“If you think the life of Alpha is better than yours, easier than yours, you are very sadly mistaken, Morgan.”

For all his privilege and money, for all the power that came with his position, he often wished, in the secret dark heart of his soul, the role of Alpha had fallen to another.

He alone was the leader. He alone held all their fates in his hands. It was not, as Morgan imagined, an all-access pass to happiness and fulfillment.

No. It was closer to a curse.

Morgan lifted her chin. “And how do you propose we go about this?” she asked icily. She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped one python-clad toe against the plush carpet. “I could use Suggestion to get her to go along for a while, a few hours possibly, but that will only go so far. How are we actually supposed to get her back to Sommerley? Kidnap her?”

“I think we should just tell her the truth,” Christian said from his position at the window. “She must know she’s different. What if we Shift in front of her and tell her she’s one of us?”

“And then what?” Morgan shot back, turning to give him a frosty stare. “Throw a bag over her head and drag her off when she freaks out and runs away?”

Christian ran a hand through his mass of shining black hair again, leaving it in disarray. “No. But we could drug her.”

“I was being sarcastic, Christian,” Morgan said with an exasperated sigh. “There’s no way we’re going to manhandle her, she’s not some piece of—”

Leander gripped the carved wood arms of the chair he was sitting in with such force they splintered under his hands. Morgan and Christian fell silent and looked over at him.

“If either of you had paid any attention during the Assembly meeting, you would know the plan,” he snapped, eyes blazing. “We will get her alone. We will subdue her with your power of Suggestion, Morgan. We will—”

The phone on the desk rang, interrupting him. He inhaled a long breath, released his grip on the chair, stood stiffly, and walked over to yank the receiver from its base.

“Yes,” he said into it, curt and low.

“What’s a few days’ difference?” Morgan said quietly to Christian, lobbying for his agreement.

He stretched his long arms out and put both palms flat against the glass, looking down at the view of the city below. “Agreed,” he murmured, almost to himself. “We should stay here awhile and...get to know her better before we take her back. Before her mind is made up for her.”

“What?” Morgan said. “What does that mean?”

He didn’t answer, and the tension in his shoulders suggested he wasn’t in the mood for more conversation.

She unfolded her arms, and the slender ruby bracelets encircling her right wrist released a knot of fiery sparks in band over faceted band. She shook back a swath of long, glossy locks from her face and glanced over at the ruined arms of Leander’s chair. “Anyway, if she isn’t home,” she persisted, “do we hang around her front door for a few hours, waiting for her to magically appear? Like that won’t look suspicious? Or are we supposed to go try to find her—”

“We don’t need to find her,” Leander interrupted quietly, setting the phone back down in its cradle. He turned to gaze at both of them with an odd look on his face, as if he’d just considered something deeply arresting.

“She found us. That was the front desk on the phone. She’s in the lobby.”

Jenna remembered very clearly the last time she saw her father alive.

It was a few days before her tenth birthday and raining very hard. The water sliced like needles down from the sullen, slate-gray sky. This would have been unusual for the month of June in most places, but at that time her family was living on Kauai, one of the smaller of the Hawaiian Islands. It rained almost every day in that green and lovely tropical paradise.

They’d been there a few weeks, no more. Boxes were still half-unpacked in the living room. Her mother never really bothered with completely unpacking all their belongings. They’d be packing them up soon enough again, she knew.

The smell of green vegetation, blooming plumeria, and wet, loamy earth soaked through everything in their small home. Her mother had left all the lights burning to ward off the gloom of a tropical summer storm, but her father had gone around the house in silence, turning off the bulbs one by one, stealthy and taut and ever unfathomable.

It was one of the things Jenna remembered most vividly about him. The way he always preferred to move in the dark, like some nocturnal creature of the forest on the hunt for dinner.

She’d been watching him again from her favorite hiding place, the tiny space under the stairs she’d turned into a warm burrow with pillows and blankets and her love-worn teddy bear. One of Teddy’s eyes was missing, the other a jaunty speck of black against plush caramel cheeks.

Her mother said she was too old to keep carrying him around, but Jenna couldn’t bear to part with him. Teddy and the clothes on her back were the only solid proof that she had a past.

Her father caught her watching, as he always did. Even when he didn’t call her out on it she sensed he knew her eyes were on him. But this time he called her name, motioned with his hand for her to crawl out from under the stairs.

She kept Teddy in her arms as she went over to him and climbed onto his lap in the rocking chair, watching the rain slide down the windowpanes like silvery tears. Through the glass she saw trees and grass and flowers smeared into muted plots of color as the patter of rain increased.

“Jenna,” he murmured into her hair. He held her tight in his arms and rocked back and forth, slowly kicking off the wood floor with one strong, bare foot. “Do you know who loves you?”

She was too young then to hear the tremor in his voice, so she smiled and wound her arms around his neck, nuzzling down into the warm space between his shoulder and neck, feeling happy and warm and oh so safe. He’d built a fire in the small fireplace in the living room; it crackled and sparked and threw off lovely waves of wood-scented heat.

“You do, Daddy,” she answered, the same answer every time.

“And do you know why Daddy loves you?” He tipped his head back to gaze down on her with those sparkling green eyes, his handsome face almost fuzzy that close.

She loved seeing him like this, unfocused and blurred in her half-lidded gaze. He seemed more real somehow. The detail of his eyelashes, the dark stubble on his chin, the pure white of his teeth as he smiled all served to make him less of a mystery, more...hers.

The mysterious, ragged scar on his jaw was still fading as it healed, four thin, ugly slashes of red going slowly to white, marring the perfection of his burnished, golden skin. He’d come home with it the day before they moved here.

“No,” she said, already knowing the answer but wanting to hear it again.

“Because you are a princess,” he whispered into her ear, stroking her back and hugging her even tighter. “Golden blonde and beautiful, strong and brave and worth any sacrifice. My princess who will one day be a queen.”

But something bothered her about this answer, something she hadn’t thought of before.

“What’s a sacrifice, Daddy?” she asked, wrinkling her brow to look up at him. He only smiled and kissed her forehead, rocked her back and forth until she fell asleep, warm and safe and happy against the hard expanse of his chest.

When she awoke the next morning she was in her bed, tucked in with Teddy under the threadbare patchwork quilt, and he was gone.

Since that night, every time it rained Jenna thought of her father and had to swallow the flame of agony that rose in her throat.

It wasn’t raining now, as she sat calmly in the lobby bar of the Four Seasons next to an enormous display of aubergine calla lilies and scented jasmine that loomed somewhat ominously over her table. It was blazing hot and so dry her eyes were sticky, but she was thinking of her father just the same.