chapter 7 : Eleanor
2277 Words
REMI'S POV
By Wednesday afternoon I had fourteen pages of the Meridian analysis done and a growing conviction that their CFO, a man named Gerald Park, had been cooking the books on their subsidiary's R&D expenditures in a way that was technically defensible but would look extremely ugly under acquisition due diligence.
I was deep in a thread of quarterly reports when the elevator dinged.
My wolf noticed before I did — that particular alertness, ears up, paying attention before my conscious mind had caught up. It was the same animal instinct that had made me sit up straighter in the conference room when Jade Sterling walked in. Rank. Old rank. Concentrated, refined, the kind of Alpha power that comes not from aggression but from generations of it simply being the air in the room.
I looked up.
The woman walking off the elevator looked like she'd been born in the middle of a board meeting and had been running them ever since. Silver hair in a precise updo. A cream Chanel suit that managed to look both expensive and like she hadn't thought about it once. Pearls at her throat — real ones, the irregular kind, not the perfect spheres of someone performing wealth. She had to be in her seventies but she moved like someone half that, and she moved like she knew exactly how much space she occupied and had decided it was exactly the right amount.
Margaret was on her feet before I'd fully processed what I was looking at.
"Mrs. Wolfe." Warm, professional, the careful warmth of someone who understood they were dealing with someone who could end careers but had chosen not to. "What a lovely surprise."
"Margaret, dear." The woman's voice was exactly what I'd have predicted from looking at her — warm honey poured over something that had been forged rather than grown. "Is my grandson available?"
My wolf sat all the way up.
Mrs. Wolfe. Dax's grandmother.
"He's on a call, but I'll let him know you're here." Margaret reached for her phone.
Eleanor Wolfe — because it could only be Eleanor, the name was in every third piece of documentation about the Wolfe family I'd processed this week — turned from the reception desk and looked at me with eyes that were the same shape as Dax's but a different color. Where his were dark gray, hers were a lighter gray that had gone almost silver, and they moved over me with the same systematic thoroughness his did, but with the addition of something warmer and considerably more dangerous.
Interest.
"And who might you be?"
I stood. Not because I felt obligated to, but because something about her presence made sitting feel like an incorrectly submitted report. "Remi Cole, ma'am. Mr. Wolfe's executive assistant."
"New?"
"Just over a week."
"Interesting." She moved closer, unhurried, the way confident people move through spaces they've decided belong to them. Her gaze was doing serious work — I could feel it the way you feel sunlight on your skin, present and warm and not entirely comfortable. "The last assistant lasted three weeks. What makes you think you'll do better?"
The question had edges on it. Not hostile edges — test edges. The kind designed to find out if you'd flinch.
"I'm stubborn," I said.
Something shifted in her face. A real smile — the kind that reached the eyes, unexpected and genuine, the kind that made you understand that the polished exterior was a choice rather than a limitation.
"I can see that." She studied me a moment longer. "Are you mated, Miss Cole?"
The question hit from an angle I hadn't been covering. "No, ma'am."
"Good. Dax needs someone who can focus." She said it clinically, as if she were noting a relevant qualification. Then Dax's office door opened and she turned toward him. "There's my grandson."
"Grandmother." His voice was carefully, precisely neutral — the voice of a man who'd developed an entire register specifically for interactions with this woman. "I didn't know you were coming."
"If I called ahead, you'd reschedule." She crossed to him and cupped his face in both hands the way grandmothers do in movies, except that on Eleanor Wolfe it looked like a quality inspection. "You look tired."
"I'm fine."
"You're working too much." She released him and turned back toward me. "Your new assistant seems competent." A pause — one beat, deliberate. "Bring her to dinner Sunday. Seven o'clock."
"She's my employee, not —"
"I'm aware of what she is." Eleanor's tone was the temperature of a pleasant room that had been carefully maintained at exactly the right degree. "If she's going to be working closely with you, I'd like to know her properly. Sunday. Seven. Don't be late." She patted his cheek once. "And Miss Cole — wear something nice. It's a formal dinner."
She swept back to the elevator with the unhurried certainty of someone who had given instructions and had no particular interest in discussing them further. The elevator doors opened as she arrived, which seemed less like coincidence and more like the elevator understood who it was dealing with.
The doors closed.
Dax stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the closed elevator for a moment with the expression of a man computing the fastest route through an unavoidable situation.
"Is Sunday dinner mandatory?" I asked.
"Unfortunately." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "She won't take no from me. She never has."
"Should I be worried?"
"She liked you." He said it the way someone notes a relevant data point. "That's not nothing. She doesn't like most people immediately."
"She asked if I was mated."
"She always asks that. She's been asking every woman in my orbit that question for six years." He turned back toward his office. "Sunday. Seven PM. I'll text you the address." He paused at his door. "There's a boutique on Fifth Avenue — Claire works there. Tell them you're my guest and that it's the Wolfe family dinner. They'll know what's needed. It goes on my account."
"I can dress myself."
"I know." His voice was dry and entirely certain. "The Wolfe family dinner has a dress code. Claire knows it. Your thrift store blazer does not." He looked at me once — quickly, impersonally. "Consider it a uniform expense. Like a work event that requires specific attire."
He went into his office.
I sat at my desk and looked at my Meridian Tech analysis and thought: dinner with his grandmother. While hiding the fact that I'm pregnant with her great-grandchild.
"You look like you're going to be sick," Margaret said from across the floor.
"I am going to be sick."
She was already heading for the break room. "I'll get the tea."
Thursday morning arrived the way bad ideas do — with total commitment and no warning.
