The Alpha CEO's Contract Mate

Chapter 2: Section 4, Subsection "Pending"

WREN

There is a special kind of humiliation in crying on the bumper of a rusted pickup truck named Gerald.

The parking garage was empty. Midnight. Concrete and oil stains and one flickering light that seemed to be judging me. Somewhere above us, sixty floors of glass and money were still celebrating, and I was down here in a borrowed dress with a shrimp tail in my fist, because I hadn't had the presence of mind to throw it away.

*We should bite something,* Pickle offered.

*We're not biting anyone.*

*A tire?*

*Not the tire.*

*Small bite. Emotional support bite.*

I wiped my face with the sleeve of a dress that wasn't mine. It smelled even more like mothballs now. It smelled like a woman in a lot of trouble with Mrs. Abernathy.

Then the other voice came back, gentle as a whisper.

*"Please stop crying."*

"Get out of my head," I said, out loud, to no one, like a lunatic.

*"I can't."* It sounded miserable. Big and rough and miserable, like a mountain apologizing. *"I tried to close it. It won't close."*

I stopped wiping.

"What do you mean, it won't close?"

Because a rejection is supposed to *cut* the bond. Clean. Brutal. Done. A rejected mate hears nothing, feels nothing, and spends six months eating ice cream out of the tub. That's how it works. Every wolf knows that. It's the one mercy the moon gives you: silence.

I should have been hearing silence.

I should have been hearing my own heart break in peace.

Instead I had a talking wolf in my head, and he was *worried about me.*

*"I'm Duke,"* the voice added, hesitantly, like a big dog sitting down in a room where he's not sure he's welcome. *"I'm his wolf. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry about the shrimp thing. I mean, the other thing. Both things."*

*He's polite,* Pickle said, grudgingly.

*Don't encourage him.*

*I'm not! I'm just noting that he's polite. It's a data point.*

Then my brain, the annoying one that reads fine print for a living, did what it does best.

It started reading.

Lunar Concord, Article 4. *Of the Severing of Fated Bonds.* I'd memorized it at sixteen, from the pocket edition Odessa keeps in the community center, back when I was young and stupid and thought the moon might one day send me somebody nice.

*A rejection is a two-part rite,* the pocket edition said, in my head, in a font I could practically see. *The Declaration, spoken by the rejector. And the Acknowledgment, spoken by the rejected. Until both are witnessed, the bond is held in a state of* pending.

I had not said the Acknowledgment.

I had eaten a shrimp instead.

"Oh my God," I whispered.

*What?* Pickle demanded. *What? Did we win?*

"I'm not rejected."

*We're NOT?*

"I'm... pending."

*Pending is not gone,* Pickle said slowly, and I could hear her tail beginning to wag against her better judgment. *Pending is a* maybe. *Wren. Wren, we are a MAYBE.*

"I have been legally un-dumped for forty minutes," I said, "and nobody told me."

*"Is 'un-dumped' good?"* asked the mountain.

"I'm not talking to you."

*"Okay."* A pause. Then, smaller: *"I'll be here."*

*Aw,* said Pickle.

*No,* I said.

The problem with being right about a legal technicality is that it doesn't fix anything. I was still a girl in a stolen dress in a parking garage. I was still one signature short. I sat there for a long time with my back against Gerald's rusted tailgate, listening to a very large wolf breathe in my head like he was afraid to make a sound, and I made a decision.

I would not think about him.

*You're thinking about him,* said Pickle.

*I am not.*

*Your ears just went pink.*

*I don't have ears in here.*

*Your metaphorical ears.*

---

At 3:04 a.m., my phone rang.

I was lying on the floor of my apartment in yesterday's mascara, staring at a ceiling stain shaped like a disappointed rabbit. The caller ID said ALPHA ODESSA. Odessa Grey doesn't call after nine unless someone is dead or on fire.

"Wren." Her voice was gravel and cigarillo smoke. "Sit down."

"I'm already on the floor."

"Good. Ravenscroft Capital just voided our lease."

I sat up so fast the room tilted.

"They can't. The lease has a cure period. There's a thirty-day notice clause, there's a—"

"They didn't use the lease. They used the back-rent clause." A long, awful pause. "Some paragraph nobody's read since 1974. Says we owe four-point-two million dollars in unpaid land tax. Due in thirty days, or the forty acres go to auction."

Four-point-two million.

Hollowbrook had never had four-point-two *thousand.*

I stared at the rabbit. The rabbit stared back. It looked disappointed on my behalf.

"Whatever happened at that party tonight," Odessa said quietly, "I need you to fix it."

"Nothing happened."

*Liar,* said Pickle.

"Something happened," Odessa said. "Somebody in a very expensive suit didn't void our lease over a clerical error, Wren. Somebody's sending us a message."

"Who?"

Silence. On the other end I heard her lighter click, and click again, the way it does when she's thinking about something she doesn't want to say.

"Odessa."

"Get some sleep." Her voice had changed. Not softer. Careful. "And Wren? If they offer you anything tomorrow, a job, a deal, a chair to sit in, you take it. You take the money and you read every line twice."

"That's the best advice you've ever given me."

"I'm not done." A breath. "Whatever they put in front of you, you keep your blood off their paper."

The line went dead.

