Alpha Who Rejected Me

Chapter 3

Personal Assistant

I woke up dressed in last night’s humiliation and a lock that meant nothing.

Someone had been in the room while I slept. A black dress hung on the closet door. Simple. Expensive. No tags. On the chair: heels, a coat, a staff badge already printed.

EDEN WARD

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

MERCER GROUP

The photo was last night’s face. Gold light. Mouth set. Eyes that had not agreed to any of this.

I tore the badge off the ribbon and went to the door anyway.

It opened before I touched it.

Cade stood in the hall in a clean black shirt, sleeves rolled, watch like a quiet threat. He looked like a man who had not slept and had decided sleep was for people he had not purchased.

“You’re not going to the hospital,” he said.

“Watch me.”

“I did. At four. You talk in your sleep.”

Heat crawled up my throat. “What did I say.”

“My name,” Cade said. “And the word you don’t get to use.”

I tried to step around him. He did not move. The bond noticed the nearness and leaned toward it like a dog that had not been fed.

“I have a shift.”

“You had a shift. Human administration received a resignation at five twelve. Generous payout. Effective immediately.” He glanced at my fist, still closed around the ruined badge. “Put the dress on. We leave in twenty minutes.”

“We.”

“You work where I can see you. That was the deal you signed with a steady hand.”

“I signed a cage. I did not apply to fetch your coffee.”

Cade’s gaze dropped to my throat, then to the faint red print the gold tag had left in my palm.

“You will sit outside my office,” he said. “You will answer to assistant because the building is full of wolves who read gossip and men who buy girls in rooms with string quartets. Assistant keeps you breathing. Lot forty-seven does not.”

“Does your fiancée know you’re dressing me now.”

“Vivienne knows what I tell her.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

He looked at me for a second too long.

“Put the dress on, Eden.”

Vivienne was already in the kitchen, as if the penthouse had grown her overnight.

White silk. Coffee. Engagement ring turned outward so the stone could do its job from across the marble. She smiled when she saw me in his clothes, which was to say she showed teeth.

“There she is,” Vivienne said. “The new hire. Try not to smell like a mating hall in the elevator. The board breakfast starts at eight and half of them were at The Hollow.”

I poured my own coffee. My hands wanted to shake. I did not let them.

“If they were at The Hollow,” I said, “they already know what I smell like. You’re the one who has to pretend you don’t.”

Vivienne’s smile thinned.

Cade took the cup out of my hand, drank from it, and set it back in front of me like that settled ownership of more than coffee.

“Car,” he said. “Now.”

The back seat of the black car was too small for three people and a dead bond that had not stayed dead.

Vivienne took the window. I took the other. Cade sat between us as if that were normal, as if a man could put his purchase and his future wife in the same leather and call it logistics.

My scent filled the closed air by the second block. I felt it happen. Heat under the tongue. A sweetness I had spent years swallowing in pill form. The suppressants were not coming back. Whatever my mother had locked was done being polite.

Cade went still.

Vivienne cracked the window. Winter came in and did nothing.

“Jesus, Cade,” she said softly. “She’s going to start a fight before we reach the lobby.”

“Then the lobby will learn to keep its eyes down.”

His hand found my knee.

Not comfort. A warning. Stay. Don’t run. Don’t make him chase you in front of Midtown.

I looked at his profile and thought of silver fabric on a bathroom floor.

“Take your hand off me,” I said.

He did not.

The car stopped under Mercer Tower. Glass and steel and his name cut into stone. Cameras near the entrance, the discreet kind, the kind that waited for billionaires and the women they claimed they were not sleeping with.

Vivienne got out first and became a photograph.

Cade’s fingers tightened once on my knee, then let go.

“You walk at my left,” he said. “You do not answer questions. If anyone from last night speaks to you, you look at me.”

“And if I don’t.”

He opened my door and stood there, blocking the street with his body.

“Then I stop pretending this is employment.”

The lobby of Mercer Group smelled like money and wet wool and too many wolves in good shoes.

It changed when I stepped onto the marble.

Not all at once. A head turn. A pause in a conversation. A man near the elevators inhaled and forgot what he had been saying. Someone’s coffee stopped halfway to a mouth.

I kept walking.

Cade’s palm landed at the nape of my neck. Open. Public. The kind of touch that told every animal in the atrium what the badge was for.

