CHOSEN FATE

CHAPTER TWO: MONDAY MORNING

Monday arrived the way Mondays do when you have been dreading them, too fast and too loud.

I tied my braids tight and pressed my uniform shirt and ate the eggs my mother made without tasting them and walked up the hill to the estate building at seven forty-five the same way I had been walking up that hill for three years.

The administrative wing of the Alpha estate was a separate building from the main house, set back from it by a courtyard with a small dry fountain and three benches nobody sat on. The admin wing was where the pack's paperwork lived. Filing, records, scheduling, payroll distribution, council correspondence. I was the junior filing clerk, which meant I handled everything the senior clerks did not want to touch and I did it faster and more accurately than any of them and got paid forty percent of what they did.

That was a situation I had been meaning to address for some time.

I pushed through the glass door and walked to my section and sat down and turned on my computer and began working.

I was three hours into a backlog of transfer records when I heard his voice in the outer corridor.

My hands stopped on the keyboard.

My chest did the thing. The pilot light, suddenly brighter.

I made my hands start moving again.

Axel's voice came through the wall, low and even, talking to someone I could not identify. A question, an answer, a pause. The way a man sounds when he is doing work and has not thought about you at all this morning.

I sorted twelve files.

He did not come into the admin wing.

I heard his footsteps in the outer corridor for about four minutes and then they moved away and the pilot light in my chest dimmed back to its usual temperature.

Bev appeared at my partition at noon with two cups of coffee.

"How was the birthday gathering?" she asked. She was in her forties, sharp-eyed, with the kind of directness that came from twenty years of dealing with council bureaucracy.

"Fine," I said.

She looked at me.

"You left early," she said.

"I left at nine."

"The gathering ends at ten."

"I know when it ends, Bev."

She set one of the cups on my desk. Sat in the chair beside my partition. She looked at her own cup for a moment. Then: "People talk."

"People always talk."

"They're saying the bond activated," she said. Not gossip. The careful voice of someone who cared about me and was trying to hand me information while giving me the option to take it or leave it.

I looked at my screen.

"Nova."

"Yes," I said. Simply. "It activated."

She was quiet for a moment.

"And he"

"Said it wasn't real." I picked up the coffee. It was hot and slightly too sweet the way Bev always made it. "In front of everyone."

Another quiet moment.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't be," I said. "He was honest about what he chose. I can respect that even if I don't like it."

She looked at me with an expression I recognized, the one that meant she was deciding whether to push further or let it sit.

She let it sit.

"The Henderson records came in this morning," she said. "All forty-seven of them."

"Put them on my desk," I said.

She put them on my desk.

I worked through lunch.

At three in the afternoon the outer door of the admin wing opened and I heard footsteps that were not Bev's and not the senior clerk's. Too heavy, too deliberate.

I did not look up.

"Miss Chase."

I looked up.

Axel Grey was standing at the entrance to my section. He was in his working clothes, dark shirt, dark trousers, the kind of dress that was neither formal nor casual, just the clothes of a man who was always at work because his work was being the Alpha. He had a file folder under his arm.

"Alpha Grey," I said. Politely. The way I would speak to any senior person who came to the admin wing.

Something in his expression adjusted. Almost imperceptibly.

"I have a corrections request," he said. "The September council records have an error on page forty-three."

"I can log the request," I said. "Senior corrections go to Bev Morrison."

"She directed me here," he said.

I looked at him.

He looked back. His face was doing the controlled thing, the nothing expression that was so perfectly nothing it was obviously covering something.

I held out my hand for the file.

He crossed to my desk and placed it there. His hand was six inches from mine for the duration of that transfer. I felt it.

I opened the file. Found page forty-three. Found the error, a transposed name in the attendance column.

"This will take two minutes," I said.

"I can wait," he said.

He did not go back to the corridor. He stood at the edge of my desk while I made the correction, logged it, initialed the change, and closed the file.

I held it out.

He took it.

Our fingers did not touch.

"Thank you," he said.

"Of course," I said. I was already looking at my screen.

He stood there for a second longer than the interaction required.

I did not look up.

He left.

I stared at the correction log on my screen and breathed carefully for about ten seconds.

Then I went back to the Henderson records.

He came to the admin wing three times that week. Each time with a legitimate reason. Each time he stood near my desk for longer than the reason required. Each time I handed him what he needed and went back to my work.

On Friday afternoon, just before I locked my section for the weekend, I found a note on my desk.

Not slipped under anything. Just sitting there, on top of the Henderson stack, in handwriting I did not recognize.

It said: I know you think I don't have an explanation good enough to matter. You're right. But I need you to know I'm trying to find one.

No signature.

I sat with it for a full minute.

Then I put it in my bag, turned off my computer, and locked my section.

On the way down the hill I passed Cassidy Vale's car coming through the estate gate.

She looked at me through the window.

I looked back.

She had the expression of a woman who was measuring a distance.

I walked home.

The note stayed in my bag all weekend.

I did not respond to it. There was no way to respond to it. But I read it twice on Saturday and once on Sunday and each time I put it away I understood something I had not been ready to admit.

He was not nothing.

That was the problem.

If he were nothing, the bond would be easy to dismiss. If he were simply cold or cruel or empty, I could build my wall and live behind it.

But the man who had stood on the path in the dark with his hands at his sides, saying I won't pretend it didn't happen, was not nothing.

He was someone who was afraid.

And I knew about being afraid.

I just was not going to let his fear become my cage.