The Enemy Alpha’s Daughter

CHAPTER 4: After Hours

Aria walked back to her desk and sat down.

She stared at her screen without seeing it. Her mind was already somewhere else, turning the problem over the way she turned every problem over, looking for the edges, for the opening. She needed to get into Ryker’s office. She needed to get onto his system. She needed files.

The plan was simple. Get in after hours, get what she needed, get out. The problem was execution. Ryker never left early. She had gathered that in four days of watching the building. The lights on the executive floor stayed on long after everything else went dark. And no one was expected to be in the building overnight unless they were on approved overtime. Aria was not on approved overtime. If security found her there after hours, it was over.

She needed a way to stay in the building without being seen doing it.

She was still working through it when her lunch break came. She grabbed her bag and went down to the cafeteria.

Her wolf hearing found her name before she even picked up a tray.

Two women from her floor, tucked into a corner table, keeping their voices low in the way people did when they wanted to be heard by the right people and not the wrong ones.

“The new girl thinks she’s better than everyone because she’s sleeping with the CEO.” One of them said.

“she wouldn’t last. Ryker would be done with her soon and she’d go back to being nobody.”

Aria moved through the lunch line and kept her face blank. The very idea of being involved with Ryker Blackwood turned her stomach. She found an empty table and sat down with her food.

When the two women noticed her they stopped talking. She didn’t look at them.

She was still thinking about the office when Greg appeared at the edge of her table. He didn’t sit down. He stood with his arms at his sides and looked at her with the flat, certain expression of a man who had already made up his mind.

“You’ve not even been here a week,” he said, his voice low. “And you’re already doing this.”

Aria opened her mouth.

“Some of us worked hard to get where we are.” He cut her off cleanly. “We didn’t sleep our way there.”

He walked away before she could say a word.

She watched him go. She knew about the open position. The whole floor knew. Greg had six years at Blackcom and the promotion was his in everything but the official letter. He had earned it properly and she had done nothing to threaten it. She had taken a wrong elevator. That was all. She breathed through the anger that wanted to come up and pushed it back down. Her mission was bigger than his opinion of her.

Greg was still muttering under his breath when he turned the corner too fast and walked straight into the janitor’s cart. The mop bucket tipped sideways. Water spread across the tile floor in a wide sheet. Greg said something sharp and kept walking without looking back. The janitor crouched to gather the scattered supplies, then wheeled the cart toward the supply room at the end of the hall. The door swung open. The door swung shut.

Aria looked at that door.

She looked at it for a long moment, her fork held still over her plate.

There it was.

She spent the rest of the afternoon at her desk doing her actual work, which was easier now that she had something to look forward to. At five o’clock she packed her bag like everyone else, said nothing to anyone, and took the elevator down to the lobby. She walked through the front doors, turned left on the street, counted to thirty, and came back in through the side entrance she had mapped on her second day.

The supply room was unlocked. She slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind her. The room was dark and smelled like bleach and sealed air. She found a crate between a shelf of cleaning products and a rack of mop handles, sat down, and waited.

She listened to the building empty. The loud rush of people leaving at five. The slower thinning of the next thirty minutes. Then the deep, settled quiet that came when a large space finally had nothing left in it.

When she was sure, she took out her hairpin and worked the lock from the inside. Eleven seconds and the door opened without a sound.

The floor was dark. Somewhere below her, two security guards were finishing their sweep, their voices easy and unhurried. She had maybe eight minutes before they signed out for the night.

She moved into the corridor.

She went up onto her toes. Weight forward, heels never touching the floor, moving fast without making noise. The guards were getting closer. She pushed harder, keeping to the side of the hall where the cameras she had already logged couldn’t reach, and made it to the executive elevator. The doors opened the second she pressed the button. She stepped in and hit forty-one. The doors closed.

Through the steel, she heard the guards round the corner.

The elevator rose.

Floor forty-one was dark except for the city.

