The Alpha's Rejected Mate: His Boss

Chapter 6: The link

I don't sleep.

The leather folder sits on my kitchen counter, patient and accusatory, while I pace the length of my apartment in bare feet. 3:00 AM. 3:47 AM. 4:22 AM. The numbers on the microwave clock advance with the indifference of a universe that doesn't care whether I sign away six months or six years or the rest of my life.

My wolf has been talking for hours.

Sign it, she says. Sign it and go home.

"It's not home. It's his building. His territory. His rules."

His bed, she adds helpfully.

"Nobody said anything about his bed."

You're thinking about it.

I stop pacing. She's right. I am thinking about it. I've been thinking about it since the moment his fingers brushed the scar behind my ear, casual and possessive, like he still owned every inch of skin he'd ever touched.

"Six months," I say aloud. The sound of my own voice steadies me. "Six months of clarity. Six months without the bond screaming in my ear. Six months to prove to him and to myself and to everyone that what we had was just biology."

And if it wasn't?

I don't answer.

---

At 5:15 AM, I make coffee. At 5:22 AM, I pour it down the sink untasted. At 5:30 AM, I pick up the phone Caden gave me and call the only person in the human world who might understand.

Maya Chen answers on the third ring, her voice groggy and confused. "Lila? It's not even six. Is everything okay?"

"I need to ask you something."

A pause. Rustling sheets. The sound of a lamp clicking on. Maya has been my closest friend since my second year at Sterling and Cochran. She knows nothing about wolves or mates or the Silver Moon Dominion. She thinks I'm just a workaholic with a mysterious past and a pathological aversion to office holiday parties.

"I'm listening," she says.

"If someone offered you a deal that would change everything about your life, but you'd have to give up control for six months to get it, would you take it?"

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Is this about the Blackwood acquisition? I saw the email. Everyone saw the email."

"It's about something older than that."

Maya is quiet for so long I check the screen to make sure the call hasn't dropped. Then she says, "You know I'm adopted, right?"

I blink. "You mentioned it once."

"I found out last year that my biological family wasn't exactly ordinary. There were things about them. Things about me. Things I'd been ignoring for thirty years because facing them was too terrifying." Her voice drops. "I'm still not ready to talk about it. But I will say this. Running only works until it doesn't. And when you stop running, the thing you've been avoiding is still there. Just bigger. And angrier. And more tired of waiting."

My throat tightens. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only answer I have."

We sit in silence for a moment, two women holding phones and secrets, separated by a city that never stops moving.

"Whatever you decide," Maya finally says, "make sure you're choosing for yourself. Not out of fear. Not out of anger. Out of what you actually want."

"What if I don't know what I want?"

"Then maybe it's time to find out."

---

The sun rises over Manhattan at 6:03 AM. I watch it from my living room window, a spill of gold across glass and steel, and I think about the color of Caden's eyes. Autumn leaves trapped in whiskey. The first thing I noticed about him when I was sixteen. The first thing I noticed again when the elevator doors opened on the sixty sixth floor.

You're thinking about his eyes, my wolf observes.

"Shut up."

Just saying.

At 6:15 AM, I shower. At 6:32 AM, I dress. My own clothes this time. A navy pantsuit, tailored and severe, armor for a negotiation I'm not sure I'm winning. I put my hair up. I leave the scar visible.

At 6:58 AM, I'm standing outside Blackwood Tower with the leather folder in my hand and the morning wind whipping strands of hair across my face. The obsidian facade absorbs the sunrise rather than reflecting it. A black hole in the center of Manhattan.

Margaret is waiting in the lobby. She takes one look at my face and the folder in my hand and says nothing. Just presses the elevator button and steps aside.

The sixty sixth floor is quiet. The cubicles are empty. The conference rooms are dark. Caden's office door is open.

He's standing at the window with his back to me, a silhouette against the morning sky. He's not wearing a jacket. His sleeves are rolled up, exposing forearms that still carry the muscle memory of running on four legs instead of two. When he turns, his expression is unreadable.

"You're early," he says.

"You gave me a deadline."

"And?"

I hold up the folder. "I have conditions."

The corner of his mouth twitches. "You always have conditions."

"First." I step into his office and stop six feet away, out of arm's reach. Safe distance. Or what passes for safe between us. "Suite 42 has a lock. You don't have a key. You don't enter without my invitation. Ever."

"Agreed."

"Second. The professional boundaries I negotiated yesterday still stand. In this office, I'm your employee. You don't touch me. You don't look at me like you're looking at me right now. You don't use the bond or the past or anything else as leverage."

"Define how I'm looking at you."

"Like you're already planning how this ends."

He doesn't deny it. "And third?"

