Marked by My Ex's Biggest Rival novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: Garden Party
I sat down on the floor in the broken glass.
Roark crouched beside me and picked a shard out of my palm before I even knew it was there.
"Who knew it was here?" he said.
"You. Addison. Krista." I swallowed. "And anybody who watched Desiree's video of me picking flowers and guessed why."
The bell rang.
Krista came in with two coffees, saw the glass, and dropped both of them.
"Oh, they did not."
"They did."
She stepped over the puddle, went straight behind the counter and pulled her laptop out from under it.
"Last spring somebody kept stealing my gauges," she said. "So I put a camera over the back alley. I never told you because you'd say it was paranoid."
"It's paranoid," I said.
"It's paranoid and it's motion-activated."
She scrubbed back through the night.
At two in the morning, a figure in a white puffer jacket came up the alley with a tire iron.
Platinum hair. Diamond studs flashing in the security light.
She smashed the window on the second try and climbed in.
Four minutes later she came back out with a black book under her arm.
On her way past the camera, she looked up at it and smiled.
"She knew it was there," Krista said. "She doesn't care."
"Because her father's the Council," Roark said.
Krista's phone buzzed on the counter.
She looked at it, then turned it around.
Desiree had posted twenty minutes ago.
A photo of Gran's sketchbook, open on a white tablecloth, next to a glass of champagne.
Chastain family archive. Proof of the old witchcraft. Showing it off at Daddy's garden party today!
"Garden party," I said.
"Four o'clock," Roark said. "Every Alpha gets an invitation. Mine's on the fridge."
I stood up.
Glass crunched under my boots.
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