Rejected Luna: Pregnant By The Ruthless Alpha Ceo After One Night

Chapter 4 : Nine Pages

REMI'S POV

At 11:30 on Friday morning, my desk phone buzzed.

One ring. Dax's extension. It was never more than one ring — like he assumed the world would pick up on the first.

"Miss Cole. My office. Bring the Sterling report."

The line went dead before I could answer.

I stared at my monitor for exactly three seconds, doing the math. The report wasn't finished. I'd planned to spend my lunch hour polishing the executive summary, add the final two pages of comparative analysis, print it clean and deliver it at two o'clock like a professional who had her life together.

It was eleven-thirty. I had nine pages and a half-written conclusion.

I could tell him it wasn't ready. I could ask for two more hours. I could explain, very reasonably, that he'd given me a four-day deadline and this was day four at the wrong end of the morning.

I looked at Dax's closed office door through the glass wall. Thought about every interaction I'd had with him this week. The coffee thermometer. The ground rules. The way he'd said don't bring me a problem without a proposed solution like it was the only rule that actually mattered.

I printed the nine pages I had.

They were good pages. They were, if I was being completely clinical about it, better than anything he was likely to get from someone who'd padded their way to ten. The Sterling Enterprises Q3 analysis was thorough. The board composition breakdown had found something — Thomas Reeves, a senior board member, quietly liquidating personal shares since Q2 through a charitable foundation most people wouldn't have thought to cross-reference. The lawsuit settlement buried in a subsidiary filing from eighteen months ago suggested a compliance problem that Sterling's PR team had been quietly sanding down ever since.

Nine pages. No filler. Every word doing something.

I stapled them, clipped a sticky note to the front that said Addendum on Sterling deal history: ready by 3PM, and walked to Dax's office.

He was on the phone when I entered — Mandarin, rapid, the particular cadence of someone who'd stopped having to think about the language and just used it. He gestured toward the chair across from his desk without looking up.

I sat. The office was quieter than the floor outside, which was strange, because it was all glass. Dax had somehow created a room that felt sealed. Pressurized. Like whatever happened inside it was operating under different atmospheric conditions than the rest of the world.

I'd spent the week sneaking glances at him through the glass from my desk. Watching him move through meetings and phone calls and directives with the same unhurried certainty he'd had at The Apex. At the bar he'd seemed dangerous in an interesting way, like something worth being careful about. Here, he was dangerous in an entirely different register — the kind you couldn't charm or outmaneuver, the kind that had already thought three moves ahead before you'd decided on your opening.

He ended the call.

The silence in the room was immediate and total.

He turned to me, and those gray eyes did their usual thing — moved over me quickly, cataloguing, giving nothing back. "The Sterling report."

I handed it across the desk. "Nine pages. The addendum on her deal history will be ready by three."

He took it. Didn't react to the page count discrepancy. Just opened to the first page and started reading.

I sat very still.

He read the way he did everything else — with complete focus, no visible tells. He turned pages at a pace that meant he was actually reading, not skimming. A minute in, his pen came out and he made a small note in the margin. Another page. Another note. He flipped back to cross-reference something on page three against something on page six.

The silence stretched.

"You said ten pages," he said finally, without looking up.

"Yes."

"This is nine."

"Yes."

He turned to the section on Thomas Reeves. Read it twice — I could tell by the way his eyes tracked back. "When I give you parameters, I expect them met. Ten pages means ten pages."

"When the quality demands nine, I'm not going to add filler to hit a number." I kept my voice level. "If you want the tenth page, I can add a condensed version of information already in the executive summary. Or I can add the Sterling deal history, which is more useful and which I'll have ready by three. Your call."

His pen stopped moving.

The silence was a different kind of silence now — not the focused quiet of reading, but the particular stillness of someone deciding something.

"When I give instructions," he said, "I don't expect them to be negotiated."

"I'm not negotiating. I'm explaining the options so you can make an informed decision." I held his gaze. "That's what you hired me for."

His jaw tightened. Just slightly. A muscle moved, once, and then went still.

"The board member liquidating shares," he said. "Reeves. How did you find that?"

"Court records are public. I searched Sterling's subsidiaries instead of the parent company. The charitable foundation he controls — Reeves Family Trust — has been making strategic liquidations since May. The timing lines up with three internal Sterling board votes I found referenced in shareholder communications."

"The lawsuit settlement. Page seven."

"Eighteen months ago. Filed against a Sterling subsidiary in Delaware. Settled out of court, sealed, but the settlement terms got referenced in passing in an earnings call transcript from Q2. I cross-referenced the timing against a sudden restructure of their compliance department." I paused. "They have a problem they've been managing. They haven't solved it."

Dax set the report down. He looked at me — not the quick cataloguing look, but something longer and more deliberate.

"Most people wouldn't have found either of those things," he said.

"Most people search in the obvious places."

"Where did you learn to do this?"

The question surprised me. It was the first personal question he'd asked since the ground rules conversation. "I worked for a private investigator for a year. Between the diner and here. He taught me that everything leaves a paper trail if you look in the right direction."

Something shifted in his expression. Filed away, recalibrated. "You were a waitress and a private investigator's assistant."

"And before that I did data entry for an insurance company. And before that I worked at a plant nursery." I met his eyes. "My resume is not linear."