"Third." I take a breath. This is the hard one. The one I didn't plan. The one that scares me more than the contract or the suppression or living in his building. "At the end of six months, if I choose to dissolve the bond permanently, you let me go. Completely. You don't follow me. You don't buy my company again. You don't send gifts or notes or memories dressed up as professional courtesy. You let me disappear, and you stay disappeared."

The silence that follows is the longest of my life.

Caden crosses the room slowly, each step deliberate, and stops a foot closer than professional distance. I don't back away. I don't flinch. But my heart is hammering and he can definitely hear it.

"You're asking me to promise something I don't know if I can deliver," he says quietly.

"I'm asking you to try."

He searches my face. For what, I don't know. Proof that I mean it. Proof that I don't. Something I'm not sure is there anymore.

"If I agree to these terms," he says, "will you sign?"

I look at the folder in my hands. The leather is soft from being held too long. Somewhere inside, a contract written in ancient ink is waiting for my blood and his. A deal that will silence the bond. That will give me six months of clarity. That will either set me free or prove that freedom was never what I actually wanted.

"Yes," I say. "I'll sign."

Caden reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a small silver knife. It's old. Ancient, maybe. The handle is carved with the same wolf's head crest that's embossed on the folder.

"Then let's finish this."

He rolls up his sleeve further, exposing the inside of his forearm. Without hesitation, he draws the blade across his skin. A thin line of red blooms against pale skin. He dips the tip of an old fashioned fountain pen into the blood and hands it to me.

"Your turn."

My hand shakes as I take the knife. The blade is cold and impossibly sharp. I press it to my forearm, just below the elbow, where the scar will be hidden by sleeves and blazers and the armor I wear to work every day.

The cut is quick. It stings more than it hurts. The blood wells up, dark and red and real, and for the first time in five years, my wolf doesn't flinch away from pain.

She leans into it.

Finally, she whispers. Finally, finally, finally.

I dip the pen into my own blood and press the nib to the paper. My signature looks like a stranger's. Lila Thorne. Two words that used to mean heir and daughter and wolf. Two words that might mean something new in six months.

Caden signs beneath my name. His handwriting is sharp and precise, just like everything else about him.

The moment the pen leaves the paper, something shifts.

It's not pain, exactly. It's absence. A sudden, ringing silence in the back of my mind where the bond used to hum. The constant awareness of him, the pull northward, the heat that's been living in my chest since I was sixteen years old. All of it goes quiet.

Not gone. Suppressed. Sleeping.

The relief is so intense that my knees almost buckle.

Caden steadies me with a hand on my elbow, then drops it immediately. "The suppression takes a moment to adjust to."

"I'm fine." I'm not fine. I'm standing in the office of the man I used to love, bleeding from a self inflicted wound, with a bond I spent five years trying to escape finally silenced and the terrifying realization that I already miss it.

"Margaret will show you to your suite. Your things from your apartment have already been moved."

I stare at him. "You had my things moved before I agreed?"

"I was confident."

"Confident or controlling?"

The smile he gives me is almost sad. "Five years ago, I would have said confident. Now I'm not sure I know the difference." He turns back to the window, dismissing me. "Settle in. Work starts at nine."

I walk out of his office on legs that feel borrowed. The cut on my arm has already stopped bleeding. Werewolf healing. Even starved and suppressed, the wolf knows how to survive.

Margaret is waiting by my desk. She doesn't comment on the blood on my sleeve or the tremor in my hands.

"This way, Ms. Thorne."

Suite 42 is on the forty second floor, which is either a coincidence or another piece of Caden's careful staging. It's larger than my apartment. Larger than any apartment I've ever had. The windows face south, away from his office, which I appreciate more than I can say.

My furniture is here. My books. My coffee maker. Someone has arranged them exactly as they were in my old apartment, down to the angle of the reading lamp and the stack of unread New Yorkers on the coffee table.

"Mr. Blackwood oversaw the move personally," Margaret says, as if that explains everything.

"Of course he did."

She leaves me with a keycard and a schedule for the week and a look that's almost maternal. "He's not what you think he is."

"I don't know what I think he is."

"That's what worries him."

The door closes. I'm alone in a suite I didn't choose, in a building owned by the Alpha I rejected, with a suppressed bond and a signed contract and six months stretching ahead of me like a road I can't see the end of.

I press my hand to my chest. The silence where the bond used to be is vast and strange and lonely in a way I didn't expect.

You're still there, I tell the wolf.

No answer. She's sleeping. Or pretending to.

I walk to the window and watch the city wake up below me. Somewhere on the sixty sixth floor, Caden Blackwood is doing the same thing. And for the first time in five years, I can't feel him at all.

I don't know if that's freedom or loss.

I have six months to figure it out.