Page 27 of The Florist and Her Alphas

“It’s horrible,” Julian says very softly.

“It wasn’t an animal attack,” I say. The words come out before I’ve fully formed the thought. “No animal kills an entire household of our kind just like that. Not without purpose. Not without someone directing it.” I look at Cole. “Keep digging. I want to know exactly what happened. I need to know who did this. Everything.”

Cole nods once.

My brothers talk among themselves while I still stare at the photograph.

She was twenty-one, walking into a flower shop with a secret stack of cash, no family, and building a business out of nothing. I am thinking about myself at nineteen. I had just inherited Frostwood Holdings from the last of our dead fathers. I had suddenly been responsible for three younger brothers, a building, a company, and the weight of a name that felt too heavy on my shoulders. I had thought, for years afterward, that I had carried the heaviest weight a man could carry at that age.

I look at Liana Marsh’s photograph and feel, for the first time, something hot and unfamiliar crack open behind my sternum.

“Cole,” I say. “I want a full report by tonight. Cause of death of the family. Where she has lived for the past six years. Everything you can pull.”

“Done.”

August looks at me. His blue eyes are earnest behind his glasses. “Will you apologize to her?”

I look at him. “I’ll consider it…”

“Good,” August says. He turns and walks out. Cole follows him, the folio under his arm, his coffee in his other hand.

I am left alone in Julian’s room with Julian. I glance around Julian’s room out of habit. Looking for what I can criticize. The cigar in the ashtray. The mess of books. The empty glass.

My eyes stop. My eyebrow lifts.

There is a delicate pair of pink panties on the floor near the foot of Julian’s bed. Cotton. Simple. Partially hidden under a gray T-shirt Julian has dropped there.

“Julian,” I say.

Julian, who has been staring at the empty space in the folio on the bed, looks up. “What?”

I nod at the floor. “Why the fuck are there panties on the floor of your room?”

Julian goes utterly white. He follows my gaze. He sees the panties. He sees me seeing the panties. The color drains from his face so completely I can track his pulse in the vein at his temple.

“...those aren’t mine,” he says.

“Yes, Julian, I know they’re not yours,” I say calmly. “Whose are they?”

Julian scrambles. He grabs the shirt and drops it over the panties, covering them with a gesture so panicked it would be comical in any other context. “It was accidentally in the laundry, I think.”

Pepper, from his perch on the desk, chooses exactly this moment to clear his throat. He tilts his bright yellow head ninety degrees and says, with crystal clarity: “I shouldn’t have taken those.”

A long, terrible silence.

Pepper, helpful: “Where the fuck did I put them?”

Julian closes his eyes. His jaw works. I can see him calculating the distance to the nearest window and whether Pepper would survive the fall.

I slowly turn my head to look at Pepper. I slowly turn my head back to Julian.

“Julian Frostwood,” I say.

Julian opens his eyes. “Ezra. Don’t.”

“Julian.” My voice is very quiet. The precision of a knife. “Did you knot her?”

Julian’s head snaps up. “What?”