Marked By The Unmated Alpha

Still here

Adele's POV

I had spent the better part of the morning pretending to work, and I could tell it wouldn't be long before someone noticed.

It had already started.

My supervisor had come to the desk earlier, spoken to Laura about her report, then turned to me and said she hadn't received mine yet. Laura had looked at me sideways when she left. She hadn't said anything, but she didn't need to. In four years of working here, I had never once missed a submission. Not once.

It wasn't that the report was difficult. The work itself was straightforward, the same as it had always been. The problem was my brain kept wandering into places I had told it not to go, and no amount of staring at the screen was fixing that.

Laura noticed before I could do anything about it.

"You've typed the same line three times," she said, appearing at my elbow the way she always did when she had decided to involve herself in something whether I wanted her to or not.

"I'm trying to get the report done," I said.

"Your mind isn't on it, Adele. You're sitting there looking like someone canceled Christmas."

I deleted the repeated line and started over. "I am working on it."

She sat down anyway.

I didn't look at her because looking at her meant having a conversation I had already decided not to have. He was gone. Two Mondays ago he had walked through those doors, spent two days here without once acknowledging that anything had ever passed between us, then flown back to Georgia without a word. The executives had mentioned it so casually at lunch that Laura had nearly choked on her sandwich.

Life at Maxim Group continued as it usually was except they had changed the name from Maximal during the second week. Our department was the same as it had always been. The rest of the building had a different energy, faster, more deliberate, people moving like they had something to prove to whoever was now watching from Georgia. But at our desk, things were the same.

Except for me, I guess, because I was sitting here unable to finish a report I could normally do in my sleep.

I was fine, or I was making a reasonable impression of being fine, which had been good enough for two weeks and was apparently starting to fall apart.

I typed another sentence and stared at it.

Then the wave hit.

No warning.

Just a sudden hollow weakness moving through me from the inside out, taking everything with it at once. My fingers went cold. The edges of my vision went briefly uncertain. I gripped the desk with both hands, breathed slowly and waited for it to pass.

It passed. Thirty seconds, maybe less.

When I looked up, Laura was already watching me and there was nothing of her usual amusement in her face.

"Adele."

"I'm fine."

"You just went completely white."

"I'm fine," I said, quieter this time. "I think I'm coming down with something."

She looked at me for a long moment, then reached into her drawer and placed a cereal bar on my desk without a word. I picked it up because arguing would cost more energy than I had and ate it while she watched.

It wasn't the first time something like this had happened.

The weekend after that Friday, I had put it down to alcohol, to nerves, to what happens when you do something completely out of character and your body takes a few days to forgive you for it. The following week, when it kept coming back, I had moved on to stress, poor sleep, the unsettled feeling of new management and a renamed company and a life that had briefly lurched sideways and was still finding its footing.

The headaches that arrived from nowhere and left just as quietly. The cold that came at two or three in the morning, not the room, not even the weather, like it was starting from inside of me and stayed until it decided to go. I had a collection of small, reasonable explanations and I had been working through all of them.

"Go home if you're not well," Laura said. Not teasing. The other version of her, the one that didn't come out often.

"I have a few more hours."

"Adele."

"I'm fine. Really."

She didn't look convinced, but she let it go, which was its own kind of kindness.

I stayed until the end of the shift.

Laura held my hand on the ride home, which she did without making it into anything, just slipped her hand into mine on the Metro and kept it there. She made dinner when we got back, something warm and simple, and it was genuinely good. Afterward, I sat on my bed with the book I had been trying to finish for two weeks and read the same page four times before I accepted that reading wasn't happening tonight and put it down.

Laura was in the shower. The apartment was warm. Everything was quiet.

I caught myself touching the spot behind my ear without realizing I was doing it.

I pulled my hand away. Then, after a moment, I got up and went to the bathroom.

I moved my hair aside in front of the mirror.

The crescent moon mark was darker than it had been.

I stood still for a long moment. Laura had taken a photograph of it a few weeks ago, and I still had it on my phone. This was not the same mark. The edges were sharper now, more defined, the color deepened from something faint and easy to dismiss into something that looked like it meant to be there. When I pressed two fingers gently against it, the skin was warm not in a feverish kind of way, just specifically warm in a way the surrounding skin wasn't.

I lowered my hand.

I looked at myself properly for the first time in two weeks.

The tiredness behind my eyes that a full night's sleep wasn't touching. The cold that had woken me up twice this week alone. The wave at the desk this morning that had emptied me out in under a minute. Two weeks of small reasonable explanations stacked on top of each other.

And a mark on my skin that was becoming more of itself without my permission.

I had been telling myself I was fine for fourteen days.

Standing here now, I couldn't find the same certainty in it. Something was happening to me that I didn't have a name for and couldn't explain away, and for the first time since that Friday night I let myself be properly afraid of that.

Laura has been quieter lately too, and she has been less of herself. I didn't know if she had noticed something I hadn't said out loud or if she was just picking up on the general feeling that had settled over the apartment these past two weeks.

Either way, neither of us had named it yet. And it scares the life out of me.