The Alpha's Only Cure

His Territory

Chapter 2

Evelyn's POV

The message came at 6:04 AM.

It was just a single line, no greeting whatsoever, just a Kross Global letterhead at the top and twelve words at the bottom.

All BioVance Laboratory staff are to report to Kross Global headquarters by 9AM.

I read it three times while standing in my kitchen in yesterday's clothes because I had not slept. Then I put my phone face down on the counter and stood there for a moment staring at the wall.

I had three options.

I could either run. Running was the first thing that crossed my mind. Pack a bag, get on a bus, find a new city. But disappearing the same morning an Alpha raided my lab would not look like coincidence. It would look like I had something to hide, which I did, but the last thing I needed was Damian King suspecting anything.

I could refuse to show up. Send a message saying I was sick, but that was entirely a lie.

Or I could go. Walk into his building, sit in his boardroom, keep my head down, and give him absolutely no reason to look twice at me.

I was good at getting unnoticed. I had been practicing that my whole life, and that was it.

I showered with the patch covered under a waterproof seal. Once I was done, I dressed carefully. I wore a brown slim fit trousers, a high collared shirt buttoned all the way up, and a coat over that. I pressed two fingers to my collarbone before I left. I felt the patch there, still holding. That was enough.

I went into the kitchen and ate half a piece of toast because my stomach refused the other half and left the apartment at 7:45.

The walk took twenty minutes. I was buried in my thoughts all through the walk. I thought through every possible version of how today could go wrong. It was not a productive exercise but my brain had never really learned how to stop once it started.

By the time the Kross Global building came into view, I had catalogued eleven separate scenarios and talked myself out of running in eight of them.

Forty two floors of dark glass and steel rising straight out of the pavement. The building was massive. I walked straight toward the front entrance and pushed through the doors and told myself it was just a building.

The lobby floor was smooth white marble, the air was cold and silence filled everywhere.Two Lycan guards stood at the elevator bank, their eyes fixed to nothing in particular. I kept my pace steady and my eyes forward. The security desk checked my ID without a word and waved me through.

I got into the elevator and six of my colleagues were already there. Nobody spoke. The doors closed and we rode up.

The elevator doors opened on the thirty first floor and I followed the group into the boardroom. Long glass table, thirty-one chairs, windows running the full length of the wall. The city spread out below. Half the BioVance staff were already seated when we walked in.

There was a single printed document on the table in front of each seat.

I sat down in the middle of the table and picked mine up. It was a formal acquisition agreement. BioVance Laboratories, the company I had worked at for five years, the company that had taken two decades to build, had been purchased in full by Kross Global. At the bottom of the page, above the timestamp, was a single signature.

Damian King.

I looked at the timestamp at the bottom of the page.

3:04 AM.

He had done this in the middle of the night. While we were sleeping, with no idea anything was happening, he had signed the papers and taken everything. By the time that message hit our phones at 6AM it was already done.

I put the document face down and did not touch it again.

The room filled over the next ten minutes. Thirty of us in total, scientists, lab technicians, two administrative staff who looked the most frightened of anyone. People were talking in low tight voices. I sat in the middle of it.

Then the door opened.

The conversation in the room died instantly, all at once. I felt the shift in the air before I looked up. That same pressure from the lab last night was evidaent here.

Damian King walked in with two men at his back and moved straight to the head of the table without acknowledging anyone. He wore a dark navy suit today. Same perfect fit across the shoulders. His hands were covered in thin black gloves that had not been there last night and I knew without needing to see underneath them that the wounds on his palms had not closed. His face was completely, deliberately unreadable.

He stood behind the chair at the head of the table and looked at the room.

His eyes swept once across the table, moving steadily from left to right, and then they stopped.

At me.

His gaze instantly became fixed on me.

Two seconds. Three. Four.

Then he pulled out the chair and looked away and began to speak like nothing had happened.

"BioVance Laboratories is now a subsidiary of Kross Global." His voice came out smoother than I expected "Your contracts have been transferred as of this morning. You will continue your research here under Kross Global. Nothing about your work changes."

He laid out the details in four straight minutes. Transition timelines, new laboratory assignments, access cards to be distributed by the afternoon. I caught maybe half of it. The other half of my attention was on the fact that his eyes had moved back to me twice more since that first look.

Each time he did, I would shift my gaze to my hands.

He did not know what I was. I was sure of that. The patch had been on since midnight, seal intact, and whatever microscopic trace had slipped through last night was long gone by now. There was nothing for him to find.

But he kept looking at me.

The meeting ended and the room came back to life around me. Chairs moving, people leaving the room, I reached for my bag and stood with everyone else and kept my eyes on the table and told myself to walk out calmly and not look back.

"Dr. Vance."

I heard my name being called and I slowly turned to answer. Within a minute, the boardroom had emptied and it was just me, him and the city that laid out behind the glass.

I looked up at him.

He had not moved from behind the chair. Both gloved hands resting on the back of it, eyes on me,

"You were in the lab last night," he said.

"Yes, I work there."

Something shifted in his face. Not much, just a slight tightening around the eyes. But he nodded anyways.

"You will be assigned to the genetics division," he said. "Third floor. Your access card will be delivered this afternoon."

"Understood," I said.

I picked up my bag and walked to the door. The whole way across that room, I felt his eyes on my back, tracking every step I took toward the exit.

The moment I stepped into the corridor, the tension in my chest loosened just slightly. Just enough to breathe.I didn't look back until I got into the elevator.

The doors of the elevator closed and I was alone. I stood there and thought about the times he had looked directly at me in that boardroom. There was something in his gaze that I could not read, and that alone was enough to unsettle me.

I had no idea what was going to happen next.