Entangled with the Alpha Brothers.

AMANDA’S FIRST DAY AT NOSCOIR.

COIR.

She doesn’t know what she does to the room when she walks into it.

I took her to the company the next morning. It wasn’t planned. She’s been restless at breakfast, picking at her food, and I’d watched her for ten minutes before I said, “Come with me today.” Just like that. No ceremony.

She’s looked up from her plate. “To Noscoir?”

“Unless you’d rather sit here and think yourself in circles. You aren’t allowed back to work till you are perfectly fine.”

“I am perfectly fine.”

“No. You’re not.” She didn’t argue.

The corner of her mouth had moved. Not quite a smile, but the piece of her that wanted to smile was in there somewhere, and I was going to keep finding ways to call it out until it had nowhere left to hide.

It gave me peace to see Soir and Noir not really bothering her and the witch, whoever she was was on a break from Amanda. It still baffles me, what a witch would ever want with an Omega? If she wanted Amanda dead…she would be dead.

Amanda appeared a while later. She wore a deep burgundy dress—nothing flashy, nothing she’d chosen to impress anyone. Just a dress that fit the shape of her, that moved with her when she walked. I noticed the way the security staff at the front lobby stood a little straighter when she came in beside me.

I noticed the women by the elevator who tracked her with their eyes and then looked at me and reassessed everything.

Amanda noticed none of it. That was the thing about her, she’s spent so long being invisible that she didn’t know how to read a room that was staring.

I introduced her at the front desk without making a production of it. “Amanda. She has full access, same clearance as me.” The receptionist, Nia, was too professional to react, but her eyes flicked between us and through all the subtlety of a stadium floodlight,

By the time we reached the executive floor, the whispers had already started.

Noir was in the glass-walled conference room at the end of the hall, mid-meeting, sleeves rolled up, a phone in each hand. He saw us through the glass.

Saw her

His eyes tracked to me and then back to Amanda with an expression he schooled so fast I almost missed it.

Amanda pretended not to see him at all. The deliberateness of it was its own kind of answer.

I set her up in the smaller office adjacent to mine with a view of the city and a coffee from the hood machine, not the one the interns used. She curled into the chair like she was trying to figure out if she was allowed to be comfortable, and then, slowly, stubbornly, she sank in.

I watched her from the doorway for exactly as long as I could justify.

“Stop watching me,” she said, eyes still on the view.

“I'm not watching you.”

“You are. You're doing the thing where you stand very still and try to make me forget you're there.”

I came and sat on the edge of the desk beside her. “Does it work?”

She looked up at me. The light from the window was doing something extraordinary to her face, catching the dark gold in her eyes, and I made myself hold her gaze at a normal distance, like a person who was not fundamentally restructuring around this woman.”

“No,” she said. “It does not work.”

We stayed like that a moment too long.

Then my phone buzzed. Work. Always work.

But before I left, I leaned down and tucked a loose braid behind her ear, gently, and I didn't say anything, and neither did she, and when I walked back to my office I could still feel the warmth of her hair against my fingers like a small, ruinous thing.

~SOIR~

I saw them from the car park.

I hadn't come inside yet. I'd been standing by the car, keys in hand, telling myself I needed a cigarette, which I hadn't smoked in four years. And then the glass doors of the lobby opened, and Coir walked out with Amanda at his side.

She was laughing.

It was bright and unguarded and she tipped her head back slightly when she did it, and Coir was looking at her with an expression I had never once seen on his face in thirty years of knowing him.

Something behind my sternum did something I wasn't going to examine.

I turned and went back to my car and drove three blocks before I pulled over.

She was an Omega. She was a nothing rank. She had rejected all three of us in front of a room full of people and I had stood there and felt it like a slap. I didn't want her. I had said I didn't want her. I had been very clear and very loud about not wanting her.

My hands were tight on the steering wheel.

She'd been laughing.

It shouldn’t bother me, I didn’t care. I blamed the bond for it, it had to be the reason why my wolf stirs restlessly whenever she was close, and maybe the possible reason why I yearn to kiss her like the first time.

It’d been rough, but a taste of her made me break, hungry for more so desperately, hiding it felt like silver in my chest.

Such a useless little thing made my heart beat so fast, my mouth watered when she spoke, but she never noticed. That’s the hardest part. Every other lady throw themselves at the likes of my brothers and I for status, money, and our power.

Amanda however has been different. She vowed to break the bond even if it hurts her the most. And that’s what I wanted, that’s what I hoped for. Yet somehow, seeing her so close and free with Coir made something break in the pit of my stomach. Something I’d rather not admit.

I put the car in drive and told myself I was going back to work, and the fact that I drove past the front of the building twice before going in was nobody's business but mine.