Page 26 of The Florist and Her Alphas

“I am not shouting.”

“You were,” August says from behind Cole’s shoulder. He is still in pajama pants, his sandy hair sticking up in three different directions, his bright blue eyes wide and worried behind his glasses. “I heard you from my room.”

I accept the coffee through gritted teeth. The ceramic is hot against my palm.

“Cole, have you found out anything about her?” I snap.

“Liana?”

“Of course, I mean fucking Liana!”

August’s eyes go wide. The honey scent brightens by several degrees. “...oh.”

“I did,” Cole says. No inflection. Flat as concrete.

My head snaps to him. “Tell me.”

Cole sets his coffee on Julian’s desk. He reaches under his arm and pulls out a slim leather folio I had not noticed until this moment. He opens it on Julian’s bed, and the four of us gather around it like men around a campfire.

“I started looking into her two days ago,” Cole says. “The minute the cafe meeting ended.”

“Okay,” I say. “Continue.”

“Liana Marsh. Twenty-four years old. Sole proprietor of Marsh Florals, LLC. The shop has been open three years. She acquired the lease and opened the doors with thirty-four thousand dollars in cash deposited into a brand-new business account the day before.”

“Cash,” August says. The word hangs.

“Cash. Untraceable to any prior account or financial history.”

Julian’s voice is slow. Careful. “Where did the cash come from?”

“I don’t know yet. But the timing is interesting.”

“Family,” I say.

Cole looks at me. “Her family is deceased.”

The room goes quiet.

“How?” I ask.

“That’s where it gets thin.” Cole turns a page. “The official record says her family died six years ago in an upstate New York incident classified as a ‘feral animal attack.’ There were others who died with her parents. I’m still pulling names. A grandmother. An uncle. Possibly the entire household.”

“Her entire family?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

I absorb this. Piece by piece. The cafe meeting rearranges itself in my memory — the defiance in her eyes, the shaking hands she hid under the table. I had thought she was being theatrical. I had thought she was negotiating.

Cole has clipped her business license photograph to the front of the folio. I look at it for the first time.

At the time of the picture, she is twenty-one. Her face is pale. Thin. Her dark auburn hair is pulled back in a severe bun that does nothing to soften the angles of her cheekbones. Her eyes are braced for something.

She had just opened the shop. With cash. Both parents recently dead. Her grandmother dead. Her uncle dead. The entire household.

“She has no one,” I say quietly, trying to absorb all this information.

The room is silent. Julian’s hand is on the edge of the folio, his fingers pressed white against the leather.