Julius didn't sleep that night. Harrison's words kept circling back, unwelcome and impossible to ignore: her family is not as harmless as you think.
He told himself it was nothing. A tactic. Another way for Harrison to plant a seed of doubt and watch it take root in the dark, the way he'd done with everything else since that night in the club. By morning, Julius had almost convinced himself of it. By noon, the doubt still hadn't left, and he found himself doing something he never imagined he would: digging into the woman he was supposed to marry.
It started small. Public filings. Old news archives. The kind of surface-level research anyone could do in an hour. Helen's family had always presented itself as old money — clean, respectable, the kind of wealth that didn't need to explain itself. Julius had never questioned it. There had never been a reason to.
But when the surface search turned up nothing, instead of letting it go, he kept pulling the thread.
He reached out to people he rarely called — men who operated in the spaces between legal and deniable, the kind who owed him favors he'd never had to collect before. By evening, the first report landed on his desk, and Julius read it standing up, still in his coat, unwilling to sit down for what it might say.
Helen's father, James Calloway, had built his fortune in shipping. On paper, it was immaculate — government contracts, charitable boards, three generations of respectability. But buried four layers down in a holding company structure designed to be difficult to trace, Julius found a name that made his stomach turn.
A logistics firm, quietly funded through Calloway-linked accounts, tied to a man who had been investigated twice for arms trafficking and walked away both times without charges.
Julius sat down heavily, the report still in his hand. It didn't prove anything outright. Men like Calloway built empires precisely so that nothing could ever be proven outright. But it was enough — more than enough — to explain why a family with old, careful wealth had been so eager, so fast, to align themselves with an Alpha whose company carried government contracts that demanded spotless partners.
This wasn't a marriage built on love, or even simple convenience. It was cover. And Julius had walked into it with his eyes closed, too focused on legacy and power to ask the obvious question.
He sat with that thought for a long time before he picked up the phone and called Marcus. "I need everything on James Calloway's shipping contracts for the last five years," Julius said, his voice flat and controlled despite the storm underneath it. "Quietly. I don't want this traced back to me."
There was a pause on the line. "This is Helen's father," Marcus said carefully. "You're sure you want to go down this road?"
"I need to know what I'm marrying into," Julius said. "Before it's too late to walk away from it."
He ended the call and stood at the window of his office, watching the city stretch out gray and indifferent below him, lights blinking on as the afternoon faded. He thought of Helen's face the night before — the hurt in her voice when she'd asked him who Harrison was, the way she'd looked at him like she already suspected she was losing something she couldn't name.
Maybe she didn't know any of this. Maybe she was as much a piece being moved on this board as Julius himself. Either way, he needed the truth before he stood in front of her family and made promises he wouldn't be able to take back.
His phone buzzed against the desk. A message, unknown number — the same one Harrison always used.
Find anything interesting?
Julius's grip on the phone tightened until his knuckles ached. He typed back, How did you know.
The reply came almost instantly, like Harrison had been waiting. I told you. I don't do anything by half measures. I looked into her family before I ever looked at you.
Julius stared at the screen, a cold understanding settling over him slowly, inevitably, like ice forming on still water. Harrison hadn't only been circling his company. He had been circling everyone in Julius's life, mapping every weakness, every loose thread, long before that first night in the club.
Why tell me now, Julius typed, his thumb hovering before he sent it.
Because you needed a reason to keep looking instead of walking back to her tonight, Harrison wrote. And because I don't like watching you choose a lie over me.
Julius set the phone down, his hand unsteady in a way it hadn't been in years. Somewhere beneath the anger, beneath the betrayal still settling into his chest, a quieter and far more dangerous thought was taking shape.
Harrison hadn't only disrupted his life. He might be the only person in it telling him the truth.