The Billionaire's Clever Thief

3

AMELIA

"This," Alaric said, sliding a laminated card across the desk toward me, "makes it official."

I looked down at it. There was my photo, taken not twenty minutes ago against a white wall by a security guard, staring back at me above the words PERSONAL ASSISTANT TO MR. VOSS. My hands didn't shake picking it up, which felt like its own small victory.

"Cute," I said. "Do I get a lanyard too, or is that a season two privilege?"

He didn't laugh. He rarely did, I was learning, not the way he had in the suite last night, that sudden bright c***k of sound. This morning he was all sharp edges again, like the man who'd let me see something warm in him had clocked out and sent his colder brother to run the tour.

"This is your chance to prove yourself," he said, walking ahead of me down a hallway made almost entirely of glass. "There are cameras everywhere in this building. Every room, every corridor, every elevator."

"Noted," I said. "I'll remember to steal things off camera from now on."

There was still no reaction from him. He stopped at a window overlooking the city and turned to face me fully, and something in his expression sharpened into a warning.

"I don't trust you," he said, plainly, like it cost him nothing to say. "Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. If you make one mistake, if you so much as breathe wrong in this building, I will make sure you rot in a jail cell for the rest of your life."

Rot in a jail cell.

The words landed somewhere behind my ribs and kept falling, past the version of me standing in this hallway in a blazer that wasn't mine, down through years I usually kept locked somewhere I didn't visit.

I remembered my father's hands through the visiting room glass, which was thinner every week. The guard who wouldn't let me hug him goodbye the last time, though I hadn't known it was the last time. I remembered the phone call, months later, a voice telling my aunt it was his heart, like his heart had simply decided it was done waiting for a door that was never going to open.

He died in a cell for a debt that was never his. All because a rich bastard tried to dupe him of his own money. This is my why, this is the reason rich people will keep suffering as long as I have the power and will. My poor father, died for nothing.

"Miss Amelia."

I blinked. Alaric's voice, which was closer now, edged with something that wasn't quite concern but wasn't nothing either.

"Miss Amelia."

I came back into my body all at once, the hallway resolving around me, his face inches closer than I remembered it being, his brow drawn together like he was looking at a problem he hadn't budgeted time for.

I wiped my eyes fast, too fast probably, a clumsy swipe of my wrist that did nothing to hide what he'd already seen.

"I'm fine," I said, which fooled absolutely no one, least of all me.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. He held it out to me without a word.

I stared at it like it might bite me.

"I have no idea why you're emotional on your first day of employment," he said, his voice flat, but not unkind, which was somehow more disorienting than if he'd been cruel about it. "But if you're going to cry, you should at least do it properly."

"I don't need your handkerchief," I said, and pushed it back toward him, my pride showing up right on schedule to ruin a perfectly good moment of near vulnerability. "I don't need anything from you."

Something flickered across his face. Not hurt exactly. Filed away, maybe, the way I imagined he filed away everything, for later use.

He put the handkerchief back in his pocket without another word and gestured me forward instead, into an office with three monitors and a man who looked like he hadn't slept in days.

"This is a problem my team has failed to solve for six weeks," Alaric said, nodding at the screens. "A rival's internal network. I want in. Let's see if last night was luck."

I sat down at his laptop, close enough that I caught the same cologne from the suite, close enough to hate how my body remembered it before my mind gave permission. My fingers found the keys and something in me settled, finally, the way it always did when the rest of the world narrowed down to code and logic and the particular silence of a system about to give up its secrets.

Five minutes in, I glanced up at the dark reflection in the monitor and caught him watching me, not the screen, me, something unreadable in his eyes before he looked away like he hadn't been caught at all.

I said nothing. ofcourse I filed it away too.

Ten minutes later, I was in.

I sat back, waiting for something, a flicker of approval, anything. He studied the screen for a long moment, his jaw tight, and then looked at me with the same unreadable face he'd worn all morning.

"You're fit for the job," he said, which felt like being handed a medal made of ice. "You'll receive a list of tasks to complete before the end of the day."

That was it. No smile. No warmth. Just the mean, unbothered face he'd worn since the moment he'd let go of my throat.

I stood, gathered my things, and turned to leave, already composing the argument I'd have with myself about why any of this mattered to me at all.

"Report to me before you leave for home today," he said, not looking up from his screen. "I'll drive you home."

I stopped mid step.

"What the?" I turned back to look at him, certain I'd misheard, certain the universe owed me a better explanation than that.

Alaric didn't elaborate. He didn't even glance up.

I rolled my eyes and walked out, telling myself the flutter in my chest was irritation. Just irritation.