Alpha by Jasinda Wilder Read Free Book Online Page B

been stalking me?”
    He sighed. “Essentially, yes. Watching. Waiting. Protecting.”
    “Protecting?”
    “Yes, Kyrie. Protecting. I’ve kept an eye on you. How do you think I knew to send the check when I did?” I heard him shift, a pause, and then the sound of an object being set upon a table. A few moments later, a door opened somewhere, and footsteps approached us. “Harris.”
    “Hello, Harris,” I said.
    “Good evening, Miss St. Claire.”
    “Harris here has been the eye I’ve kept on you. His primary instruction was to watch, unobserved, and never, ever make any contact, or allow you to ever feel watched. Did he succeed in that?”
    I thought long and hard. “Yes, I suppose so. There have been a few times where I had a vague sense of being watched, but mostly, no.”
    “I have a file on you, several flash drives full of photographs. And let me reassure you that you’ve never been photographed in any way that would violate your privacy. There are no nude or revealing photographs, no shots of you in private with any of your boyfriends or…liaisons…over the years. Just enough to inform, to know.”
    “To know what ? And why?”
    “To know you. To be sure that you’re okay, safe, provided for.”
    “But I wasn’t provided for. I wasn’t safe.”  
    “Yes, you were. You never starved. You were never in any direct danger. I only interfered when I felt there were no options left. And there were a couple of times Harris acted to keep you safe, although you may not be aware that anything even happened. He is, after all, very good at his job.” He paused, and then continued. “Harris?”
    Harris spoke. “Miss St. Claire. Do you remember St. Patrick’s Day two years ago? You and your friend Layla went out drinking. You two drank from noon to well past two in the morning. You were both extremely intoxicated.”
    I blink behind the blindfold, thinking back. “Yes. I remember.”
    “You were wearing a lime-green T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Layla was wearing a…well, I suppose one could call it a dress. It was…rather short.”
    I couldn’t help but laugh at his description. Layla’s dress had barely covered her ass, and if she moved wrong, the bottom of her ass did actually show beneath the hemline. Then the fact that he knew exactly what we were wearing that night sank in, and I started shaking. “You were…there?”
    “I was always there, Miss St. Claire. Out of sight, but there. You and Layla were too drunk to even walk straight that night, but there were no cabs, and the bus didn’t go where you needed to go. So you ended up walking—and I use the term ‘walking’ very loosely—all the way home. Seventeen blocks. At two in the morning, in downtown Detroit.”
    I shuddered as I remembered that night. We had been living together then, in a shitty-ass apartment downtown. We rarely ventured outside past dark and never, ever, alone. That night, though, we did. And we’d thought, the next day, that it was a miracle we’d made it home alive. Now I was starting to think it was less a miracle than Harris’s unseen protection.  
    “That was an insanely bad decision on our part,” I said. “We woke up the next day amazed that we’d made it home intact.”
    “You shouldn’t have,” he said. “You almost didn’t.”
    “What?” I took a sip of Scotch, for courage. “What do you mean?”
    Harris answered. “Layla was so drunk you basically carried her the whole way. She couldn’t stand up, couldn’t walk, couldn’t even speak. You weren’t much better off, but you managed somehow. I’ll never know how you did it. You actually puked a few times, while you were dragging your blacked-out friend.” Harris’s voice was bemused. “You remember anything from that walk home? Any sense of danger? Anyone who might have proved to be a threat?”
    I thought hard. That walk home was a blur in my mind. I remembered very little, just a few random thoughts: how heavy Layla had been, how