Don't Tempt The Boss

CHAPTER TEN

BASTIEN.

The blood bag on the counter had gone warm, but I still didn’t touch it, I couldn’t bring myself to. My mind kept replaying the security footage over and over. Alois positioning himself beside Lena on that pavement like she was already his.

Fuck. That son of a b***h.

“You watched it.” Celine’s voice came from across the room.

“Don’t start.”

“How many times did you watch it, Bastien?”

I turned slowly. “What do you have on him? How long has he been in the city?”

“At least a week.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Possibly two. I confirmed it an hour ago through my contact inside the Dominion. Lower rank, but he’s never given me bad information. He says Alois came personally. No advance party, nothing.” Her voice dropped. “He came for her.”

“For her blood.”

“For her blood,” she agreed. “Bastien, you knew this was a risk the moment her compatibility results came back. She’s the only human alive whose blood strain stabilized the synthetic formula. If Alois gets a draw from her—”

“I know what it means.” I pushed away from the counter. “I’m not an i***t, Celine.”

“No,” she said quietly. “But you have been behaving like one.”

I looked at her, my jaw clenching tightly.

She looked right back. “You have been keeping her close and telling yourself it is protection. Those are not the same thing, and I think somewhere underneath all the excuses you have been making in your own head, you already knew that.”

The silence stretched between us. She was right, but I wasn’t going to admit it.

“I am ending her contract,” I said.

Celine blinked. “Today?”

“Today. I will pay out the remainder in full. I will cover her brother’s treatment bills directly and anonymously, so she cannot trace it back to me and turn it into an argument.” I walked to the coat rack and pulled my coat off the hook. “She will have more than enough to finish medical school. She does not need Vale Biotech anymore.”

“And when she pushes back? You know she will.”

“She will not have the option to.” I pushed my arm through the sleeve. “She comes in, I hand her the paperwork, and it is finished.”

Celine was quiet for a while, that was how I knew there was something else. “She was already approached this morning,” she said. “Before you even saw the footage. I had someone posted outside her building after the incident on the pavement yesterday. Alois spoke to her directly. He gave her something. My contact could not confirm what from the distance.” She paused. “She has no idea who he is. She does not know what any of this is. But he has already made contact, which means—”

“Which means the timeline just moved.” I grabbed my keys. “Call me if anything shifts on your end.

“Bastien.” Her voice stopped me at the door. “Whatever you are planning to say to her when you get there, make it quick. Do not let yourself linger.”

I left without answering her.

I took the car. I drove faster than I should have, the commute traffic was just beginning to build at the main intersections and I cut through the side streets instead, my hands tight on the wheel.

The footage kept running in my mind. The way Alois had leaned toward her, smiled at her. I had watched that same smile get aimed at men, women, rivals, allies across four centuries, and not one of them had walked away from it whole.

She had smiled back at him, because it was Lena. f*****g polite, goody two shoes Lena. She had absolutely no idea what she was standing in front of.

I pulled up to her building and killed the engine. Looked up at her window, the light was on. Good. She was awake and I could do this now. All I had to do was hand her the paperwork, transfer the funds, end it before it got any worse than it already was. Simple, right?

I took the stairs and knocked at her door. “Lena.”

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder this time. “Lena, open the door.” Something in my chest squeezed. When she still didn’t answer, I pressed my palm against the door and it swung inward on its own. It was unlocked.

She never left it unlocked. She had told me that three weeks ago, she always locked her door.

Her scent hit me the moment I stepped inside — lilac and citrus, like she'd been here a few minutes ago. There was tea on the counter, still steaming. Her study notes spread across the kitchen table and her keys hanging on the hook by the door.

She had definitely not left willingly.

I moved through the apartment fast, pushing open the bedroom door, the bathroom, checking every corner, already knowing what I was going to find before I found it. Nothing. Not a single sign of a struggle, no broken glass, nothing at all.

I stopped in the middle of the sitting room as something cold and old moved in my chest. A feeling I hadn’t tasted in over a century crawled up my throat. Where the hell was she?

“f**k!” I screamed.

Then something on the floor caught my eye. I crouched slowly and picked it up.

It was a photograph. An old photograph, the edges were soft, and the image rendered in sepia tones that had not been fashionable since the nineteenth century.

The woman in the frame stared back at me.

She wore different clothes, her hair was pinned up in the style of another era. The quality of the photograph put it somewhere around the 1880s at the earliest. But the face was unmistakable. Her jaw line, the exact shape of her eyes, the way her chin tilted upward, her smile.

Lena’s face, but she had the name I had not said aloud in over a hundred years scribbled on it.

Elara.