“You’re out of your mind.” My lips barely moved, and the words came out a hoarse whisper. Not very convincing. “I had—an injury. To my eyes. When I was a teena—”
“Bullshit,” Pechorin cut in. “Total fucking bullshit. Any injury that left you with intact eyes at all would’ve healed. Is that the story you tell publicly when people ask about your glasses?”
It was, actually. My parents had come up with the lie and drummed it into me: an accident while using cleaning chemicals during the summer while I’d been at camp and helping clean the swimming pool, followed by my eyes only healing part of the way since I was so weak and pathetic, barely worthy of being a werewolf at all. Hensley’s Syndrome came through the male line, and it didn’t affect alphas—it couldn’t even be passed down by alphas as far as all the scientific literature said. So my father was a medical miracle, basically, only in the worst possible way.
And he insisted that had to be covered up at all costs to protect his own reputation as the perfect alpha, the perfect CEO. My reputation didn’t matter, of course. Holding me up to ridicule instead didn’t bother him at all.
Of course, my extended family and their friends thinking that story was laughable rather than tragic—an injured teenager who couldn’t heal, damaged for life—was another fucking issue all on its own.
No one had ever questioned the lie. After all, everyone else in my family appeared to be perfect. Who’d suspect a genetic cause of my glaring flaws, right?
No one had questioned it until Pechorin, that is.
“What do you want? To keep your mouth shut.”
He stared at me, his mouth, ironically, dropping open. “What?” he demanded. “You fucking—what?”
“To keep what you figured out to yourself,” I gritted out. “How much money?”
His brows furrowed as he frowned down at me, eyes lighting with the faintest hint of an alpha glow.
“How can this be a secret?” he asked after a long pause. “How the fuck does everyone not know? You’d have to have seen doctors. Any kind of chronic health problem in a werewolf is weird. Noticeable.”
“The doctors got paid off. Just like I’m offering to pay you. How much? I’ll get the cash, you take it and walk away, and I never see or hear from you again.”
The tight, heavy clench in the pit of my stomach owed about half to wondering how the hell I’d be able to afford what he’d be able to demand—more than he’d have asked for to mate me, I was sure—without asking my father, which would mean coming up with an explanation for this whole debacle.
The other half came from realizing it was over.
My plan had failed. And I truly was as pathetic as my family had always thought me.
Pechorin tilted his head, still frowning, examining me like an insect he’d found crawling on the floor. I felt like that, too: small and unwanted and ugly. Worthless.
“You made it sound like you’d be paying me a lot to mate with you. I agreed to that deal. I’m not trying to change it now. I’m not a fucking blackmailer, Castelli.” Christ, he’d offered to kill Blake for money, unfunny joke or not. And now he had the nerve to sound insulted that I’d accused him of extortion? “I agree to do a job, I do that job. Not some other double-cross bullshit I come up with on the fly. I didn’t research what was wrong with you to get money out of you. I did it because I like to know what I’m getting into.”
“What you’re getting into?” I asked faintly, stunned by his torrent of furious denial. He really, really did seem to be…wounded. Actually surprised that I’d suspected his intentions. “What the hell difference does it make to you? It’s not like it’s contagious. Or we’re going to be reproducing.”
Because we might actually still go through with this. Holy shit, he meant it. He meant to do it, because he’d said he would.
How long had it been since anyone had made a commitment to me and then followed through? Or even made a commitment in the first place?
“What happens if you have a seizure, huh? Or something else crops up. I’ll be your mate. I’ll be the one in charge of taking care of you. And if no one knows about this, and it’s some kind of big secret I need to keep? That makes taking care of you—”
“I don’t need anyone fucking taking care of me!” I snapped, pushing myself off the wall and right into his face, anger finally shaking me out of the haze of shock that’d fallen over me.
“The hell you don’t!” he snapped back, leaning down so that mere inches separated our faces, alpha eyes blazing into mine. “You’re a fucking mess, Castelli. Hiring someone like me to fuck and bite you proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt! And like I was saying—” I started to interject, and he had to raise his voice over my protests. “Like I was saying! The reason for us mating is a secret, obviously. Your medical condition: another secret. Something happens to you? I’m fucked, because I won’t know how to handle it unless you tell me in advance. The secret comes out, or maybe you die because I don’t know what to do. So yeah. This is something I needed to know. No more bullshit. I agreed to do this. I’m not going to take your money for nothing. But I’m not doing it unless you come clean. About everything so far, and anything else I don’t already know.”
The urge to obey him turned my thoughts and my blood sluggish, like poisoned honey. Fuck. That edge to his voice. No other alpha, including my father, had ever been able to affect me like this.
Obeying couldn’t happen, because my father’s secret,oursecret…if it came out, everything would be ruined. There wouldn’t be a company left for me to take over. And the board would never agree to having me in charge, anyway, not when I’d be seen as a liability too.
But he had a point; it couldn’t be denied. Keeping the secret in general meant looping him in, and I’d been an idiot not to realize it.I’m not going to take your money for nothing. I kept coming back to that, too. It seemed like such a strange position for a man like Pechorin to take.
Maybe I’d misjudged him. Shit.
Even though, “You’re a fucking mess, Castelli,” also still rang in my ears. That made it a lot harder to feel bad about making assumptions.
“I have Hensley’s,” I said, forcing myself to put the words together slowly and carefully. “It’s mostly my vision. I do have occasional seizures, but no grand mal so far. Myoclonic jerks—my legs start misbehaving, basically. Or I go a little fuzzy, but I don’t pass out completely. Except for once, and that still was only a partial seizure. My doctor says I’m not at risk for any of the more serious symptoms.”