"Evidently." He picked up the report again, tapped the corner against his desk once, twice. A thinking gesture. "The deal history. Three o'clock."

"It'll be ready."

"And next time I give you a page count, you meet it."

"Next time I'll build the extra page into the structure from the start instead of discovering at nine pages that I've said everything worth saying."

He looked at me for a moment that lasted slightly longer than it needed to. "That's all."

I stood to go.

"Miss Cole."

I turned back.

He was already looking at the report again, pen moving. "The compliance problem in the Sterling subsidiary. Find out which department head was responsible for the restructure. I want a name before Tuesday's meeting."

"I'll have it Monday."

"Today."

I checked my watch. It was eleven forty-two. "Today," I said, and walked out.

I found the name by two-fifteen.

Vincent Carlisle, former head of regulatory affairs at Sterling Enterprises, quietly transitioned to a newly created "Special Projects" role three weeks after the lawsuit settlement. His LinkedIn profile had been scrubbed of the regulatory affairs title. His name appeared exactly once in Sterling's annual report, in a footnote about organizational restructuring.

I printed it on a single page with supporting documentation and left it on Dax's desk without knocking.

At three o'clock exactly, I delivered the ten-page complete report — nine original pages plus the Sterling deal history addendum, cross-referenced, formatted cleanly, with a one-page executive summary on top.

I left it on his desk with a second sticky note: Carlisle information included in addendum, page 10. V. Cole.

I was back at my own desk before he'd have had time to open it.

At four-thirty, his extension buzzed once.

"Sterling meeting. Tuesday. Ten AM. Conference Room A. You're taking notes."

The line went dead.

I opened my calendar and blocked the time. Then I sat back in my chair and looked at the city through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the hall, the one small stretch of glass that wasn't Dax's office.

Marcus appeared from somewhere and dropped into the guest chair beside my desk. "How'd the report go?"

"It was nine pages."

He winced. "He say anything?"

"He told me ten pages means ten pages. I explained the alternative was filler. Then he asked me how I found the compliance problem in Sterling's subsidiary structure."

Marcus stared at me. "He asked you how you found something."

"Yes."

"Dax Wolfe does not ask assistants how they found things." He said it slowly, like he was reading a headline he didn't quite believe. "He expects things to be found. He doesn't ask how."

"Maybe he was surprised."

"Dax is never surprised." Marcus leaned back. "Or rather — he's never surprised in a way he lets you see." He looked at me with a curious, careful expression. "You're going to be interesting, Remi Cole."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I genuinely have no idea." He stood. "Tuesday's meeting — Jade Sterling is a lot. She's going to try to figure out who you are and what you mean. Don't let her."

"I'm his assistant. Taking notes. That's all I am."

"Right." Marcus said it in a tone that suggested he was choosing not to argue the point. "Good luck."

He disappeared back into the office labyrinth, and I turned back to my monitor and started building background files on Jade Sterling's complete acquisition history, because Dax would want them, and because I had a name to learn before I walked into that room on Tuesday.

Outside the glass walls of his office, Dax was on the phone again. Pacing. His voice was inaudible through the glass, but I could see the precise, contained quality of him — the way he moved like someone who'd never had to fill space for the sake of it.

Don't think about the bar, I told myself.

I opened a new research tab and got back to work.

The weekend arrived like a reprieve I hadn't earned.

I spent most of Saturday in my studio apartment — the one with the bathroom down the hall and the elevator that hadn't worked since February — eating ginger crackers and reading everything publicly available about Sterling Enterprises. By Sunday afternoon I knew their board better than I knew my own pack's council, which was a low bar given that the pack council had voted unanimously to let Flynn publicly humiliate me and then suggested I find a nice Beta to settle down with.

I'd turned off the notifications from the Crescent Bay pack's community group. I'd blocked three numbers I didn't recognize that had sent variations of we heard what happened, so sorry, Flynn and Bree seem really happy though! messages.

I hadn't blocked Aunt Carol's number, but I had let it go to voicemail four times.

On Sunday night I sat on my Murphy bed with the pregnancy tests I still hadn't thrown away — still on the bathroom counter, still glaring at me with their two pink lines — and had a long, quiet, unsentimental conversation with myself about reality.

Reality: I was twenty-four years old, thirteen weeks pregnant, living in a studio apartment with a broken elevator and an eviction notice I'd bought myself one more month on by accepting Dax Wolfe's advance on my first paycheck. I had exactly one friend I could call who wasn't connected to my old pack — my roommate from two years ago, a human named Jade (not Sterling, not even close to Sterling, Jade Kim who worked at a coffee shop in Brooklyn and texted me memes at three in the morning) — and I was working for the father of my unborn child who didn't know he was going to be a father.

Tell him, Margaret had said.

I knew she was right. The longer I waited, the more it became a choice to deceive him rather than a choice to protect myself, and those were different things. The first one I could live with. The second one, less so.

I just needed the right moment. I needed to be less precarious than I currently was. I needed to know that when I told him, I was doing it from a position that wasn't pure desperation.

Tuesday's meeting, I decided. Get through Tuesday's meeting. Prove to both of us that I'm here because I'm good at this, not because I need something from him.

Then tell him.

I put the pregnancy tests in the bathroom cabinet where I didn't have to look at them and went to sleep.