The Three Alpha Brothers Want Me

The handle turned without a sound.

Chloe slipped inside and eased the door shut behind her. Sophia's room smelled faintly of lavender and old paper. Rain ticked against the window. In the narrow bed, Sophia lay curled on her side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, breathing slow and even.

She looked younger and asleep. Chloe noticed that and disliked it.

She crossed the room on bare feet, avoiding the loose floorboard by the desk. She had learned that years ago, back when she still crept in here to borrow things. Ribbons. Books. A silver hairpin she had never given back.

The wardrobe stood in the corner. Chloe opened it an inch at a time.

Coats. Cardigans. Plain dresses hung in a tidy row, every hanger facing the same direction.

Chloe pulled the blue velvet case from her pocket and pushed it deep behind the winter coats, where the shadows were thickest. Then she opened her other hand.

The necklace lay coiled in her palm. Diamonds, cold and heavy. Her stepfather's gift to her mother on their wedding day, worth more than most people earned in ten years.

She did not put it in the wardrobe.

She closed her fingers around it instead and turned toward the bed.

Sophia stirred. A small frown, a quiet murmured *Mum*.

Chloe froze. Her heartbeat kicked hard against her ribs. For three long seconds neither of them moved.

Then Sophia sighed, and her breathing settled again.

Chloe let out a slow breath and smiled.

"Sleep well," she whispered. "It's the last quiet night you'll have for a while."

She slipped out, and the door clicked shut behind her.

~~~

Sophia woke to shouting.

It took her a moment to understand that it was real. The sound was muffled, distant, somewhere below, but it had the edge of something breaking. She sat up, heart already racing, and grabbed her cardigan.

Grey light. Seven forty-two. Rain is still falling.

She reached the top of the stairs just as a maid ran past her, pale as milk, and disappeared toward the east wing.

"What's happened?" Sophia called.

The girl did not stop.

By the time Sophia reached the ground floor, half the household staff had gathered in the hallway outside her father's study.

Marta stood among them, twisting her apron. She caught Sophia's eye and shook her head, very slightly.

The study door was open.

Her stepmother stood in the middle of the room in a cream dressing gown, hair unpinned, face rigid with fury.

The steel safe hung open behind the skyline painting. She was holding a phone in one hand, and her knuckles had gone white around it.

"Where is my husband?"

"Mr. Hale left for the airport at five, ma'am." The head butler kept his voice careful. "His flight to Boston, as scheduled."

"Call him back."

"His phone is off while he's in the air-"

"Then call *someone*!"

Nobody moved. Sophia had never seen her stepmother lose composure like this. The woman was always ice, always polished. Now she looked like glass about to crack.

"Ma'am," Sophia said softly from the doorway, "is something wrong?"

Her stepmother turned.

It was only a look. But it went through Sophia like cold water.

"My necklace," her stepmother said. "The diamonds. They are gone."

Sophia's stomach dropped. "The ones Father gave you?"

"Do not say it like you don't know."

"I don't know anything about it. I only woke up a moment ago."

"How convenient."

Footsteps came pattering down the stairs. Chloe appeared in a pink robe, hair tousled, eyes wide and already glassy with worry.

"Mummy? What's happened? I heard shouting, I was so frightened-" She stopped when she saw the safe. Her hand flew to her throat. "Oh no. Oh, Mummy, no. Not the necklace."

Her mother pulled her into a fierce embrace. Over Chloe's shoulder, for less than a second, Chloe's gaze found Sophia's.

Nothing in it. Not a flicker. Just calm, bright, empty blue.

Sophia felt the strangest chill. She could not have said why.

"Someone has been in this house," her stepmother said, releasing Chloe. "Someone with access. The safe wasn't forced. No alarms were triggered. Which means it was opened by a person who knew the code."

The staff shifted uneasily. A younger maid started to cry quietly.

"Everyone will be questioned," her stepmother continued. "Every room will be searched. Every bag, every drawer, every cupboard. I don't care how long it takes."

"Mummy, is that really necessary?" Chloe's voice trembled with concern. "The staff have been with us for years. Perhaps we should be careful about accusing people."

Her mother's expression softened as she looked at her daughter.

"You are far too kind."

"I only think everyone should be treated fairly. If we search the staff quarters, we should search the family's rooms too. Mine as well. So no one can say we were unfair."

Sophia watched the performance and felt something uneasy stir at the back of her mind.

*Why is she suggesting that?*

Her stepmother nodded slowly.

"Yes. Quite right. Start with the family bedrooms. Now."

