CHAPTER 4: WHAT HAPPENED AT THE ESTATE

The man in the dark suit led me through the gates without waiting for me to catch my breath, Kayla's hand slipping out of mine before I was ready to let go of it.

"Please," I said, hurrying to keep up pace with him, "just tell me what happened this morning. You said something happened at the estate."

"That is not for me to say, Miss Voss."

"I'm about to marry into this family within the next hour. So I think I've earned the right to know."

He said nothing. He simply held the door open, and I stepped in through it because there was nothing else left to do.

Inside, the lobby was a chaos dressed up as calm. Guards moved in quick, clipped steps, low voices cutting off the moment I passed, phones pressed to ears, every set of eyes splitting attention between whatever crisis had happened and the girl who had just arrived to marry their Alpha. A woman in a sharp black dress intercepted me before I had gone ten feet.

"This way," she said, already pulling me toward a private elevator. "We don't have much time left."

"Please, just tell me what's going on."

She hesitated, glancing around before lowering her voice. "There was an attack last night, on the Alpha himself at Central Park."

My whole body went cold.

"Is he?" I started and could not finish the question, horrified by how badly I needed to hear the answer.

"He's alive," she said quickly. "Shaken, but alive. That's why the timeline changed. His father wants the alliance sealed before anyone decides last night was an opportunity instead of a warning."

Central Park. Last night. My mind raced back to the gray eyes in the dark, six men closing in, a hand steadying my shoulder before pulling away. Your father should have thought twice, one of the attackers had said before vanishing into the trees.

"Was it Ashwood?" I asked, my voice barely holding. "Is that what they think? That my pack did this."

"I don't know what they think," she said, guiding me down a hallway lined with closed doors. "I just know we have less than an hour to get you ready, and this whole house is on the edge, so please, don't ask that question out loud from anyone else."

She left me in a small room with a woman who never introduced herself, who pinned an ivory dress around me with quick, impersonal hands and threaded flowers through my hair without meeting my eyes for once. I sat still and let it happen, my mind spinning too fast to protest, circling the same terrible thought again and again. If someone had attacked the Kingston Alpha in Central Park last night, and I had been in that same park at the same moment, then whoever those men were might have seen me there. Might already know exactly who I was before I ever set foot inside this tower.

The door opened, and Felix stepped inside, dressed sharp, looking older than I had ever seen him, eyes darting around the room like he expected trouble to walk in through the walls.

"Helena." He came to me fast. "Are you all right?"

"Someone attacked him," I said. "Last night. In the park."

Felix went very still. "How do you know that?"

"Does it matter how I know? Felix, I was in that park last night."

His face drained of color so completely I thought he might be sick. "You were where?"

"I couldn't stay in that hall after what happened with Jason. I needed air. So I went to the park, and I didn't see anything, I swear to you, but if someone was watching him, they might have seen me too, and now I'm about to walk into his house with his family already thinking Ashwood tried to kill their Alpha—"

"Stop." Felix gripped my shoulders, forcing me to look at him. "Listen to me carefully. Whatever you saw or didn't see last night, do not say anything about being in that park. Not to him, not to his father, not to anyone else in this house. Do you understand?"

"Why?"

"Because I do not know who ordered that attack," he said, low and urgent, "and until I do, the safest thing you can be inside those walls is someone who was nowhere near it."

Before I could ask anything else, a knock came on the door, sharp and final.

"It's time," a voice called from the hallway. "The Alpha is ready."

Felix's hands fell away, and whatever fear had been on his face folded itself behind a mask of forced calm. "Remember what I said," he whispered, and then the door opened fully before us with no time for anything except walking forward.

I was led down a long corridor toward a set of tall double doors, my heart pounding so hard I felt it in my throat, Felix's warning circling my mind. Say nothing. Know nothing. Act like you were never there.

The doors opened onto a room full of unfamiliar, watchful faces, wolves who had clearly heard about last night's attack and were searching every new arrival for signs of a threat. I walked forward on legs that did not feel like mine, past every measuring stare, toward the altar, toward the man I was about to marry, whose name I still did not know.

Then I lifted my eyes, and the room tilted beneath my feet, because standing there, tall and sharp in a black suit despite a fading bruise along his jaw, gray eyes locking onto mine with the exact same shock written across his face, was the stranger from the park.

The man who had pulled me behind him when six men came out of the trees. The man that Felix had just warned me never to admit I had seen last night.

He was the groom, and from the look on his face, he had just realized exactly who I was too.