I was at my desk by seven-thirty, crackers and ginger tea in hand, fourteen pages of Meridian analysis on my left screen and Gerald Park's suspicious R&D expenditure trail on my right. The floor was quiet. I had thirty minutes before Dax arrived and approximately four pages left to write.
The elevator dinged at seven fifty-two.
The woman who stepped off it looked like Tuesday's meeting had never ended. Dove-gray suit, ice-blue eyes, silver-blonde hair impeccable at seven-fifty-two in the morning as if she'd scheduled it that way. She walked off the elevator and straight to my desk and her eyes found mine before she'd stopped moving.
"Remi." Jade Sterling smiled. "You're here early."
Everything in me went very still. "Ms. Sterling. Did we have something scheduled?"
"No. I was hoping to catch Dax before his day started." She gestured vaguely at the empty floor around us. "Before the machinery gets going." She perched on the edge of the small client chair beside my desk — not in it, on it, the way someone sits when they want to communicate that they're not staying but also aren't leaving. "We can chat while I wait."
"Mr. Wolfe typically arrives at eight." I didn't close my laptop. "I can let him know you're here when he comes in, or I can schedule something for later this week —"
"I'll wait." She crossed one leg over the other. "Tell me — how are you finding it? Working for him."
"I'm finding it exactly as described in the job posting."
She laughed. The real one — I recognized it now from the conference room. "He'd have liked that answer." She looked at my screens without pretending not to. "Meridian Tech."
"It's not confidential that we have multiple research projects running."
"No. It's not." She was quiet for a moment, watching me the way she'd watched me through the whole of Tuesday's meeting — that particular quality of attention that felt less like looking and more like data collection. "I came in through the secondary entrance during the break on Tuesday. Did you know that?"
"Yes."
"Did you tell him?"
"Of course."
She nodded slowly. "Good. He'd have been irritated if you hadn't." She uncrossed her legs. "I'm going to tell you something, Remi, because I think you're smart enough to use it properly. Dax Wolfe is one of the most extraordinary people I've ever known. He is also completely incapable of letting people in unless they force the door. He will respect you, he will use your skills, he will protect you in his way — which is efficient and impersonal and nothing like what it looks like in the movies." She held my gaze. "But if you're expecting him to meet you halfway emotionally, you will be waiting for a very long time."
"With respect, Ms. Sterling, that's not information I need."
"Isn't it?"
"I'm his assistant. Not his —"
The elevator dinged.
Dax stepped off and stopped walking in the same instant his eyes found Jade sitting at my desk. The calculation happened fast — I was learning to read the micro-second of processing before his face locked into its usual professional neutral.
"What are you doing here," he said. Not a question. A statement requesting an explanation.
"Following up on the Riverside permits." Jade stood with the smooth, easy movement of someone who'd rehearsed the version of this moment where she had the upper hand. "I had questions about the easement language."
"Email them to my assistant. She'll direct them appropriately." He crossed the floor without adjusting his trajectory for her, which meant she had to step aside. "Miss Cole. My office."
He went in. The door closed.
Jade gathered her bag. She looked at me for a moment.
"He discards people," she said, pleasantly. "I'm not trying to be cruel. It's just — accurate. He decides something is finished and it's finished. Ask Sarah. Ask Jennifer." A pause. "Ask me."
She walked to the elevator.
I sat for exactly three seconds before standing and going into Dax's office.
He was at the window again.
"Sit down," he said, without turning.
I sat.
"She came through the secondary entrance again."
"No. The main elevator this time." I set my notepad on my knee. "She arrived at seven-fifty-two. She said she was here about the Riverside permit easement language."
"She has questions about a permit easement at seven-fifty-two in the morning."
"She also told me you were incapable of letting people in and would eventually discard me."
He turned from the window. His expression was neutral, but there was something behind the neutrality that was paying attention. "And?"
"And I told her I'm your assistant, not whatever category she was trying to place me in." I held his gaze. "She said to ask you, ask Sarah, ask Jennifer. And ask her."
A pause. Long enough that I wondered if I'd gone too far.
"Jade and I were engaged," he said. "Three years ago. I ended it. She has not — adjusted her understanding of that."
"Why did you end it?"
The question surprised him. I could tell because he almost didn't answer, and Dax Wolfe didn't almost anything. "Because she wanted what I represented. Not who I am." He crossed to his desk, sat down, picked up his pen. "There's a difference. She's never understood that distinction."
"What does she think you represent?"
"Power. Access. Legacy." He looked at me directly. "The kind of things that look like love when you want them badly enough." He clicked his pen once. "The three-company analysis. Friday."
"I'll have it."
"And if Sterling shows up again before I arrive, you call security."
"I know."
"She won't push you physically. But she'll push every other way available to her." His eyes held mine for a moment. "Don't let her reframe your position. You know what your position is."
"I'm your assistant."
"You're the most competent person on this floor," he said, the way he'd said good catch — flat, factual, not designed to be kind, just accurate. "That's your position. Everything else is noise."
I stood. "I'll have Westfield and Blackstone drafted by Thursday evening so I can polish Friday morning."
"Wednesday evening. I want to review Meridian Thursday."
"Wednesday evening," I said, and walked out.
At my desk, I opened the Meridian file and typed for the next four hours without stopping. The analysis was good. I could feel it the way you can feel when writing is working — the way the pieces fit without being forced, the way the conclusions arrived from the evidence rather than being retrofitted.
At noon, Margaret appeared with a sandwich and set it on my desk without comment.
"Eat," she said.
I ate. Then I kept typing.
- Writer
