Still. My fist itched to connect with Blake’s nose. It’d heal within five minutes, faster than my hand would.
That was pretty much all that was stopping me at this point.
Two urges to flatten someone’s face in as many days. I was on a roll.
“You already asked our parents, right?” The sheepish horror on Blake’s face made me cackle aloud, an unprofessional noise that I choked down almost instantly, afraid it’d carry out of my office. “Oh, too scared to ask? Well, I’m saying no. Ask them. Or fuck off.”
Blake’s low growl didn’t scare me. Even though the spreadsheets still hadn’t come into perfect focus, I stared back at them, ignoring the way my brother had completely failed to fuck off.
“Dad’ll give me the money,” Blake said, low and ugly. “I just didn’t want to bother him. Not like you have anything important to do. You’ll never have anything important to do around here, because you’ll never be able to handle it. You’ll never be an alpha.”
Now the spreadsheets were nothing more than a haze of red, but I didn’t dare look up. I’d lose my cool.
What I had left of it.
“You are an alpha,” I managed to choke out. “And you’re still useless.”
Blake let out something between a huff and a growl, but he finally shoved himself off the door frame and stomped away, letting me get the last word. That actually pissed me off more than a lame retort would have. Like my opinion of him didn’t even matter enough to rebut.
Our father probably would give him the money; he’d only canceled the Amex so that Blake would be forced to ask, giving him the opportunity to deliver a lecture. And then once he’d given Blake what he wanted, he’d take me to task for sending my brother to waste his valuable time rather than simply dealing with it on my own—even though he’d planned on seeing Blake about it in the first place.
My headache intensified.
If you can’t even handle a simple issue like your brother’s finances, Brook, I don’t understand why you’d expect more responsibilities.
Or something along those lines. I had a thousand quotes like that embedded in my brain after years of the same old, same old.
That morning I’d been wavering on whether I ought to cancel my meeting with Pechorin. Call it all off. Trying to mold that rough-hewn criminal into an alpha my father would respect enough, while still keeping him from taking charge and fucking me over, felt like such a Hail Mary pass.
And I’d be taking his knot, along with his uninterested contempt, in order to mate with him in the first place.
Bottoming didn’t appeal to me, in any sense: in bed, in life, in my personal relationships.
Still better than dealing with Blake on these terms for one more fucking day. Or with my father’s dismissive attitude and pressure to mate an alpha of his choosing. Or the board, who listened to my ideas, hemmed and hawed, put off implementing them until the ideal time to do so had passed, and then assigned some other junior executive to put them into practice and take credit for any resulting success.
They kept hoping Blake would suddenly manifest some hitherto unknown talent or aptitude for business, and in the meantime…well, they had complete confidence in my father’s ability to run our several companies for decades to come.
My fucking father.
Who’d gone to great lengths to keep the results of his own even more discreet genetic testing secret, knowing perfectly well that the packs we socialized and did business with would see any imperfection, any crack in his perfect alpha façade, as an unforgiveable flaw worthy of shunning. Who might only have another five years, max, before his declining health forced him into retirement, even though he kept up a front of the perfect vigorous alpha, and meanwhile treated me like shit for having the same genetic abnormality he’d passed down to me.
Fucking hypocrite. I had to loosen my grip on the mouse again or risk disintegrating it.
I could take Pechorin’s knot.AndI could keep him in line, damn it all.
With Drew and Blake unavailable and unsuitable respectively, and me mated to an alpha and thus satisfying the traditionalists on the board, my father would be left with no choice but to promote me into his position before his secret came out and our stock prices plummeted into the sub-basement. An alpha and a Castelli would make everyone happy. They didn’t have to be the same person to keep up appearances, as my father’s mating plans for me proved.
It took half an hour before I could focus again, but I forced myself to keep at it, keep working on this fucking proposal that the board wouldn’t even consider if it came from me without an alpha endorsement, until six o’clock on the dot.
The drive home only took fifteen minutes despite rush-hour traffic. My grandparents had established their own upscale version of a pack compound: a gated community with all the bells and whistles. My parents lived in the massive mansion my paternal grandparents had built to dominate the center of it. After coming back from college, I’d tried to argue for living somewhere else, but they’d already had a house set aside and furnished for me.
And like a spineless coward, I’d moved in and had been there ever since.
The hotel room had been a precaution, even though I’d have preferred to meet in my own space: werewolf instinct, to have the home-turf advantage. The gate guard on duty would almost certainly report Pechorin’s visit to my mother if he came here, and we needed to be mated or very close to it before my family got a whiff of his existence and the opportunity to throw a spanner in the works.
But I had to get home first: I needed to shower to wash off the stink of anxiety and to dress in something a little more casual, something that’d blend in with the guests of the mid-range chain hotel I’d chosen.
Dark jeans and a sports jacket over a white button-down, I eventually decided, and took a quick survey in the hall mirror on my way back out the door again. The shower had left my short blond hair a little darker, but it looked okay damp, only slightly rumpled. The navy jacket brought out the blue of my eyes—what you could see of them behind the wire-frame glasses that would’ve done any accountant proud. Not like stylish ones would’ve helped make me less of a shocking anomaly. Werewolves who needed vision correction were rare enough that I might well have been the only one west of the Mississippi.
