Mate Under NDA

Chapter 2: Audit Trail of Blood

Numbers don’t lie, but they do bleed.

The CCTV still is a bruise on the screen, a figure dragging a bad arm and a trail he can’t help.

Pier 19 smells like salt, diesel, and iron.

The audit trail says user SMOAKE moved product that never existed, and the wolf under my skin says a man who should be missing isn’t far enough away.

Investors want answers at 8 a.m.

My pack wants safety always.

Aria Hart wants the truth.

I want her to want that with me.

Being a CEO is a theater of control.

Being an alpha is a religion of restraint.

Some nights I remember my father’s voice teaching me when to bare teeth and when to offer a hand.

Most nights I don’t need the memory.

Tonight I do.

A rogue came through my warehouse and left blood on my glass.

Evan is nervous in all the wrong directions.

Luca, my head of security, is not nervous at all.

Aria’s scent is under my tongue like the first rain of August.

I won’t touch her without consent.

I won’t lie to her more than necessary.

The wolf hates both limits.

Luca leans over my shoulder, attention narrowed to a hunting point.

“Freeze there,” he says.

I pause the footage at 02:11:43.

The vest, the stiff arm, the smear.

“Moake?” I ask.

“Walk matches,” Luca says.

“Arm injury matches the forklift incident last quarter.”

“Except Moake resigned and then evaporated,” I say.

“Rogues don’t evaporate,” Luca says.

“They leak.”

I don’t smile.

Outside the monitor’s glow, my office is all glass and city.

Reflections make liars of things.

“Evan,” I say, not turning.

“Tell me why Red Harbor Logistics has no EIN and still gets paid.”

Evan perches on the edge of a chair like a bird unsure the branch will hold.

“We use a third-party consolidator,” he says.

“Sometimes those have… layers.”

“Peel them,” I say.

He swallows.

“Compliance-”

“Aria can have whatever she asks for,” I say.

“We don’t stonewall her. We don’t babysit her. We don’t insult her by pretending to help while not helping.”

Evan’s mouth opens, closes.

He nods.

Luca’s phone vibrates without sound.

He flips it, reads, slides it back.

“Pier 19 team found more,” he says.

“Blood in Bay 4, not human. Dog maybe.”

We both avoid the word we mean.

“Dispose?” he asks.

“Document,” I say.

“Quietly.”

I will not have photos like that in the world.

I also will not pretend we are tidy when we are not.

“Aria saw the smear upstairs,” Luca says.

“Knows more than she says.”

“So do we,” I say.

He doesn’t argue.

My calendar pings, the polite kind that believes time is negotiable.

In forty minutes I’m scheduled to review product strategy with Marketing.

Instead, I walk into the lab.

Aria is there, as if pulled by the same magnet that drags me.

She’s cataloging the broken label, the edges crisp and hope-shaped.

“You work quickly,” she says, echoing me back at myself.

“Leadership is 80% repetition,” I say.

“And 20% pretending the repetition is new.”

She huffs.

“Full access?”

“Granted,” I say.

“But there are things in our systems that won’t make sense on paper.”

“Then make them make sense,” she says.

“And if they don’t, admit it.”

I like that about her, the way her honesty feels like a cut that heals clean.

“May I smell your wrist?” I ask, and the question is a rope thrown across a river.

Her chin lifts.

“Yes,” she says.

She holds out her left arm, palm up, trusting and not, both at once.

I step close and breathe in, slow.

Citrus at first-bergamot, bright and ironic.

Then skin, warm and salt.

Under that, something that makes the wolf lean forward and quiet at the same time.

Lightning before rain.

I don’t touch her.

I don’t have to.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Why?” she asks.

“So I recognize you,” I say.

“In a crowd.”

“In a storm?” she asks.

“In a fight,” I say, because lies rot from the inside.

Her pupils flare and then steady.

“You think we’re in one,” she says.

“I think we’re near one,” I say.

“And I think you found something.”

She hands me a printout.

“GL-SSNT-ALPHA,” she says.

“The tagged SKUs that lose mass on paper but keep moving in space.”

“Alpha is an internal joke,” I say, and I let the lie hang long enough to be obvious.

She tilts her head.

“Your facilities manager’s last name is Araujo,” she says.

“Alpha could be his pet tag.”

“Or your private language,” I say, giving her the courtesy of the blade.

“It’s always the same with wolves,” she says, airy, and then she realizes what she said and bites the inside of her cheek.

I let it go.

“Pier 19,” I say.

“I’ll take you tomorrow.”

“I prefer tonight,” she says.

Night is when the edits happened.

Night is when the wolf is closest to the skin.

“Tonight,” I agree.

“After you let me brief you on safety protocols.”

Her smile is sharp.

“Does it include not licking blood?”

“Top of the list,” I say.

A tone chimes in the ceiling, the all-office polite alarm that means someone propped an emergency exit.

Luca’s name flashes on my phone.

I answer.

“East stairwell, Level 22,” he says.

“Brown-red on the landing. Cameras looped for twenty seconds.”

“Looped how?” I ask.

“Like someone who knows our system,” he says.

“Not a rogue.”

I look at Aria.

I dislike the feeling of choosing between telling the truth and keeping her safe.

“Lock down the lab,” I tell Luca.

“I’m taking her down.”

“Roger,” he says.

“Elevators are clean as of now.”

We step into the hallway and the building’s night breath meets us.

I badge us into the private elevator bank because I know my own machines.

The car arrives like a promise.

We stand in the mirrored box and pretend not to watch each other in the reflections.

“Question,” she says.

“Ask,” I say.

“If I ask you whether your family came from wolves, will you lie?”

“I’ll say my family came from the Hudson Valley and owned a lot of land,” I say.

“That’s a partial answer,” she says.

“Those are the best kind,” I say.

She laughs once, the sound quick and unwilling.

The car hums.

At Level 22, the doors open a finger’s width, then stutter.

A smear catches the light on the threshold, thin, fresh, iron.

The metallic tang lifts and spreads.

My body answers before my mind.

“Back,” I say, and hold an arm across her without touching her.

“Is it-”

“Blood,” I say.

“Not human.”

Her eyes widen, and then narrow.

“Dog?”

“Bigger,” I say, and the word sits between us like a name.

The emergency light slices on, red and clean as a warning.

Luca’s voice hits my ear again.

“Got movement in the east corridor,” he says.

“Shadow size wrong for a person.”

The doors decide to be brave and open.

We step into the quiet.

“Stay behind me,” I say.

“Ask me,” she says.

I swallow a smile because she is right.

“Aria Hart,” I say.

“Will you stay close to me?”

“Yes,” she says.

Consent is a small thing until it is the only thing holding the night in place.

My wolf presses against my skin, not for violence but for vigilance.

We move toward the smear like surgeons toward a wound.

At the corner, a pale handprints the wall and slides down, and when the body attached to it staggers into view, Maya looks at me, eyes blown and strange, and whispers, “He has your eyes,” before collapsing in a wet rust sound at our feet.