The Alpha's Petite Nightmare

Chapter 2: Terms and Conditions

Ethan Vance did not let people walk away from him. It wasn't ego — or it wasn't only ego. It was thirty years of learning that the moment you let something slip through your fingers, it stayed gone. His father had taught him that lesson exactly once, and only ever needed to.

So when the girl in the lilac sweater lowered her blade, stepped over his unconscious guards like they were sidewalk cracks, and walked toward the stairwell instead of the elevator — clearly unwilling to be trapped in a box with him — he let her get exactly four steps before he spoke.

"Clara Lin."

She stopped.

It was small, barely a hitch in her stride, but he caught it, filed it away. He hadn't known her name a minute ago. He'd had one of his people run a quiet trace on her scent signature the second she'd stepped off the ledge, cross-referenced against old rogue registries while he'd still been in the elevator. The system had taken longer than he liked to spit out a match, longer than it should have for anyone with a real pack history, which told him almost as much as the name itself did.

"That's an invasive party trick," she said, without turning around. "Do you Google everyone who threatens you, or am I special?"

"You're the first person who's threatened me on my own roof in about six years," Ethan said. "So yes. Special."

She turned around then, and for the first time he got a proper look at her without three unconscious men or a knife between them. Doe eyes, soft round face, hair escaping a loose braid in a way that looked accidental and probably wasn't. She looked twenty-two. She looked harmless. He knew better now, and some small, primal part of him — the part that had gone very quiet and very interested the moment their eyes met — found that gap between appearance and reality more compelling than he wanted to admit.

"I'm going to leave now," Clara said, in the tone of someone explaining something patiently to a child. "You're going to let me, because chasing me is going to be a lot more trouble than it's worth. We can both pretend this evening didn't happen."

"We both know that's not true," Ethan said. "You felt it. I felt it. Fated bonds don't come with a return policy."

Something flickered across her face — gone almost before he registered it, but he'd spent his whole life reading rooms for a living, and he didn't miss it. Not fear, exactly. Closer to exhaustion. Like she'd been bracing for this particular disaster for a long time and had simply hoped it would happen to somebody else.

"I don't want a pack," she said. "I don't want a mate. I don't want a penthouse or a title or whatever it is you're about to offer me instead of just letting me go. I want to finish my milk in peace, which, thanks to your employees, I no longer have."

"I'll buy you more milk."

"That's not the point, Mr. Vance."

"Ethan."

"That's definitely not the point."

He almost smiled again. He was doing that a lot tonight, an inconvenient new habit. "Here's my point. Three of my best people are on the ground behind you, and you did that without shifting, without breaking a sweat, and without so much as spilling your drink. I don't know what you are exactly, but I know what you're not — and you're not a starving rogue who wandered in off the street. Which means one of two things is true. Either you're a threat to my pack, in which case I have every right to detain you. Or you're not, in which case you have nothing to hide by telling me who you are and what you were doing on my roof."

Clara considered him for a long moment, head tilted slightly, the picture of someone weighing an entirely reasonable request. "There's a third option."

"Which is?"

"I'm neither, and it's none of your business, and I leave anyway."

"That option requires me letting you walk past me," Ethan said. "I already told you. I don't do that."

"You held a knife on you for two minutes tonight, Mr. Vance. I'd think that would recalibrate what you think you can and can't stop."

"You didn't kill me," he said. "You could have. You didn't. That tells me something too."

That landed somewhere he hadn't quite intended it to. He watched her jaw tighten, fractionally, and filed that away as well.

"Don't read into it," she said.

"I read into everything. It's how I run a company."

"Then read into this." She took a step closer, close enough that he caught the smell of strawberry milk and something underneath it, something wilder and colder that made his wolf strain against its leash. "I've survived eight years without a pack, without a mate, without anyone's protection or permission. I didn't do that by being careless, and I didn't do that by staying anywhere someone wanted to keep me. You can post guards on every exit in this building. It won't matter. I was already gone before your friends woke up on the roof."

She turned to walk away again.

"Fifty million dollars."

That stopped her cold.

Ethan almost regretted saying it — almost, if regret was a thing he indulged in — but he'd learned a long time ago that everyone had a price, and if hers wasn't money, watching her reaction to the offer would still tell him something useful. Instead what he got was worse than a reaction. He got silence, and a look on her face he couldn't fully parse: not greed, not interest, something closer to old, tired anger.

"You think this is about money," she said quietly.

"I think everyone's price is different. I'm still working out yours."

"My price," Clara said, "is being left alone. You can't buy that. You've apparently never tried."

"Then let me try something else." He reached into his jacket, pulled out a card — not his standard one, the one with a private line that maybe four people on earth had access to — and held it out between two fingers. "A contract. Corporate advisory role, six-month term, fully compensated, at Vance Enterprises. You consult. That's all. In exchange, I don't send my legal team, my pack trackers, or my council allies looking for the woman who put three of my guards on the ground with her bare hands. Given the interest that's going to generate the second word gets out — and it will get out, people talk — I'd think of it less as a job offer and more as the safest six months you've had in eight years."

Clara didn't take the card. She looked at it the way someone looks at a trap they've already half-decided to walk into anyway, because the alternative is worse.

"That's not a job offer," she said. "That's a leash with a salary attached."

"Call it whatever helps you sleep at night."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you spend the next several months looking over your shoulder wondering which of my people found you first, and whether they're feeling as generous as I am tonight." He said it without heat, without threat in his tone at all, which somehow made it land harder than if he'd growled it. "I'd rather not do that. You clearly don't want a fight you don't have to have. Neither do I."

For a moment, neither of them moved. Somewhere behind her, one of the guards groaned and shifted, beginning to stir. The wind pulled at the loose strands of her hair, and for just a second, standing there in her ridiculous oversized sweater with a business card held out between them like a dare, she looked exactly as young and soft as she was clearly trying to seem — and Ethan found himself, against every instinct that had built his empire, wanting to know what was underneath that on purpose, rather than because his wolf had made the decision for him on a rooftop.

Clara reached out and took the card.

"Six months," she said. "Not one day more. And if I find out this is some kind of trick to keep me here past that—"

"You'll put a knife to my throat again. I remember."

"I'll put a knife somewhere less forgiving next time."

"Noted." He almost smiled, and this time let himself. "Welcome to Vance Enterprises, Ms. Lin."

She turned the card over once in her fingers, reading nothing on it that wasn't already there, and slid it into the pocket of her sweater beside an empty carton of strawberry milk.

"You're going to regret this," she said, not unkindly, more like she was doing him the courtesy of a warning he wouldn't take.

"I regret a lot of things," Ethan said. "I have a feeling you're not going to be one of them."

Behind them, in the shadow of the stairwell door, a fourth figure who had not been part of the original three guards — who had, in fact, been standing there silently since before Ethan stepped off the elevator — turned and disappeared down the stairs without a sound, already reaching for a phone to make a call neither Clara nor Ethan would learn about for weeks.