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Chapter 17
Alpha
“You’readick,you know?” Dante’s wry tone caught him off-guard over the phone.
Alpha watched Jasmine talking to one of the girls in the AV headquarters, his mind preoccupied.
“Good to hear from you too,” Alpha ground out, distracted. Distracted by too much happening around him. The killer had finally left his DNA at his last scene. His wife had been screwing with his head for days. His feelers had come coming back about the missing girls. The Syndicate was clearly trying to get him out of the picture. Too fucking much was happening, and his head felt out of the game.
And his missing eye itched like a bitch.
Fuck, he sounded whiny. Alpha wasn't whiny. He didn't know what was up with him these days.
He heard Dante sigh. “Amara was upset at how soon you left after the wedding. Tempest too.”
Alpha grunted. “She’s barely one.”
“So?” Dante argued. Alpha knew better than to say anything about Dante's little princess. Fucker was whipped by both girls in his life, and shamelessly so.
“How’s your marriage?” the younger man asked, with no sense of boundary or self-preservation. His marriage. It had started as a farce, a game, and now he didn’t know. He hated to admit how much he’d begun to enjoy her company, how she amused him with how cute she was and seduced him with her antics. He’d begun to doubt that there was a secret at all, her motives for the marriage unknown to him, and with the way she was, he knew it best to ride out the months with some distance. Everything had been going great. Until she didn’t show up at the tower.
Alpha remembered sitting in his office, watching the door, something twisting in his gut when she didn’t come. He’d called Victor, who’d told him she’d gone home. Thinking maybe she was unwell, he’d wrapped everything up and gotten home, only to find it empty, her dinner plate washed and drying. She’d eaten without him. And that… they did that together. She’d come back, and she’d been off. Not herself.
And then she’d called him Alpha. Not hubby, not handsome, not some absolutely ridiculous name like 'pumpkin pie'. Alpha.
That had pissed him off, and he'd been even more pissed at getting pissed. For the first time in his life, Alpha had hated hearing his name. Standing there, watching her quiet form duck away from him, something nasty, ugly had taken root in his gut. And it didn’t go away, not when she’d started to have dinner with him in her pajamas, not when she simply went to sleep and didn't even try to engage with him, not when she didn't cuddle him anymore.
She had slipped in behind his defenses, and he did not like that.
Alpha wasn’t defenseless, much less against a little woman. And yet, last night, when she’d been about to duck away again, his defenses had shattered against the office windows. She'd pushed him over the edge, and he'd fucked her, and fuck if it hadn't felt good. But being inside her, he'd not lost control like he'd thought he would. And that had given him a plan to get the upper hand back in their dynamic. He’d fuck her slow, satisfy them both, break the sexual tension, keep her happy, and keep his distance. He was best alone, and she was nothing but a distraction, one who was getting too close, too sneaky under his skin. He didn't even care anymore what her motives were, he just wanted to let his promised time pass with pleasure. Their time together would end and they would go their own ways, mutually satisfied.
It was a good plan.
“Is that why you called?” he asked in response to Dante’s question.
Dante chuckled. “That bad, huh?”
Fucker.
“Anyway,” his half-brother’s voice turned sober. “Morana found something. The Syndicate did put that building here in your name, but they got tipped off by someone. The username on the account was ‘f_finisher’. The IP address originated from central Los Fortis. I’ll text you the address.”
Fortis Finisher.
What the fuck?
Was the killer a part of The Syndicate? One of their operatives told to target Alpha and his empire? Or was it a freelancer, someone Alpha had wronged in the past? He didn’t have a dearth of enemies who would happily see him fall, and clearly, the killer was framing him for some reason.
“I’ll check it out,” he told the other man, keeping most of his thoughts to himself. While he appreciated Dante and the fact that he was nothing like his father, a part of him couldn’t help but feel bitter about their shared past. He wasn't a good man by any means, and the fact that Dante had grown up with resources Alpha had to bleed to earn and beg Lorenzo Maroni to save his mother, was still a thorn on his side. He tried to not let his previous experience color his relationship with Dante, especially since the other man had been persistent in wanting to have a good relationship with him, but sometimes it bled through. Alpha didn’t trust people easily, and while he’d been trying to keep an open mind, eventually, he hoped to be completely okay with the man, simply because the desire of having some family, any family, was acute in his heart.
He’d never thought he'd have any of his own, especially because he never really gave thought to bringing a life into his world without a mother. From his own experience, he knew how formative a mother's love was for a child, and he'd never seen a woman and felt he wanted her to birth his kids. Zephyr would make a great mother, he was sure, but he didn't trust her. She hid something from him, and though he didn’t get the feeling it was nefarious, it unsettled him. And what a girl like her, from as different a background from his as one could imagine, would hide he didn’t know.
He saw Jasmine give him a slight nod, and wrapped up his call with Dante, telling him he’d touch base soon.
“She said she saw a guy in a black hoodie,” Jasmine started as she came up to him. “And another guy running off. The hoodie is the one who left the envelope on the car for me.”
Another envelope. This time with a smear of his semen found at the crime scene, a crime scene his people had been able to cover up thanks to that warning.
Alpha was completely baffled. The only place he’d left his semen recently had been on his wife’s ass, and he doubted anyone could have swiped it from her without his knowledge, especially with all the surveillance in the building. Still, he’d check to be double sure once he was alone.