Chicago spread beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows in every direction, all amber and white light, the lake sitting black and flat in the distance. The air up here felt different. Quieter than it should have been.

Almost empty.

One desk lamp was still on near the far window. Aria spotted it and moved left to put a column between herself and the light. She was half a second too slow. The woman at the desk looked up.

The same woman from that morning. The one who had nearly walked into her outside the executive elevator, head down, already somewhere else. She was paying full attention now.

“Can I help you?” Her voice was steady. “It’s after hours. You shouldn’t be up here.”

“Sorry.” Aria kept her tone easy. “Ryker asked me to grab something he left in his office. It won’t take a minute.”

She started moving toward the office. The woman’s voice followed her.

“You’re the new girl everyone’s been talking about. Malia, right? Ryker’s new toy. Impressive record, by the way.”

Aria stopped. She turned around slowly.

“I’m not his toy.”

The woman looked at her with the calm of someone who had heard that exact sentence before and wasn’t moved by it. “Doesn’t look like it from where I’m standing.” She leaned back in her chair. “Look, I’m not trying to start anything. I’m just being straight with you. If you think something real is going to come out of whatever this is with Ryker, let it go. Half the women in this city have thought the same thing. And you’re better than that. Your data modelling scores from the hiring process were some of the best this company has seen in years. Don’t waste your brain being a footnote in his calendar.”

It was said plainly. No cruelty in it. Just one person saying a thing they meant.

“Thank you,” Aria said. “But there’s nothing going on between me and Ryker.” She paused. “I’m sorry, what was your name?”

“Kate.” She was already standing, coat in hand.

She pulled a set of keys from her desk drawer and held them up. “I’ll leave these on Rae’s table. Lock up when you’re done playing assistant.”

The elevator opened and closed. The floor went quiet.

Aria counted to ten. Then she crossed to Ryker’s office and pushed the door open.

The wolfsbane hit her before she was fully inside. Softer without him in the room, but still there, still finding her wolf and settling it down before she could do anything about it. She crossed to the desk.

The laptop was open. Screen up. No password. Just the desktop sitting there, completely unprotected.

She stopped.

Something in her chest pulled tight. Both parts of her, the trained and the instinctive, sent up the same quiet signal at the same moment. This was too easy. An unlocked office. An open laptop. A man like Ryker Blackwood did not leave things unprotected by accident. He was not careless. She had seen enough of him to know that.

She stood in the dark and looked at the screen and felt Frank’s last message sitting in her phone like a weight. Four days. Nothing. He was losing patience. The files were right there.

She pulled the flash drive from her blazer and plugged it in.

The transfer ran in silence. She watched the door and counted seconds. When it was done she pulled the drive, checked the desk was exactly as she had found it, and walked out without looking back.

She told herself the bad feeling in her gut was nothing.

***

In the Blackwood estate, the bedroom was dark except for the cold light of a monitor. Ryker sat at his desk, the blue glow cutting across his chest and jaw, and watched the camera feed play back in sharp, clean resolution.

He watched Malia Voss move through his office. Watched her go straight for the desk, see the open laptop, and stop. He leaned forward slightly when she stopped. He the hesitation sit on her face and then, slowly, get pushed down by something that looked less like greed and more like pressure.

She plugged in the drive.

His eyes shifted in the dark, hazel bleeding to red at the edges before settling back. He watched until she was gone. Then he sat back and thought about what he had just seen.

She had felt it. He could see it in how she stood there. She had known it was wrong and she had done it anyway. Which meant whoever had sent her was pushing her harder than she was comfortable with.

That was something worth knowing.

He picked up his phone and called Marcus.

“Deep background on Malia Voss,” he said. “Biometrics, employment records, digital footprint. Don’t stop at the surface. It’ll be clean. Go further. Someone spent real money building her cover. I want to know who and I want to know why they sent her here.”

He set the phone down. On the dark screen, the last frame of the feed sat still. Malia’s back as she walked out of his office.

He looked at it for a moment longer than he needed to. Then he closed the laptop and the room went dark.