~~~

They started with Chloe's room, and found nothing.

They searched her stepmother's dressing room next. Nothing there either. Sophia stood in the corridor with her arms wrapped around herself, watching maids move through the upper floor with careful, frightened hands.

"Sophia's room," her stepmother said.

Two staff members went in. Sophia followed as far as the doorway and stopped there.

Drawers were pulled open. The mattress lifted. The desk was checked, then the shelves, then the small wooden box where she kept her mother's letters.

Sophia's cheeks burned as a stranger's fingers turned over the private folded pages.

"Nothing here, ma'am," one of them called.

Relief loosened her shoulders.

"The wardrobe," her stepmother said.

"We haven't-"

"Open it."

A maid pulled the doors wide and began moving coats aside. Sophia heard the soft rasp of hangers sliding along the rail. Then a pause.

"Ma'am."

The maid's voice had changed. Small. Careful.

She stepped back, holding something in both hands.

A slim blue velvet case.

For a moment the whole corridor went quietly.

Sophia stared. "That isn't mine."

Her stepmother crossed the room in three strides and took the case. She opened it. Inside, a shallow bed of white silk lay pressed into the shape of a necklace that was no longer there.

Empty.

"That isn't mine," Sophia repeated. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. "I've never seen it before. I don't know how it got in there."

"It was in your wardrobe."

"I know, but I-"

"Behind your winter coats."

"Yes, ma'am, but I didn't put it there."

"Then who did?"

The question hung in the air. Sophia opened her mouth, and nothing came out.

Who? Anyone. Everyone. Someone had walked into her room while she slept, and the horrible truth was that she would never have known. She never locked her door. She had never thought she needed to.

"I don't know," she said quietly.

"You don't know." Her stepmother's voice was very flat. "The necklace vanishes from a locked safe. The case is discovered in *your* room. And you don't know."

"Mummy." Chloe had appeared at the door, her fingers pressed to her lips. "Please don't be angry at her. Maybe there's an explanation. Maybe Sophia just wanted to look at it, and she was going to put it back, and then she got frightened-"

"I never touched it!" The words came out sharper than Sophia intended. She swallowed and lowered her voice. "Chloe, please. I would never do that."

"I know you wouldn't want to," Chloe said gently. "But sometimes when people are struggling..."

She let the sentence trail off. Kind. Sad. Perfect.

Sophia stared at her. It struck her, like a pane of glass sliding into place, that Chloe had not asked a single question all morning. Not who, not when, not how.

Not once.

"Where is it, Sophia?" her stepmother asked.

"I don't have it."

"Where is it?"

"I don't *have* it." Her voice cracked. She hated that it cracked. "I swear on my mother's memory. I didn't take your necklace."

Something flickered across her stepmother's face at the mention of the dead woman. It hardened instantly.

"Do not use her name to defend yourself."

"I'm not defending-" Sophia stopped. She pressed her palms together, trying to steady them. "Ma'am, I'm only telling you the truth. Please, search for me. Search for anything you like. I'll answer whatever you ask."

"Oh, I will have answers," her stepmother said. "Just not here."

She snapped the velvet case shut and turned to the butler waiting in the corridor.

"Lock the front gates. Nobody leaves the buildin. Not the staff, not the drivers, not anyone."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And tell Marta to stop hovering and get back to the kitchen."

Behind the doorframe, Marta flinched and disappeared.

Sophia felt the room tilt. It didn't seem real. A few hours ago she had been asleep beneath her mother's photograph, and now she was standing in the wreckage of her own privacy, with a stranger's crime laid at her feet like a wreath.

She looked at Chloe once more.

Chloe looked back, eyes bright and full of sympathy.

And, very faintly, at the corner of her mouth, something curled. Something that was not sorrow.

It vanished before anyone else could see it.

"Ten o'clock," her stepmother said. "My study. You will sit in front of me, and you will explain every single thing you know."

"Yes, ma'am," Sophia whispered.

Her stepmother swept out, Chloe close behind her, one hand resting protectively on her mother's arm.

The staff dispersed. The corridor emptied. Only Sophia remained, standing alone beside her ransacked bedroom.

Downstairs, a clock began to chime.

She had never dreaded a door before. Now, as she walked down the stairs toward that closed oak study, she realised how many doors in this house she had never truly looked at.

At the bottom of the staircase, a voice she didn't recognise spoke from the hallway, low and official.

A man in a dark coat stood beside her stepmother, a small leather badge folded open in his palm.