Blood Moon queen

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Chapter Three

The summons came at 8:52 the next morning, before Selena had even set down her coffee: Priya's assistant at her desk, apologetic and slightly wide-eyed, saying Mr. Draven wanted to see her.

"Me?" Selena said. "I'm an intern. I deliver decks."

"He asked for you by name." The assistant's tone made it clear this was, in the history of the forty-second floor, not a good sign.

She rode up with her stomach in a knot, running through everything she could possibly have done wrong. She'd left the deck on the desk exactly as instructed. She hadn't lingered. She hadn't said anything except her name and she winced, try remembering one sharp comment when he'd been rude to her, but none came to mind. That was probably it. Nobody snapped at Kael Draven and got away with it.

Damon was waiting outside the office again, and this time his expression wasn't cataloguing rather it was careful, the way people got careful around something breakable.

"Go in," he said. "He doesn't bite. Usually."

The office looked the same as yesterday glass, silence, the city spread out like a held breath except Kael wasn't at the window this time. He was behind his desk, and the folder from yesterday, the one with the strange old-fashioned wax seal, was gone. Put away, or hidden. She noticed that and filed it without knowing why it mattered.

"Sit," he said.

She sat. She was determined not to let him see that her pulse had picked up the second she walked in, that same unwanted lurch from yesterday returning like a held note.

"I'm reassigning you," Kael said.

Her stomach dropped. "You're firing me?."

"I said reassigning." A flicker of something that might have been irritation at being misunderstood.

"You're being moved to my direct team of Special projects. Effective as of today."

Whatever she'd braced for, it wasn't that. "I've been here three weeks."

"I'm aware."

"I don't understand why—"she was cut off before she could complete her sentence

"You don't need to understand. You need to decide whether you're taking the position." His eyes were doing that thing again, the flicker-and-shutter, like he was holding a door closed by main force. "The pay is triple what you're making now. The hours will be worse. I will not explain myself to you further than I already have, and you will not enjoy working for me. Yes or no."

It should have been an easy no. Everything about him set off some old, buried instinct in her the same instinct that used to tell her, back in Alder Pack, which Alphas were dangerous to be alone with. And yet underneath that alarm was the other thing, the thing she didn't have a name for yet, pulling her toward him even as every rational part of her said run.

She thought about the number in her bank account. She thought about the laundromat radiator and the walls she could touch with her arms out.

"Yes," she said, hating a little that she meant it.

Something in his shoulders eased, almost imperceptibly, like a held breath let out through his teeth. "Damon will get you set up. You start now."

She stood, made it to the door, then stopped, because the question had been eating at her since yesterday and she was apparently too stubborn to leave it alone.

"Why me?"

Kael didn't look up from whatever he was writing. "Don't mistake this for a compliment. It isn't one."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

She left before she said something that would get her fired on her first hour of the new job.

The special projects floor turned out to be a single room off Kael's own no windows, heavy door, the kind of soundproofing that made Selena's ears feel strange the moment it clicked shut behind her. Damon walked her through logins and an NDA thick enough to double as a doorstop, and didn't quite meet her eyes when he handed her the pen.

"What am I actually going to be doing?" she asked, signing where he pointed.

"Financial modeling. Risk analysis. Whatever he needs." Damon's voice was careful in a rehearsed way, like he'd delivered this exact non-answer before. "You'll report only to him. Not to Priya, not to anyone else in the building. If anyone asks what you work on, the answer is

"confidential restructuring.'"

"That's not a real answer either."

Damon almost smiled. "You'll fit in fine here."

Three days in, she started to notice the pattern.

Kael criticized everything. Not casually rather surgically. A model she'd spent six hours building came back covered in red-pen corrections that were, infuriatingly, all correct. A presentation she'd polished for a stakeholder meeting got cut down to a third of its length in front of her, with the explanation "you don't need to prove you're smart, you need to be right," delivered in a tone that suggested both were currently in doubt.

She spent more hours than everyone else, not because he asked her to, but because she refused to let him be right about her.

It didn't help. If anything, it made it worse. He seemed to notice everything she did the exact minute she arrived, the exact minute she left, and had opinions about both that he shared without being asked.

"You don't need to be here past seven," he said one night, appearing in her doorway without a sound, which she was starting to suspect was less about quiet shoes and more about something she didn't want to think too hard about.

"I'm almost done with the—" she said

"Go home, Ms. Hart."

"I have thirty more minutes of—" cut off again

"That wasn't a suggestion."

She looked up at him, and something reckless in her, something that had gotten her banished once already and clearly hadn't learned its lesson it made her hold his gaze instead of looking away. "You realize you criticize my work and then criticize me for trying to fix it. There's no version of this where I win."

Something shifted behind his eyes. For one unguarded second, he looked less like a man delivering a rebuke and more like a man losing an argument with himself.

"No," he said, very quietly. "There isn't."

He left before she could ask what that meant.

Two weeks into the new job, She was in the special-projects room past midnight, alone, running a model that refused to balance.

when the temperature in the room seemed to change not physically, but in that animal way she was starting to recognize as belonging specifically to Kael's presence.

She looked up. He was in the doorway again, but this time he wasn't criticizing anything. He was just looking at her, and the look on his face was one she hadn't seen from him before: not cold. Not controlled.

Something closer to hunger, badly hidden, the way Elias's contempt had been badly hidden that night in the pack hall except this was the opposite of contempt, and somehow that made it more dangerous.

"You should go home," he said, but it came out rougher than his usual clipped delivery.

"I told you, I'm almost—"

"Selena."

It was the first time he'd used her first name. It landed in her chest like a struck match.

Neither of them moved. The silence stretched, taut and strange, and Selena had the sudden, dizzying sense that if she took one step toward him, something would happen that neither of them could take back.

Then his phone rang.

He looked down at it, and whatever had been building in the room shattered instantly, replaced by something rigid and alert. He answered without a greeting.

"Where?." A pause. His jaw tightened.

"How many." Another pause, longer, and Selena watched his free hand curl into a fist at his side.

"I'm on my way."

He hung up and was already moving toward the door.

"What's wrong?" Selena asked, because some instinct in her, the same one that had lurched the first moment she saw him, was suddenly screaming that this mattered, that this was connected to her somehow even though it made no sense that it would be.

Kael stopped in the doorway and looked back at her for one long second, and for the first time since she'd met him, she saw something that looked almost like fear behind the control.

"Go home, Selena," he said. "Lock your door. Don't open it for anyone tonight not a neighbor, not a delivery, not anyone. I mean that."

"You're scaring me."

"Good," he said. "Stay scared. It'll keep you alive."

He was gone before she could ask what, exactly, was hunting her.