knife down. "Conference room. They can wait."

Fiona opened her mouth. Her father’s eyes came up and she closed it.

"Get a grip. That man’s mated. There was a ceremony, there’s a Luna on the Hale rolls, and even if there weren’t, his head’s been somewhere else the whole time you’ve known him. Quit throwing yourself at a bonded Alpha in front of two hundred people."

"I said we could feed them."

"He cost this pack nine figures today. He can skip a meal."

Finn pushed the roast down the table. "Dad. Try that. It’s actually good."

"Fiona. Eat."

It broke, barely.

"Finish your dinner." Alpha Carter had come down a notch, and the pressure came off the room with it. "And drop the Hale thing. You don’t even like him that much and we both know it. You want a pact that’s worth signing, aim at Sterling."

"The Sterlings don’t need one." Fiona set her glass down. "Three hundred years of their own territory and not one border they didn’t win outright. Nobody’s traded a daughter into that house since before Grandpa was born, and they’ve never needed to."

"They’ve never needed to. That’s the point of them."

"And I’d be doing it solo, because that man won’t let an unmated female inside ten feet of him."

"That’s called discipline."

"Sis, you land somebody like that, he stays landed." Finn shrugged. "Sterling’s never carried a second scent in his life. Not once, not at anything, and people have looked. Half the mated females you grew up with are standing in their own front hall at midnight trying to figure out who’s on their husband’s coat."

She knew. She’d tried.

Two years ago, the Ridgeline benefit, four packs in one ballroom and every unmated female in the room scented up to the collarbone. She walked the whole length of it and asked Killian Sterling to dance.

Two hundred people. He didn’t even give her the courtesy of pretending to think about it.

He wasn’t interested. Both ways. Not in the dance, not in her.

She went back once more with cover, said his mother had suggested it.

That time he didn’t say no.

"Bad knee." Then he stood up, crossed the whole room at a normal walking pace, and shook somebody’s hand over by the bar.

He could have lied better. He chose not to.

Alpha Sebastian Hale remembered names. He’d never once made her feel like part of the furniture. If her father hadn’t told her the man was married she’d have gone after him without blinking.

"Worry about yourself for once. You’re almost twenty-four."

Finn’s whole face changed. "I met someone."

His father and his sister both turned.

"I asked you yesterday," Fiona said. "You told me no."

"That was yesterday."

Fiona put her fork down. "You met her today?"

Finn’s ears went red.

"Oh my God. Dad. Look at your son."

The rest of dinner went easier than the start of it. Half an hour, and Alpha Carter still didn’t get up.