Forbidden Affectionate

Chapter 1: Meridian

Kae's Pov

The one rule of the Meridian Summit that nobody says out loud but everybody follows is that you do not cause a scene.

You come in, you sit down, you negotiate whatever cross-pack dispute has been rotting for three years, and you leave with your territory intact and your dignity more or less where you left it. That is the deal. That has always been the deal.

I fixed my cufflinks in the elevator on the way up because I'm the kind of man who notices when something is crooked and physically cannot leave it that way.

I was going to the thirty-second floor of the Halcyon Building.

And that place has the specific kind of tension that only exists when you put fifteen Alphas in a room together and tell them to behave.

I walked in at eight fifty-eight, two minutes early because I'm never late and I'm never first, and I took my seat on the east side of the table the way I always do.

Alpha Gregor Vane was already at the head of it. He was seventy-one years old and he had been the ruling Alpha of the Northern Territory since before I was born, and the thing about Vane was that he was the only person in any room who could make every Alpha present feel like a child without opening his mouth.

He looked at me when I sat down. I nodded. Then he looked away. That was our entire relationship and it worked fine.

The room filled up in the next ten minutes and I did what I always do at these things, which is watch the door.

The last person through the door at nine-oh-four was Lucian Freud.

I'm not going to describe him because it doesn't matter what he looks like.

What matters is that he is the Alpha of the Westside pack, his territory shares a border with mine that has been a problem for two years, and of every person sitting at this table he is the one I trust the least.

He found his seat on the opposite side without looking at me, which is what he always does, and I looked away first because I always do that too.

The meeting started. I won't say it was boring because that would be disrespectful to what happened next but it was going the way these things go, which is slowly, until Elder Scrolsal cleared his throat at the head of the room and said they needed to address the matter of the eastern corridor agreement and I pulled out the brief I'd prepared and we got into it.

Vane was quiet through most of it which wasn't unusual. He listened the way old powerful men listen, with his hands folded and his eyes on whoever was speaking and his face giving away absolutely nothing.

Someone on the south side of the table saw it first and made a sound I cannot describe, and then everyone was standing.

Because apparently Vane was slumped sideways in his chair with his eyes open and a glass of water still in his hand, and the smell of poison hit me half a second later.

Immediately the room broke open as voices sounded all from different directions.

Then someone called for the building to be locked down, and I stood where I was because moving right now without knowing what I was moving into felt like exactly the wrong thing to do.

That was the moment Elder Scrolsal pointed at me.

"Armstrong was the last one near him," he said, and the room went deadly silent. "He walked past Vane's seat on his way in. Everyone saw it."

I looked at him. "I walked past because that's where my seat is." I almost yelled.

"You had the most to gain from his death." Another voice from the south side, I didn't catch who.

"We all had something to gain, that's why we're here." I responded, more like to everybody.

"Your territory dispute goes away the moment a new ruling Alpha is named." Scrolsal said again, stepping forward now, and the room was listening. "You've been the loudest voice against Vane's eastern corridor ruling for two years. You flew in last night, not this morning. Nobody knows where you were between midnight and six."

“I was at my hotel,” I said.

"Alone?" he asked.

I didn't answer that fast enough and that pause did more damage than anything else I could have said.

They were going to vote. I could feel it moving through the room, that collective current that happens when a group of powerful people have decided on a direction and are just waiting for someone to say it first.

And here there are fifteen Alphas, a dead ruling Alpha, and me standing there with no alibi and a two-year-old grudge on public record.

I have never been afraid in a room in my life. I want to be clear about that.

But I started thinking very quickly about what came next and none of the options were good.

Then a chair moved and Lucian Freud stood up.

The room looked at him murmuring, just exactly the way people at anyone who interrupts something very important, but he didn’t care.

He stood there with both hands on the table and waited until it was genuinely quiet.

"He didn't do it," Lucian said.

Nobody spoke for three full seconds. Scrolsal found his voice first. "Freud. Armstrong's territory going to dispute directly benefits your pack, this is not the time for…"

"I know what it benefits." Lucian didn't raise his voice. "He didn't do it."

"Then who did?" someone from the back asked.

Lucian looked at me then. Just for a second. And I don't know what I expected to find on his face because I've never looked at Lucian Freud and found anything I understood.

But what was there wasn't guilt, like maybe he was the one who killed him, and it wasn't fear either, like he’s scared for me. And honestly, I don’t have a name for the expression.

He then looked back at the room.

"I did," he said.

And the silence and shock that followed that was the loudest experience I have had in thirty years of being alive.