His Forgotten Silver Luna

Chapter 10

Monday arrived the way significant days arrived looking entirely like any other.

Nova was at the Sinclair Corp offices by seven fifteen. She'd been awake since five, which she attributed to the early call she had scheduled with their Singapore legal team and not to any other reason. She reviewed the Ironclad brief over black coffee at her desk, made three pages of notes in the small precise handwriting that Remy said looked like a mechanical engineer's field notes, and was professionally, completely ready by the time the Ironclad delegation arrived at nine.

There were four of them this time.

Damien. His operations manager a broad, careful Beta named Garrett who had the look of someone competent and tired. A data analyst, young, nervous in the specific way of someone junior attending a meeting above their usual level. And Selene.

Nova had known Selene would be there. She had prepared for that too.

Selene Cross walked into the Sinclair Corp conference room and found Nova's eyes immediately not with the furtive look of someone managing a secret, but with the direct look of someone who had decided on a posture and was committing to it. A slight inclination of her head. The smallest possible acknowledgement.

Nova returned it at the same scale. Then looked at the room.

"Good morning," she said. "We'll start with the logistics infrastructure. I'd like to walk through the operational data your team submitted and identify the three highest-leverage intervention points before we discuss timeline."

And they worked.

This was the thing about work it was honest. Numbers didn't have history. Supply chain data didn't carry the weight of ceremony halls and stone floors. Nova had always found refuge in the concrete, in problems that had definable shapes and measurable solutions, and the Ironclad logistics situation was a genuinely interesting problem that deserved her full attention.

She gave it her full attention.

Garrett, the operations manager, was good thorough and practical, with the kind of deep institutional knowledge that never showed up in formal documents. The data analyst was better than his nerves suggested, quick with figures and honest about gaps in the data. Selene said little but her questions, when she asked them, were sharp.

Damien was quiet for the first hour.

Not passive he was reading everything she put in front of him with visible attention, tracking the analysis, occasionally writing something in the margin of his copy. But he wasn't speaking unless directly addressed, which was unusual for an Alpha in his own business meeting. They were typically territorial about airspace.

She noticed this without appearing to notice it.

At the ninety-minute mark they broke for coffee. The Ironclad team clustered at one end of the room with their phones. Remy materialised at Nova's shoulder.

"Garrett's good," he said quietly.

"Very. He's been keeping the operation functional on institutional knowledge alone. Once we give him updated systems he'll be excellent."

"Cross hasn't said much."

"No."

"He keeps looking at you."

"I'm the one running the meeting."

Remy made a noncommittal sound that communicated significant skepticism in minimal syllables.

She moved back to the table.

The second hour was more detailed drilling into the specific hub locations that were causing the greatest bottlenecks, cross-referencing with population shift data among the northern packs over the last decade, mapping the delta between where the infrastructure was and where the actual transport demand had moved.

Damien spoke more in the second hour. He knew his territory that was evident, the kind of granular knowledge that came from physical presence and attention over years. He added context to the data that changed the shape of two of her recommendations, which she acknowledged and incorporated without ceremony, because being right was less important than getting the solution right.

At one point they were both leaning over the same map a physical one, printed large, spread across the table's centre and she was indicating a route corridor with one hand and he reached across to point at something adjacent and their hands were perhaps six inches apart.

The ghost bond roared.

She kept her expression neutral through what she could only describe as an act of significant will. Her hand didn't move. Her voice, when she continued the sentence she'd been in the middle of, came out even.

But she felt it the warmth, the pull, the particular electromagnetic quality of standing six inches from someone whose existence had been written into your biology before you had any say in the matter.

She moved her hand to indicate a different point on the map.

He hadn't reacted. If he'd felt anything he'd covered it.

At four o'clock she closed the session with a clear summary of the day's findings and concrete actions for each team member before the next meeting. Professional. Structured. The Ironclad team began packing their materials.

She was at the side table pouring water when she heard him behind her.

"You're good at this," Damien said.

She turned. He was standing a few feet away, jacket still on, hands in his pockets, with the expression she'd been cataloguing the one that was looking for something without knowing what it was looking for.

"Thank you," she said.

"I don't mean the analysis. I mean the room." He paused. "You run a room the way some Alphas can't."

She looked at him steadily. "I had good reasons to learn."

He held her gaze. Something moved through his a question he wasn't asking.

"Same time Thursday?" she said.

"Thursday," he confirmed.

He held her gaze one moment longer than necessary. Then he turned and walked back to his team, and Nova turned back to the window and let out a breath that was slow and controlled and quiet and told her absolutely nothing she wanted to know about how the next twelve weeks were going to feel.