Page 60 of Choosing Her Alpha
Sasha would dare a lot. Her instincts were taking over, her intellect set aside. If Bella continued hissing, Sasha was going to attack her, pull her hair and shred that look off her face.
"Is it only because I’m a younger rival? Is that why you hate me? I walked into this room a child, you knew that. Saw that. You were kind and then you were vicious. You wanted me to see you with him so that I would know my place, I guess. Is it because you come from the slums too? Did you have to prove something to me? Or were you trying to prove it to yourself?"
Bella flinched.
"You are not where you are born. And you could have been more, kind, better, even in this world. You could have chosen a different path. Breeders choose. You chose poorly."
Sasha tapped her heart and stood up. She caught the look of surprise on their faces and wondered at it, until she looked at Queen Annalise and realized she should have deferred to the other woman. Biting her lip, Sasha held out her hands to help the queen stand and was grateful when she took them.
The queen looked at her first chair. "Fulfill our end of the exchange contracts and escort the ladies out, please." Her smile at the room was gracious and ice cold.
Sasha saw where Kane got it from now.
Chapter 16
Kane sent a wooden trunk. The big, metal wrapped thing appeared one day in his rooms, along with a message that it was the contents of Sasha’s father's safe and not to open it yet.
She was pleased he’d kept his word.
But the thing sat there like a portent of something ugly to come. She had once eagerly anticipated revisiting the unique recipes that had made her father's pub famous. Their bottled gin sold well in the markets of the better sectors. She had fond memories of washing, filling, and sealing glass bottles for her dad to take with him for selling.
He'd talked about licensing fees, material costs, and transporting problems, and he blamed it all on Administration holding him down. They couldn't handle enough bulk product to make it cost effective. She had dreamed with her father, and when he was gone, she’d dreamed with the drones who were her family—that one day, they would thrive.
Now she wondered what he had left out of his tirades. What had he not said about his dreams for expansion? She thought he meant for her to work alongside him, but her conversation with Kane had shaken that belief.
There was more in that safe than just recipes. Her father kept logs and journals. He had shown them to her. He’d started in his school and military days and never gave up the habit. There was a very good chance that those accounts and writings would support all of Kane's accusations against her father. They might even point to where her half-siblings had gone.
Sasha was afraid to find out.
She let go of the image of her dad as the man who’d helped and cared for everyone. She let go of the idea of him as a good person. But she didn’t want to think that he had been so selfishly driven that he never loved her and only planned to use her.
She couldn’t think that.
*
Sasha was crossing from the rear service port to the laundry house when the outside breeze shifted. Her hair lifted from her back and the bottom of her dress briefly twisted around her legs, the thin material pulled tight. Turning into the playful feel of the storm scented afternoon air, she started to laugh.
The sound died in her throat when the breeze brought the smell of a musk so much more potent than a storm. She hadn’t smelled that for months. She’d nearly forgotten save for the traces in the house.
Kane.
The back of the compound was a common entrance for drones and employees alike. It was easier to drive through the gates and unload there and avoid the front of the building with its grand circular drive facing the street. Sasha walked past transports and drones at work, waving distractedly back at them when they called out greetings.
That smell. It made her mouth water. She needed more of it. The tiny bit of it filled up her senses.
She searched faces as she followed the spiced musk scent. It could be she was smelling someone who had been with him, or maybe his laundry.
The enticing aroma was there and gone again. Her task forgotten, all her attention narrowed and focused on Kane. She had some things to say to that absent man.
She followed a gravel road that curled around tall trees toward the back of the property. Never having explored here, she thought it was a forested area or a park. She hadn't expected to walk up a slight incline, pass a guard checkpoint, and suddenly find herself looking down on a military exercise arena.
Shirtless, wearing some sort of belted, skirt like cut-off pants, Kane was a giant in the center of the ring of alpha males. Holding two thick bladed swords, he used the weapons to strike and pummel the men who attacked him with their own weapons in numbers of threes and fives.
Many of the men wore padding on their chests, legs, and arms. Kane's strikes made loudthwompingnoises that echoed through the air. As she got closer, Sasha could see that Kane's swords were only wood, while the attackers used the heavy blades owned by those who'd served in the king's army for thirty years or more. Alphas only.
He was the alpha of alphas. A warlord. Any man who could beat him in challenge would be honored, might even take over Kane's compound and station, because breed respected strength like no other species. The old and the weak did not rule; they were cut down by the young and the clever. Kane was as old as his parents bond, his life lengthened by the close contact and powerful love of his mother’s breeder's blessing.
He moved with the grace and power of a man at his peak in a dance of death too quick for the eye to follow. Taller than every other man in the yard, corded with muscle, he should not have been able to move so fluidly.
