Under His Authority

Chapter 2

Maren's POV

"Miss, the meter is still running."

"Keep the change!" I shoved a note through the partition and jumped out before the cab fully stopped, nearly rolling my ankle on the curb. The Voss Industries building stood in front of me, all black glass and cold steel, thirty floors of quiet authority that matched its owner perfectly.

8:43 a.m.

Over an hour late. His coffee had been due on his desk forty minutes ago. I was going to get fired. Genuinely, absolutely fired today.

I pushed through the revolving door and the reception hall swallowed me whole. Marble floors, high ceilings, the low hum of people pretending to work while actually watching me sprint across the room in yesterday's clothes with my hair barely held together by one clip.

I heard the whisper before I cleared the first desk.

"Must be rough, working directly under the Alpha. That man doesn't know what a good mood looks like."

I did not stop.

The elevator doors were open. I picked up my pace and got there just as seven people stepped in ahead of me and the doors closed in my face. I stood staring at my own reflection in the polished metal for exactly one second.

"Great," I said to nobody.

I found the stairwell.

Eight floors up to the staff kitchen for his coffee. Then three more to the eleventh. I told myself it was fine. I had been telling myself many things this morning that turned out to be wrong.

By the fifth floor my lungs were filing a formal complaint. By the seventh they had moved on to physical protest. I grabbed the coffee from the kitchen on the eighth, nearly burned my palm, and kept moving. Stopping was not an option. Dorian Voss did not send two messages in one morning for nothing.

I hit the eleventh floor, pushed through the door and walked as fast as I could toward his office without technically running, because running would look unprofessional and I was already failing on every other standard this morning.

His office door was right there. I grabbed the handle and pushed it open hard.

The problem was that he was on the other side of it.

Not at his desk. Not by the window. He was standing right at the door, hand already reaching for the same handle from the inside, jacket on, clearly about to leave for the meeting I had forgotten to remind him about.

We collided.

The coffee went first. I watched it happen in real time and could do nothing. The full cup caught him directly on the chest and soaked through his white dress shirt, spreading like a slow, awful decision. The cup bounced off him and hit the floor.

The hallway went completely silent.

Dorian looked down at his shirt. Then he looked at me. He did not shout. That was the terrifying part. He just looked at me with that face that made junior staff hand in resignation letters.

"I am so sorry." My voice came out smaller than I intended. “I am so sorry. Genuinely, deeply, from the bottom of my entire heart sorry. I know I'm late and I should have knocked and I was trying to make up for the time and I—”

"You're fired."

The words landed flat and clean. No heat in them. That was somehow worse.

I went down on both knees right there in the doorway. Not proud of it. "Please don't do that. I am having the single worst morning of my life and I know that isn't your problem but I am begging you, just this once—"

"Alpha." A calm voice came from across the room.

Kaden. His beta and PA, already on his feet, unhurried the way a man stands when he knows his boss will actually listen to him. He was the only person in this building who talked to Dorian Voss in a normal tone without his hands shaking.

"She's the best secretary this office has had in four years," Kaden said. "And you have a meeting in nine minutes."

Dorian looked at Kaden. Then back at me, still on my knees on his floor.

"Get up," he said.

I got up.

"Kaden, go hold the room." He turned back into the office. "You. Suit."

Kaden gave me a look on his way out that said 'you owe me' and disappeared. I exhaled a breath that had been stuck in my throat since the eighth floor and went straight to the inbuilt closet.

I knew this closet better than my own. Pressed shirts on the left by color. Suits on the right by weight. Ties on the inside panel. I pulled the clean white shirt and the charcoal suit, laid them on the chair beside the bathroom door and stepped back.

"Done," I told the bathroom door.

I straightened the papers on his desk. Checked his schedule on the monitor. Rearranged his pens. The pens didn't need rearranging. I did it anyway.

The bathroom door opened.

I turned around to ask about the ties.

That was my mistake.

He had a towel around his waist and nothing else. Water was still running down his chest and I want to say I looked away immediately but that would be a full lie. The man was built like someone had designed him to make professional women forget their own names. I had worked for him for three years and kept him filed very firmly under: boss, Rafe's father, completely off limits in every direction.

Three years of very successful professionalism collapsed in about four seconds.

The ties slipped out of my hands.

"When you're done eye raping me," he said, in exactly the same voice he used for board presentations, "go get me a new coffee."

The heat that climbed my face was so fast I was genuinely concerned. I bent down for the ties and nearly knocked my head on the desk. "I was turning around to ask about the ties. That's all that was."

"Which one." He was already buttoning the shirt, not even looking at me.

I held both up. He pointed at the dark one. I passed it over without another word.

He took it, looked me over once and said, "You look like someone who slept in a bus station. Change before you come to the conference hall."

He walked out.

I stood in his empty office with my face still warm and made a firm decision to never think about the last three minutes again for as long as I lived.

I kept a spare dress in my office for emergencies. Dark green, ironed, the kind that said 'I have my life together' even when that was aggressively untrue. I changed, fixed my hair and went back to the eighth for a fresh coffee. I got to the conference hall on the fourteenth floor with three minutes to spare and slipped in through the side door.

The meeting had already started.

Dorian sat at the head of the table. Six investors on either side, all in expensive suits, all giving him the kind of attention people give someone they are slightly afraid of. He was talking through projected pack expansion into the eastern territories, numbers and strategy coming off him like he had memorized the whole thing in his sleep.

I set the coffee at his right hand and moved to stand near the wall.

I had sat through a hundred of his meetings. He never raised his voice. Never repeated himself. He said a thing once and waited, and the silence after it was always heavier than anything anyone else said. One investor tried to push back on a budget figure and Dorian looked at him the way you look at a wrong answer on an exam and said, "Run the numbers again and come back when they're correct." The man nodded and wrote something down.

I caught myself watching him and looked at the wall.

I needed to stop doing that. His son had spent the better part of an hour this morning explaining all the ways I wasn't enough. I was not going to spend the rest of the day making heart eyes at his father like an i***t.

The meeting ended. Investors filed out. Kaden handed Dorian a folder and left. The room emptied until it was just the two of us.

I started gathering documents from the side table. He stayed at the head of the table with the folder.

"You came in wearing pajamas," he said, without looking up.

"I was in a rush."

"You were at his apartment."

I stopped. "That's not really—"

"I heard about the videos," he said simply, and turned a page. "Are you going back to him?"

I didn't answer right away. Some tired part of me was still doing the math on seven years and not knowing what to do with the number.

"I don't know. Maybe if he apologizes. Seven years is—"

"He doesn't deserve you." Not a compliment. A fact, delivered like he was reading it off a balance sheet. "He is a failure in everything he touches, including the people good enough to stand beside him."

Something pressed hard against the inside of my chest.

"He's your son," I said.

Dorian closed the folder. He looked at me across the length of the table and something shifted behind his eyes that I had never seen there before. Not coldness. Something much older than coldness.

"Yes," he said quietly. "He is."

He stood. Buttoned his jacket. And then, instead of walking to the door, he walked toward me.

He didn't stop at a professional distance. He came close enough that I could smell his cologne, something cold and dark that I had spent three years pretending not to notice, and he looked down at me in a way that made every rational thought I had, line up quietly and excuse itself from the room.

My back found the edge of the side table. I had nowhere to go.

He didn't touch me. He just stood there, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him, looking at me like he was deciding something. His eyes dropped to my mouth for a second.

My brain went completely blank as he lowered his head slowly.

My breath caught.

Then he said against my mouth, “Stay exactly where you are.”