I’ve been in rooms with men who had guns pointed at me. Where I walked into burning buildings and was shot at and held people while they bled.
But I’m not prepared for the sight of her standing in the doorway.
Adelaide’s hair is wet down her shoulders. Her eyes are red and swollen, and she’s wrapped in a soft pink robe that engulfs her. She has both her arms folded across her stomach, holding herself. Her cheeks are flushed deep, her lips are bitten raw, and her scent, even softened by the room’s deliberate fragrance, finds me instantly. My cock throbs.
Behind me, Luca and Ace don’t say a word, but I hear their breathing picking up.
“Adelaide.” I take half a step forward and stop, hands open at my sides. “Please let us explain everything. If after you’ve heard us out, you want us to go, we’ll go. I give you my word.”
She blinks at me and steps aside for us all to enter, including Clio.
The room is enormous, painted with a watercolor reef, fish in impossible silvers and blues. A four-poster bed, a sunken spa glowing pale blue through an archway, cabinets of folded towels and soft objects, but my attention is on Adelaide, who retreats toward the bed.
Clio closes the door behind her with a soft click and leans against it with her arms crossed.
“I’m sorry, babe,” Clio says. “I called them because I couldn’t sit out there knowing you were in here hurting even more for the Alphas your body craved. I love you. Don’t hate me.”
Adelaide turns her face toward Clio, and her smile, when it comes, is so small and so tired and so pure that I want to put my fist through the wall. “I could never hate you,” she whispers.
She crawls up onto the bed, then pulls a pillow into her lap and wraps her arms around it. She sits cross-legged and stares at us.
“Talk.”
I sit on the foot of the bed, hands open on my knees. Far enough that she could kick me without having to extend.
Luca stays at the wall. Ace lowers himself into the small velvet chair by the cabinet, perched on the edge, his hands gripping his own knees so hard his knuckles have gone pale.
“Adelaide.” I keep my voice low. “First. We fucked up, and we’re going to say sorry for eternity to get you to forgive us. We’d decided this morning that we were going to sit down with you tomorrow and tell you everything with the time it deserved, in our home, where you were comfortable. But we should have told you much earlier, and we have no excuse for that.”
She stares at us, her hands tighten on the pillow, and my pulse is burning a hole through me at how desperately I want to reach over and take her into my arms, to show her she means the fucking world to me, that it’s breaking me to be so far apart.
“Sure.” Her voice comes out rough and wrecked, barely holding together. “But I want the truth. Not some neat apology. The truth.” A small broken sound leaves her, and she folds harder over the pillow, one hand pressing low against her stomach like she can physically contain what’s happening to her body. “I don’t know how much longer the suppressants are going to hold.”
Luca makes a low, pained sound, and I get it—the room is thick with her scent.
It’s everywhere. Sweet and desperate and unmistakably Omega, the first sharp pull of heat turning the air into a weapon. Every breath I take scrapes through me. My body wants to go to her, kneel in front of her, and fix whatever hurts. Instead, I lock my jaw and keep my hands open where she can see them.
“Then I’ll be quick,” I say, though nothing about this feels fast. “On the boat, I told you we’d done bad things. I let you fill in the blanks, and that was cowardly. The full truth is that the three of us worked as contractors for really bad people and gangs. We took work other people wouldn’t touch. Most of it came through one organization here on the islands. Some we handled independently when it suited.”
She lifts her head. Her eyes are bright with tears and fury both. “Define ‘work.’?”
“Whatever paid.” I hold her stare and make myself say it clean. “Threats. Recovery. Collections. Violence when that was what people were really buying. But also rescuing many who were in dangerous situations or kidnapped.”
“Violence,” she repeats. Her fingers crush the pillow harder. “Say the word you mean.”
My chest feels like it’s splitting open. “On very rare occasions,” I say, “we eliminated.”
Her breath catches. The scent in the room spikes with her distress, sharp enough that Ace moves around in the chair like he’s been hit.
Her whole face tightens. “How many?”
“Only two.” My throat burns saying it. “And I need you to hear the second part just as clearly.”
Her laugh is ugly and wet. “There’s a second part to that?”
“Yeah. There is,” Ace answers before I do, voice rough from holding himself back.
“The second part,” I say, because if I don’t keep control of this now, we lose her, “is that we never took work on innocent people. Not once. We turned down far more than we took. The ones we accepted were on traffickers. Men who sold kids, who beat women half to death and hid behind money. Men with bodies behind them and enough protection to keep walking around free.”
