THE LAST HUMAN EMPLOYEE

Alone With It

Elena didn't remember the elevator ride down, or the walk across the lobby, or the six blocks she covered on foot before some functioning part of her brain reminded her she'd left her car in the parking garage two streets in the opposite direction. She found herself sitting on a bench in a small park she didn't recognize, breathing hard, the late morning sun doing nothing to warm the cold that had settled into her chest somewhere around the word wolf.

She should have laughed. Some detached, rational part of her insisted that laughing was the correct response to a man telling her, in complete sincerity, that he was some kind of mythological creature who'd been secretly rearranging her life for six years. But nothing about the last hour had felt like a joke, not the careful stillness in his face when he'd confirmed the apartment, not the raw edge in his voice when he'd said the word bond, not the way her own body had responded to his proximity from the very first elevator ride in a manner she'd never quite managed to explain to herself.

Her phone buzzed. Priya.

Where are you? You missed the 11:30 sync and Grant's asking questions.

Elena stared at the message for a long moment before typing back, Not feeling well. Going home. It wasn't entirely a lie. She didn't feel like herself in any sense she recognized, standing at the edge of something so large it had swallowed the shape of her ordinary life whole.

She walked home instead of retrieving her car, needing the time and the movement more than she needed efficiency, and spent the walk running through everything she thought she knew, testing each piece against the new information like a puzzle she was being forced to reassemble with pieces that no longer fit the picture she'd spent years believing in.

Six years of luck. Six years of a stranger's hand shaping the edges of her life, invisible and total. She tried to feel angry about it, and found the anger there, waiting, sharp and immediate the moment she let herself reach for it. But underneath the anger, uncomfortably, sat something else, something that had been growing since the first elevator ride and refused to be reasoned away now that she understood its shape. He hadn't done it out of cruelty. He hadn't done it for leverage or control in the way the word usually implied. He'd done it, by his own account, because some involuntary, permanent thing inside him had fixed on her the moment they met and never let go.

That should have terrified her more than it did. Perhaps it did terrify her, and the warmth she felt underneath the fear was simply the oldest, most dangerous kind of self-deception, the part of her that had spent a childhood being moved from house to house, family to family, never staying anywhere long enough to be chosen on purpose, finally encountering someone who claimed to have chosen her before she'd even known his name.

She let herself into her apartment, the one he owned, she reminded herself grimly, and sat on the couch without turning on any lights, the afternoon sun sliding slowly across the floor as she tried and failed to organize six years of her life into a shape that made sense.

Her phone buzzed again, a different number this time, unfamiliar the way the woman's call had been unfamiliar the night before. She almost didn't answer. She answered anyway, some reckless part of her deciding that whatever else this day had already cost her, she might as well finish absorbing whatever else was coming.

"Ms. Cross." A man's voice this time, calm and precise. "My name is Marcus. I work with Damon. He asked me to check on you, but he also told me not to contact you directly if you'd rather not hear from anyone connected to him right now. I'm respecting that, but I wanted you to have a way to reach someone if you had questions he might struggle to answer clearly, given the circumstances."

Elena sat up slightly, surprised by the offer, and by the strange, careful courtesy of it. "Why would he struggle?"

"Because he's spent six years terrified of exactly this conversation, and terrified people rarely explain themselves well, no matter how old they are or how much power they hold." A pause, considered. "For what it's worth, I've known him twenty years. I've watched him build an entire private security apparatus around a woman who had no idea it existed, and I've told him more than once that it was a mistake to let it go on as long as it did. But I've never once seen it come from anything except a bond he didn't choose and couldn't refuse. I think that distinction matters, even if it doesn't excuse everything."

"Are you—" Elena hesitated over the word, still unfamiliar in her mouth. "Are you one too? A wolf?"

"I am."

"Is everyone at Meridian?"

"Not everyone. Enough of us that it's easier to think of the company as ours than as a place that happens to employ us." Marcus's voice carried a wry, tired edge, the tone of a man who'd explained this reality to very few people and found it exhausting each time. "I imagine that's a great deal to absorb in one afternoon."

"That's an understatement."

"I won't pretend otherwise." A pause, longer this time. "There's something else you should know, and I'd rather you hear it from me than discover it on your own the way you discovered everything else this week. There's a faction within the pack, led by a woman named Renata Kestrel, who believes Damon's bond to you has compromised his judgment badly enough to threaten the pack's safety. She's been building a case to remove him as Alpha, and I have reason to believe she's the one who arranged that anonymous call you received last night."

Elena's stomach dropped. "Why would she call me?"

"Because a frightened, angry human digging into things she doesn't understand is exactly the kind of instability Renata needs to prove her point to the council. If you'd gone straight to the authorities, or the press, or simply disappeared in fear, it would have handed her everything she needs." Marcus's voice hardened slightly. "I'm not telling you this to frighten you further, Ms. Cross. I'm telling you because you deserve to understand that you're not just caught in the middle of Damon's mistakes. You're caught in the middle of a fight for control of an entire pack, and there are people in it who would use you as a weapon without a second thought."

Elena closed her eyes, the cold in her chest settling deeper, no longer just about betrayal but about danger she hadn't fully understood the shape of until this exact moment. "What happens if she wins? If the council removes him?"

"I don't know," Marcus admitted, quietly enough that Elena believed him. "But I know Renata's vision for this pack doesn't include protecting a human who knows what we are. I'd advise caution, Ms. Cross. More than you've had to exercise in your life so far, I imagine."

He gave her a number to call if she needed anything, then ended the call before she could ask any of the dozen other questions crowding behind her teeth, leaving her alone again in the darkening apartment with the growing, uneasy certainty that whatever she decided about Damon Voss, the choice had already stopped being only about the two of them.