The Alpha's Forbidden Pact

CHAPTER 4: HE KNOWS

"How do you know that name?"

"Sit, Miss Sinclair."

"Don't." My voice came out sharper than intended, my hand still locked around the door handle. "Don't call me that. Tell me how you know it."

"Sit first."

"I'm not sitting until you explain how a man I met an hour ago knows a name I've spent my entire life concealing."

Julian didn't move from behind his desk, didn't lean forward, and the stillness unsettled me more than shouting would have. "It's not a short conversation. I'd prefer to have it with you seated."

"I'd prefer to have it standing exactly where I am."

"You won't enjoy standing through this."

"I don't enjoy anything about this conversation. Standing won't change that."

"Fine." He folded his hands on the desk. "Ask your questions."

"How."

"That's not a question. That's a syllable."

"Julian."

"There it is. First time you've used my name instead of an insult."

"Don't redirect."

"I'm not." He looked away, briefly, as though selecting his next words with more care than he'd used all morning. "You're asking how I know. I'm telling you there's no short version."

"Give me the short version regardless."

"There isn't one."

"Then give me a version where I can survive standing up, because I am not sitting in that chair as though this is an ordinary conversation."

Something shifted in his expression, not quite softening, closer to recalculating. "Understood."

I crossed my arms, partly to appear steady, mostly to stop my hands from shaking. "Start talking."

"What first?"

"Everything. Start with how long."

He hesitated, and the hesitation told me the answer would be worse than I wanted.

"That's not an answer."

"I'm arriving at one."

"Arrive faster."

"Why," I said, before he could respond. "Why tell me any of this? You could have maintained the fiction that this was an ordinary first day. I would have believed it. I believed it for a full hour."

"Because you were about to walk through that door and never return, and I'd rather you resent me for the truth than trust me on a fabrication."

"That's not much of a choice."

"It's the only honest one available."

"Why does this matter to you? I'm an assistant you hired this morning. According to you."

Something flickered across his face, quick, almost involuntary. "It matters considerably more than you currently understand."

"Then help me understand."

"Not yet."

"You don't open a door like this and shut it whenever it becomes inconvenient for you."

"I'm not shutting anything. I'm telling you certain pieces aren't fit for the same conversation as the first."

"Does the pact know you're aware?"

"No."

"Does anyone?"

"No one who would report it."

My mind raced ahead of my mouth, cataloguing every conversation inside the safehouse this week, every assumption I'd made about safety simply because the Five had selected this job for me. "If you knew who I was, my placement here was never secure. That means whoever is watching you may already know where I am. Do you understand what that means for the people protecting me."

"I understand it better than you assume."

"Then why let me walk into this building at all."

"Because leaving you out there, invisible to me, was more dangerous than keeping you here, where I could actually observe what happened to you."

"That's not your decision to make."

"No," he said. "It wasn't. I made it regardless."

"What else have you decided for me without asking?"

"Nothing you'd thank me for hearing right now."

"Try me."

"I arranged for the safehouse's backup contact to route through a line I control. If the Five's usual channels ever fail, you'd still have somewhere to go that isn't exposed."

"You built yourself an emergency exit into my life without telling me."

"I built you one. Whether I told you was never the point."

"It should have been the point."

"Perhaps. I've had months to weigh that decision and I still don't regret making it."

The honesty of that landed harder than any lie could have. I sat down after all, not because he'd asked this time, but because my legs stopped agreeing to hold me upright.

Julian watched me sit without any satisfaction crossing his face, which somehow made it worse. Had he looked pleased, I could have located my anger again easily. Instead his jaw stayed tight, as though carrying this had cost him something he wasn't accustomed to admitting aloud.

"How many others have known," I asked, "while I've gone about my life believing I was invisible."

"I don't know precisely. Fewer than you'd expect. More than you'd want."

"That's not a number."

"It's the honest version of one."

"Do any of them mean harm to me?"

"Not the ones I've kept close. The ones I haven't kept close, I can't promise you."

"That's not reassuring."

"I told you. I don't do anything reassuring."

I pressed my palms flat against my knees, grounding myself the way Kade had taught me years ago, back before any of this, back when the largest danger in my life remained theoretical instead of sitting three feet away in an expensive suit.

I released the door handle and walked back toward the desk, my legs steadier than my pulse had any right to be, and stopped close enough that he'd have to look up to keep watching me. "I don't have patience for being slow this morning."

"You'll want the patience once you hear it."

"Let me decide that."

He didn't answer immediately, and the silence stretched long enough that I turned back toward the door, my hand finding the handle again, ready to walk out of this building and never return, cover job or not.

He almost got me there.

He didn't call after me right away either, and the silence itself was its own answer, a man deciding whether to let me leave or whether whatever he had to say outweighed my anger. My hand was flat against the door when he finally spoke.

"Ivy."

I stopped.

"You have five seconds," I said, without turning.

"That's not enough time for the truth."

"Then speak quickly."

"I already knew who you were," Julian said, steady, no hesitation this time, as though he'd concluded there was no version of this conversation where softening it helped either of us. "Before you applied. Before the recommendation letter. Before any of it."

I turned around slowly. "That's not possible. That posting was random. I found it myself."

"Did you."

The certainty in his voice dropped my stomach straight through the floor. "You placed it there."

"I'm saying nothing about your placement here was random."

"That means the Five don't actually know who you are either. Not the way they believe they do."

"They know precisely who I am. What they don't know is how much I already knew about you before their pact ever brought you into this city."

"You're lying."

"I don't lie about matters of this weight."

"Then you're wrong. Nobody outside three people knows who I am. That's the entire point of eighteen years of hiding."

"I'm not wrong, Ivy."

"Prove it. Tell me something only someone who's actually known me for months could know."

"You hum when you're concentrating. Something wordless, three notes, always the same three. You did it twice this morning without noticing."

My throat went tight. Nobody outside the safehouse had ever mentioned that, because nobody outside the safehouse had ever been close enough to notice.

Hearing my real name in his mouth a second time struck differently than the first, less like a threat and more like something settling into place I wasn't ready for.

"How long," I said again, quieter, because some part of me already understood I wouldn't like the answer and needed to hear it regardless. "Don't give me a version that makes this easier. Give me the real one."

Julian was quiet for a moment, watching me the way one watches someone just before delivering something that changes everything, his jaw set as though even he wasn't entirely comfortable with what he was about to hand me.

"Months," he said finally. "I've known exactly who you are for months. Long before you ever walked through that door today."