I lay very still.

*That,* Pickle said, *was a weirdly specific warning.*

*She's a weirdly specific woman.*

*Wren. Why would anybody need blood on a contract?*

I didn't have an answer. The rabbit didn't either.

---

**KADE**

The howling started at midnight and hadn't stopped.

Duke lay on the penthouse floor with his nose pressed to the glass, mourning in a voice that rattled the wine glasses. Six feet of pure heartbreak in the shape of a very large wolf who lived in my head and was, at the moment, ruining my life.

*"You made her cry,"* he said, for the ninth time.

"I know."

*"She ate a SHRIMP at you."*

"I know."

*"It was the saddest thing I've ever seen. She's so brave. Kade, she's so brave, and you—"*

"Duke."

*"...Sorry."*

Tobias Finch, my Beta and the only man alive who could say my name in that tone, stood in the doorway with a tablet and a face like a funeral. "Sir. Your uncle used his proxy on the Capital board twenty minutes ago. Hollowbrook's lease is void."

Of course he did.

Victor had watched me at the gala. He'd seen the bond flare across the ballroom like a struck match. He'd smiled that patient smile of his, the one he'd worn at my mother's funeral, and I'd known then that the rejection had bought me exactly one night.

"He suspects," Tobias said.

"He knows."

"Those are different."

"Not to Victor."

I had said the words tonight. Exactly the words I needed. Not one syllable more.

It had been the hardest thing I'd ever done, and I'd done it with my hands in my pockets so no one would see them shake.

My phone lit up on the desk.

*UNCLE V.*

I let it ring four times. Duke stopped howling. When a wolf that size goes quiet, the whole room notices.

"Victor."

"Nephew." The voice on the line was warm as a fireplace. There was music behind it, the quartet, still playing. "Wonderful party. You know how I feel about tradition, and tonight, I saw so much *tradition.* Terrible, about the girl."

"Which girl?"

A soft, fond laugh. "Of course. Which girl." A pause. "Poor little thing. Hollowbrook's not a healthy place to be, with the lease in trouble. I'll have someone look in on her. Make sure she's comfortable."

Everything in me went cold.

*"He said 'look in on her,'"* Duke whispered, and his voice in my skull was no longer a golden retriever's. It was something old and dark that lived at the bottom of the dog. *"Kade. He said LOOK IN ON HER."*

"That's generous," I said, into the phone, evenly. "I wouldn't worry about her."

"Oh, I do worry. It's my nature." The music swelled. "Sleep well, Kade. You look tired."

The line clicked.

I stood there, holding a dead phone, and listened to my own pulse. Then I sat down at my desk, opened a new email, and typed a subject line I would have deleted if Duke weren't watching me with those enormous, terrible eyes.

*Subject: Employment Offer, Chief Contracts Counsel.*

I wrote three lines. Deleted two. Kept the last.

*Sixty floors up. Nine a.m. Non-negotiable. — K.R.*

*"She's going to hate that,"* Duke said, wagging in spite of himself.

"Good," I said. "Hate is safer."

I didn't tell Duke the other reason. The one I couldn't say out loud, even to a wolf who couldn't keep a secret. If Victor was going to put his hands on Hollowbrook, on her, then she was going to be somewhere he couldn't reach.

Sixty floors up. Inside my walls.

Where I could see her.

I hit send.

---

**WREN**

My phone buzzed at 6:00 a.m. I read it through eyes crusted with tears and rage.

*Non-negotiable.*

*Ha,* said Pickle. *HA. He clearly doesn't know what we do for a living.*

I had been a contracts paralegal at Pruitt & Vale for three years. Forty-one thousand dollars a year and a chair with one working wheel.

Everything in this world is negotiable.

I sat up. I cracked my knuckles. I opened my closet.

*"Wear the green dress,"* said a deep voice, very softly, from somewhere in the back of my skull.

"*No,*" I said.

*Wear the green dress,* said Pickle.

"Whose side are you on?"

*Mine,* she said. *Obviously. And I want him to suffer.*

---

At 8:14 a.m., I came down the front steps of my building in the green dress, a pair of sensible shoes, and an expression I'd been working on all morning in the bathroom mirror.

It was the look of a woman who had eaten a shrimp at a billionaire and was now prepared to eat the billionaire.

A black SUV idled at the curb.

The driver stepped out, tall and neat in a gray suit, and opened the rear door. "Miss Calloway? Alpha Ravenscroft sent a car."

"I'm sure he did."

*Smell him,* said Pickle.

I sniffed. Clean cedar. Ravenscroft's crest on the lapel. A little tired, a little scared. An honest man, following orders.

I climbed in.

That's when I saw the second car.

It was parked across the street with its engine off, a long, silver sedan with tinted windows and no license plate. It hadn't been there when I left for the gala. I would have noticed.

The rear window slid down.

The man in the back seat had silver hair and a kind, grandfatherly face. He looked at my building. He looked at my window, two floors up, the exact window where I'd been lying on the floor at three in the morning. And then, slowly, with an old man's perfect courtesy, he raised two fingers from the glass in greeting.

*Wren,* Pickle whispered. *He knows where we live.*

The window slid back up.

The SUV pulled out into traffic, and the silver sedan didn't follow.

It didn't have to.