Double Life of Her Bodyguard

Chapter 1: The Glass She Handed Me

Maren POV

The candle was still lit when the elevator opened on the fortieth floor.

I shielded it with my palm. Lemon cake from Maison Verel, one slice-sized tier in a white box, the only dessert Grant ever finished. I had driven across Seattle in the rain to collect it before they closed. The pastry chef had tied the ribbon himself and told me happy birthday without being asked.

I was twenty-four as of this morning. My father had texted at six. My stepmother had sent a calendar invite titled Family Dinner, Sunday. Nothing from Grant yet, and I knew why. He had told me last week he was planning something and refused to say what.

I had decided to plan something too.

Linnet moved under my ribs, restless and warm. My wolf had arrived late, years after everyone else's, and the Cedar Ridge Pack had spent that time looking at me with careful kindness. But she had known Grant from the first second. Mine, she had said, when he took my hand at the Harvest Gathering two years ago. The mate bond had locked behind my ribs, hot and immediate.

Two years. He had told me my wolf needed time. He said he'd wait until she was strong enough for a full claiming. He sent flowers to my office. He took me to dinner at places that required reservations made three months out. In two years he had never once pushed.

I had thought that was love.

I touched my mother's silver ring where it hung on its chain under my silk collar. Then I held my key card to the penthouse door. It turned green, and the lock released.

The entry hall was dark except for the city through the glass wall. Grant's loafers sat on the marble by the console table. Beside them, a pair of gold heels with red soles. One had fallen on its side.

I stood there holding the cake.

The smell reached me next. Under the leather and cedar of his apartment was something sweet and heavy. Vanilla and amber, blended for one woman in a shop in Paris, because she had once told our whole family that ordinary perfume made her feel invisible.

My stepsister's perfume.

"Grant?"

Nothing. Then, from the bedroom at the end of the hall, a laugh. Low. Satisfied. I would have known it in a crowd of a thousand.

"Sloane," I said. Nobody heard me.

I told myself she had dropped something off. A document from Dad. A gift. I told myself that for every step down the hall, in my good shoes, on a floor I had never once walked across barefoot because he never asked me to stay.

The bedroom door was open a hand's width. I pushed it.

Sloane lay across the middle of his bed with a sheet at her waist and her blond hair undone. Grant stood at the foot of it buttoning his shirt, back to me. The same shoulders I had looked at across restaurant tables for two years and never touched without permission.

The bond didn't snap. It screamed. Linnet threw herself against my ribs hard enough to bend me forward.

The cake left my hands. The white box hit the hardwood, split along one side, and lemon frosting slid across the toe of my shoe. The candle rolled and went out.

Grant turned. The color left his face, then came back.

"Maren." He held up both hands. "Okay. Just listen."

"Don't say it isn't what it looks like."

"I wasn't going to."

That was worse. I had wanted a lie. A lie would have meant he was ashamed.

Sloane didn't reach for the sheet. She propped herself on one elbow and looked at me with polite interest. "You could have called first, Mare."

"Don't call me that."

"You're my mate." I said it to Grant, and my voice came out smaller than I had ever heard it. "The Moon Goddess gave you to me. You said you'd wait. You said it was a promise."

He pushed a hand through his hair. His eyes went to the cake, to my shoes, to the window. Anywhere but me. "The Goddess makes mistakes. Two years, Maren. Two years of dinners and goodnight kisses at your front door. I'm thirty-one. I'm not built for it."

"You said you were fine."

"I said what you needed to hear." Then he looked at me, finally, and there was nothing in his face. Not guilt. Not even discomfort. "Sloane doesn't make me wait."

I pressed my fist flat against my sternum. It hurt there, and I needed to hold it in.

"She's my sister."

"Stepsister." Sloane got up, took his white shirt off the chair, and put it on one button at a time. "And honestly, Maren, be real. Did you think a man like Grant would organize his life around a woman who took until twenty-two to shift? The pack was embarrassed for you. Everybody was. Dad's little saint with her little rules."

It landed exactly where she had aimed it. Two years ago I had shifted in front of the entire pack, and it had taken twenty minutes and ended with me on my hands on the grass, crying. Everyone had applauded gently. Nobody had met my eyes. Sloane had stood in the back in a cream coat, arms folded, and watched.

She had been counting the whole time. I understood that now.

I turned and walked out.

Not ran. Walked, fast, down the hall, past the heels and the loafers, toward the door. I had my hand on the handle when his fingers closed around my wrist.

Warm. Familiar. The same hand from the Gathering. My skin recognized it before I could stop it, and I hated my skin for that.

"Let go of me."

