The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 10: THE FILE

I stood outside his door longer than I should have.

The shake in his voice still sat under my skin. Two words. Get out. Nothing else. But the way they left his mouth made it clear he was holding something back that cost him.

I forced my feet to move.

The elevator carried me down to the main floor. I told myself I was leaving. I told myself I would go back to the safehouse and pretend the last ten minutes had not happened. My body had other plans. I stopped at the glass doors, turned around, and rode the elevator back up.

His assistant was gone from her desk. A half-finished coffee sat cooling beside her keyboard. The executive floor felt emptier than it had twenty minutes earlier.

Julian’s office door was closed now. I tried the handle. Locked.

I should have walked away. Instead, I remembered the spare keycard he had given me on my first day for emergency access. I had never used it. I slid it through the reader. The light turned green.

The office was still warm from his presence. His cologne hung in the air. The glass of water he had poured sat untouched on the sideboard. I closed the door behind me and locked it from the inside.

I did not know what I was looking for. I only knew he had almost said something he could not take back, and I was done waiting for permission to find the rest of it.

His desk was clean. Too clean. I opened the top drawer. Pens. A spare phone charger. A single black notebook with nothing written on the first twenty pages. I put it back.

The second drawer held files. Client names. Numbers. Nothing that belonged to me. I flipped through them anyway, heart beating hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth.

The bottom drawer was locked.

I stared at it. Then I remembered the small silver key I had seen him drop into the pen holder on my second day. I emptied the pen holder onto the desk. The key was there, small and ordinary.

It fit.

Inside the drawer was a single folder, thicker than the others, the edges worn from being handled. No label on the front. I lifted it out and set it on the desk.

My hands were not steady.

I opened it.

The first page was a photograph. Old. Slightly faded. Two people standing close together in front of a dark doorway. The woman had my eyes. The same shape. The same slight tilt at the outer corners. Her hair was longer than mine, but the line of her jaw was the same. The man beside her had one hand on her back, protective, familiar. I had never seen my father’s face this clearly before. Every picture the Five had allowed me was cropped or damaged or carefully incomplete.

I turned the page.

A report. Dates. Locations. Times. The night my parents died written out in cold typed lines. Witness statements that had never reached me. A list of names I only half recognized. At the bottom of the second page, in a different hand, someone had written a single sentence.

She is alive. Location unknown. Protect at all costs.

I kept turning pages. Medical records from when I was small. A list of every safehouse I had ever lived in, including the current one. Notes on Kade. Notes on Damaris. Notes on Theo. Detailed. Recent. Updated within the last month.

My name appeared over and over. Ivy Sinclair. Heir. Last living bloodline of the old throne.

I reached the final page and stopped breathing.

A second photograph was clipped there. My mother again, younger, laughing at something off-camera. Standing beside her was a man I did not know. Tall. Dark hair. The same sharp jawline I had just seen on Julian ten minutes ago. The resemblance was not subtle.

Under the photograph, in the same handwriting as the earlier note, was a name and a date.

Vincent Vance. Died the same night as Elena and David Sinclair.

I closed the folder.

The room felt smaller. The air felt thinner. Every conversation I had ever had with Julian rearranged itself behind my eyes. The job posting. The way he had watched me from the first hour. The way he already knew things no stranger should have known. His father had died trying to protect my parents. And he had spent months building a cage of safety around me without ever telling me why.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway.

I shoved the folder back into the drawer, locked it, and dropped the key into the pen holder. My hands were shaking hard enough that the key nearly missed. I stepped away from the desk just as the door handle turned.

It stopped.

Someone tried it again. Then a keycard slid through the reader. The lock clicked.

I had nowhere to hide.

The door opened.

Julian stood in the doorway. His eyes went straight to my face, then to the desk, then back to me. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man who had been waiting for this exact moment and still was not ready for it.