Rejected Reborn

Alina Arrives

# Chapter 3 — Alina Arrives

Alina took one look at the man I'd told her about for three years, looked at me, and said, "Oh no. He's gorgeous. This is going to be a disaster."

"Lower your voice."

"I am using my indoor voice. This is my indoor voice for finding out that the man who ruined your early twenties has cheekbones like that." She adjusted the strap of her bag, still scanning the entryway where Arker had disappeared down a side hall two minutes earlier after a brief, excruciatingly polite exchange in which he'd welcomed her to the estate and she had said "so lovely to finally put a face to the villain" in a tone so pleasant it took him a full second to realize what she'd said.

I had watched that second happen. It was, I will admit, deeply satisfying.

"He's not a villain," I said, which surprised me more than it surprised her. "He's just—" I stopped, because I didn't actually have the end of that sentence yet, three years later, and that was its own small humiliation.

"Complicated," Alina supplied. "Sure. All the worst ones are complicated. That's how they get away with it."

Alina Belle had been my person since a crisis-counseling night class a year after I left the pack, back when I was still learning how to be a person who didn't flinch every time someone said the word *mate* out loud. She was human, endlessly curious about the wolf half of my life in a way that had, over time, gone from mildly invasive to genuinely one of the best things in it, and she had insisted on co-leading the Morse Wellness side of this contract the moment she heard the words "extended six-week engagement" and "large private estate," because Alina has never in her life turned down an opportunity to watch drama unfold from a safe professional distance.

This was, it turned out, not going to be a safe distance.

We spent the afternoon walking the property so I could show her the wellness wing, the meeting rooms, the layout of a place I knew better than I wanted to admit. She asked good questions — real ones, about staffing and intake protocols — and then, without warning, entirely different ones.

"Does he know you're allergic to shellfish?"

"What? Why would that—"

"Because at dinner, when the caterer asked about dietary restrictions for the visiting consultants, he answered before you did. He said 'no shellfish for Ms. Morse.' Nobody asked him. Nobody told him. He just knew."

I hadn't caught that. I'd been too busy not looking at him to notice he'd been looking closely enough to remember something I told him once, years ago, in passing, over a dinner that had nothing to do with contracts or consultants.

"That doesn't mean anything," I said.

"Avery." Alina stopped walking. "I have known you for four years. I have watched you build an entire company out of spite and excellent time management. I have never once seen your hands shake during a work meeting. They were shaking today. I saw it before you tucked them under the table."

"It was cold in there."

"It was seventy-two degrees. I checked the thermostat because I, too, am a professional." She softened, the teasing dropping out of her voice the way it did when she meant to actually say something. "I'm not trying to poke at you. I just — I watched him during that whole meeting. He didn't take his eyes off you. Not once. Not even when Corrine was talking directly to him."

We kept walking. The gardens opened up ahead of us, the same ones I used to walk when I was twenty-four and still hopeful, still soft, still someone who believed the mate bond meant she'd finally been seen. I didn't say any of that to Alina. I didn't have to. She already knew the shape of it, even if she didn't know every corner.

"He set this contract up on purpose, didn't he?" she said, quieter now, no performance in it at all. "Avery. Did he engineer this whole thing just to get you back here?"

I opened my mouth to say no. It was the obvious answer, the safe one, the one that let me keep believing this was a coincidence I'd simply had the misfortune to walk into.

I could not say it.

The word sat right there behind my teeth and refused to move, because the truth — the truth I had been very carefully not looking at since the moment I'd seen Dalone Holdings on the contract paperwork — was that I didn't actually know. And not knowing was worse than either answer, because not knowing meant I had to sit with the possibility that some part of him had gone looking for me on purpose, and some part of me, God help me, was glad.

Alina watched my face do whatever it was doing. She didn't push. She just looped her arm through mine, the way she'd done a hundred times before on nights when I needed a person more than I needed an answer, and steered us both back toward the house.

"Okay," she said. "New plan. We're going to finish this contract, you're going to be brilliant at your job like you always are, and I am going to watch that man very closely for the next six weeks and report back on everything, because somebody in this friendship needs to keep their head."

"That's not a plan. That's surveillance."

"Same thing," she said, "when the subject looks at you like that."

I didn't answer. Behind us, through the tall windows of the west wing, I caught a flash of movement — Arker, alone in his office, phone to his ear, looking out at exactly the stretch of garden we were standing in. He wasn't talking. He was just looking. At us. At me.

I did not tell Alina. I filed it away instead, the way I'd been filing away every small unbearable detail since I'd arrived, and told myself I'd deal with the pile of it later.

Later kept not coming fast enough.