"You're shaking." His voice went gentle, and for one second it nearly worked. "It's storming out there. Sit down. Five minutes. We'll talk like adults."

"Adults." The laugh broke in half. "You mean you and her."

"Here." Sloane had come up beside him with a flute of champagne. Pale gold. Bubbles still rising. She slid it into my free hand and closed my fingers over the stem with her own, cool and careful. "You're gray. Drink something. You'll feel steadier. I promise."

I should have thrown it at her face.

But my throat was raw from a sound I hadn't let out. My hands would not stop shaking. And some stubborn, humiliating part of me still believed my own family could not do this to me. She had held my hand at my mother's funeral. I was twelve. She had been thirteen, and she had not let go once.

I drank.

Sweet first. Pear and toast.

Then something bitter spread across the back of my tongue, sharp and chemical, and in the half second before the hallway tilted I understood exactly what I had done.

The glass slipped from my fingers and shattered somewhere near my feet. The sound reached me late.

"What was in that?" My tongue felt thick. "Sloane. What did you put in it?"

"Nothing that will hurt you." She stepped back. "You'll just be a bit of a mess for a few hours. Maybe longer."

Grant's grip loosened. He looked at her. Then at me. For one second I watched him understand what she had done, and I watched him decide it wasn't his problem.

"Sloane," he said. "That's not what you told me."

"Let her go, babe."

He let go.

I got the door open and found the elevator and pressed the lobby button four times before it registered. The doors closed on his face. He did not follow. He stood in the hallway with his hands at his sides and let them close.

By the twentieth floor I was sweating through my dress. Heat rose from my stomach in long slow waves, until my skin itched and every breath came out broken. The mirrored wall showed a woman with a flushed face and pupils so wide her eyes looked black. I didn't recognize her.

Linnet was pacing so hard my knees almost gave. Wrong, she kept saying. Wrong. Wrong. Not about Grant now. About my blood.

The lobby swam. The concierge, a man in a navy suit, half stood behind his marble desk. "Ms. Hale? Are you all right?"

"Call my father." The words came out slow and thick. "Warren Hale. Please. Tell him I'm—"

My legs buckled. I caught the edge of the desk. The man was already coming around it, reaching for me, and the smell of his skin was too strong, too close, and Linnet lunged toward it so violently that I flinched away and ran.

Out through the revolving door. Into the rain.

It should have been freezing. I felt nothing from it. Water ran down my face and neck, and my hair stuck to my cheeks, and the streetlights smeared into long white lines. The curb shifted when I stepped toward it. My phone was in my clutch. I got it out. My thumb couldn't find the right icon. I pressed a name three times and heard it ring.

Dad. Four rings. Voicemail.

"Dad." My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "I need you to come get me. I'm outside Grant's building. Sloane gave me something, I think I—"

A black car swept past, spraying water over my ankles. The phone slid out of my hand and hit the sidewalk. The screen cracked across the middle and went dark.

I knelt and slapped my palm around on the wet concrete until I found it. Dead.

I thought of Sloane's face in that doorway. The small smile. The flute already poured and waiting in her hand, as if she had known exactly which minute I would try to leave. She had planned this. I was the last person to find out. Not even Grant knew.

Move, I told myself. Don't stay here.

I walked. I don't know how far. Past a closed bookstore. Past a line of parked cars with fogged windows. A siren, three blocks off, sounded like it was inside my head. The heat spread to my chest and my face and my hands, and I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

Then smoke and pine, faint, carried on the wet air from somewhere up the hill. And under it, something that made Linnet stop pacing and stand completely still.

I lifted my head.

Across the street, the Aldren Hotel rose in glass and pale stone, every window on the ground floor lit gold. Black SUVs lined the drive three deep. Valets in dark coats ran umbrellas to every car door. Men in suits with earpieces stood at each entrance, hands folded in front of them. A banner hung over the main doors, soaked through, one word still readable.

SUMMIT.

I knew what it was. Every Alpha in the territory was inside that building tonight. Every Beta. Every security detail the packs could field. If I walked through the front in a ruined silk dress with my hair plastered to my face and my knees failing, I would be the story by morning.

But I couldn't stand straight. I couldn't make a call. And whatever Sloane had put in that glass was pulling me under faster than I could think.

A service entrance sat at the side of the building. A delivery van waited with its rear doors open. A kitchen worker propped a steel door with a crate of wine and went back inside. He never looked at me.

I went toward it, one wet hand on the wall.

The corridor beyond smelled of floor polish and cold stone. My heels left prints on the tile. Somewhere above me, crystal clinked and a man laughed. I needed a door that locked. An empty room. Ten minutes.

I walked down the hall trying every handle.

The third door on the left was already open.