Rejected Reborn

# Chapter 1 — The Wrong Estate My wolf knew before I did. She'd been quiet for three years and then, three miles from the Dalone estate gate, she sat up inside my chest and said: *him.* I told her she was wrong. I have gotten very good at telling her she's wrong. It's one of the more useful skills I've developed since the last time I trusted her judgment and ended up crying in a gas station bathroom four states from home. "You okay?" Alina had asked when she dropped me at the airport two days ago, before she was scheduled to fly out and join me. "You've got a face." "I don't have a face." "You have the face you get before a root canal." I did not tell her it was worse than a root canal. I told her it was a six-week contract, our biggest one yet, and that I was going to be professional and unbothered and extremely good at my job, which was true on all three counts. What I did not mention was the name on the paperwork. Dalone Holdings. I had read it eleven times before I let myself believe it wasn't a coincidence, and then I had sat very still in my office for eleven minutes, and then I had signed anyway. Because here is the thing about being twenty-seven and having built something real out of the wreckage of being twenty-four: you do not get to call yourself rebuilt and then flinch the first time the universe hands you a test. You take the contract. You drive up the mountain. You do the job. I was still telling myself that when the gate came into view. It looked exactly the way I remembered it — iron scrollwork, stone pillars, the long gravel drive lined with birch trees that turn gold in October and were currently just green and indifferent, the way trees are when they don't know they're standing at the site of the worst night of someone's life. The house sat at the top of the rise the way it always had, pale stone catching the afternoon light like it had never once had anything to be ashamed of. I had not been ashamed either, for the record. Not of myself. Just of how long it took me to stop hoping. I parked where the administrative liaison had directed — a polite, harried woman named Priya who met me at the door with a tablet and a smile that suggested she had absolutely no idea whose estate this used to almost be mine — and I let her walk me through the east wing, past the boardroom where I would be presenting tomorrow, past a sitting room with the kind of furniture that costs more than my first car, toward the guest suite that would be my base of operations for the next six weeks. "You'll have full access to the wellness wing starting tomorrow," Priya said. "Mr. Dalone's assistant will send the finalized session schedule tonight. If you need anything—" "I'm fine," I said, which was mostly true, in the way that a building is fine right up until the moment it isn't. She left me at my door with a key card and a smile and the promise of a welcome dinner I intended to attend for exactly as long as professionalism required and not one minute more. I stepped inside. The suite was beautiful — pale wood, soft light, a window that looked out over the same gardens I used to walk in when I still believed I belonged here. I set my bag down. I breathed. I told my wolf, silently, the way you'd talk down a dog that's spotted a squirrel: *not yet. Not today. We have a job to do.* She did not answer. She has never once, in three years, taken my advice. I decided to explore the wing before dinner — better to know the building than to be surprised by it later, that was the professional reasoning, and also I needed to walk somewhere that wasn't four walls holding still around me. I took the east corridor, the one that curved past the old library, because I remembered it being quiet and I wanted quiet. I turned the corner and the corridor was not quiet. He was maybe thirty feet away, walking toward me with the unhurried, contained stride of a man who has never in his life needed to hurry for anything, phone in one hand, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm in a way that used to mean something to me and apparently still did, because my chest did something violent and stupid the instant I registered who I was looking at. Arker Dalone had not changed the way I had hoped he would. I had spent three years constructing a version of him in my head that had gone soft, gone gray, gone ordinary — some kind of insurance policy against exactly this moment. The real one was worse. Taller than memory, or maybe I'd just forgotten how a room reorganizes itself around him. Same eyes, gold-flecked and too observant, currently locked on me like he'd walked into a wall he didn't know was there. He stopped. I want it on the record that I did not. I kept walking, chin level, pace unchanged, past him and the specific gravity he generates without trying, close enough to catch the same cedar-and-rain scent that used to mean *safe* to a twenty-four-year-old who did not yet know better. "Ms. Morse," he said, to my back. I did not turn around. "Mr. Dalone." And then I was past him, and the corridor kept going, and I made it exactly to my suite door before my hand — hanging loose and casual at my side, doing an excellent job of appearing unaffected — started to shake. I got the door shut. I got my back against it. I slid down until I was sitting on the floor of a very beautiful room I would be sleeping in for six weeks, and I said, out loud, to nobody: "Three years. I had three years. And he still does this to me." My wolf, finally, said something. One word, smug and delighted and entirely unhelpful. *Told you.*