“Morning, Mr. Mercer.” The receptionist’s smile flickered when she saw his hand. “Miss Ashford. And—”

“Ward,” Cade said. “My assistant.”

Assistant. With his skin on my spine.

The elevator opened.

Nico Vale was already inside it.

I knew him by the smile. Last night it had gone to fifteen million like a joke. This morning it was white and easy and aimed at my mouth.

“Mercer,” Nico said. “Ashford. And lot forty-seven, looking almost employed. Small city.”

Vivienne’s laugh was a little too bright. “Nico. Don’t be vulgar before coffee.”

Cade did not take his hand off my neck.

The four of us rose together. The numbers climbed. My scent had nowhere to go. Nico’s eyes darkened the way men’s eyes darkened when they remembered a bid they lost.

“I hear congratulations are in order,” Nico said, looking at Vivienne’s ring and then at me, like the two things were a puzzle he was allowed to solve out loud. “Engagement in the papers. Purchase in The Hollow. You always did like to keep your options warm.”

Cade’s voice went quiet enough to cut glass.

“You lost.”

“I did.” Nico’s smile did not move. “Doesn’t mean I stopped being able to smell her. Cross blood always did leak through cheap suppressants. Your father used to pay for that information, Mercer. Funny you’d forget.”

Cross.

My mother’s name. Thrown on an elevator floor between floors forty and sixty like it was public.

Cade’s hand tightened on my neck.

The doors opened on seventy.

“Get out,” Cade said.

Nico stepped into the executive floor as if he had been invited, because men like him always had a meeting on the calendar. He glanced back once.

“Assistant,” he said to me. “If he ever puts you back on a platform, I’ll beat thirty.”

Cade moved.

I put my body in front of him before the lobby cameras on seventy found a headline. My hand hit his chest. Hard. The bond jumped like it had been waiting for an excuse to touch him.

“Not here,” I said.

Cade looked down at my hand like it had burned him.

Then he looked at Nico’s back and did not kill him in front of the glass.

Vivienne’s voice came out silk.

“Board breakfast is in the east room,” she said. “Try not to start a war over the help.”

They sat me two seats down from him.

Not beside. That would have looked like a claim. Two seats was a leash with manners. Vivienne took the right hand. The board took the rest. Wolves and humans mixed the way they did in this city: the humans thought they were in charge because they had spreadsheets, and the wolves let them think it until the room needed blood.

I poured water. I wrote nothing. I listened.

Nico Vale sat across the table and never quite stopped looking at my wrist, as if the gold tag might grow back.

“The Ashford-Mercer merger stays on schedule,” Vivienne said, bright, for the humans. “June ceremony. Joint statement next week.”

A few polite claps. A few wolf glances that went from her ring to my throat and back again.

Cade did not clap.

An older man two chairs down—Ironfang by the way he held his shoulders—leaned toward Cade and did not bother lowering his voice enough.

“The girl from last night is loud,” he said. “If you’re going to keep a rejected mate on the floor, put a mark on her or send her to a holding house. Scent like that in an open boardroom is an invitation.”

Cade’s fork stopped.

I smiled at the older man. Sweet. Hospital-sweet. The smile I used on drunks who grabbed nurses.

“If my scent bothers you,” I said, “you can hold your breath. It’s free.”

The table went thin.

Vivienne closed her eyes for a half a second. The human board members laughed because they thought it was a joke. The wolves did not.

Cade turned his head toward me slowly.

I thought he would drag me out.

He did something worse.

He laughed once, low, and the sound made the older man sit back as if the Alpha had put a hand on his throat.

“My assistant stays,” Cade said. “Anyone who calls her an invitation in my building can take it up with me after breakfast. I don’t recommend it.”

Nico raised his coffee in a tiny salute I wanted to break.

Under the table, Cade’s knee pressed mine.

Stay, the pressure said.

I pressed back harder.

I am not yours to sit.

His jaw ticked.

Breakfast ended. Chairs moved. Vivienne rose into photographs again. Nico lingered like a stain.

Cade’s hand closed around my elbow.

“Office,” he said.

His office was glass on three sides and a door that sealed like a vault.

The city looked smaller from here. So did I, in the black dress he had chosen, badge ruined in my fist.

He locked the door.

“You don’t speak at my table unless I tell you to.”

“Then don’t sit me at your table and call me help.”

Cade came in close. Too close. The bond got up off the floor and stood between our mouths.

“Nico Vale bid on you,” he said. “He will not do it twice.”

“He just did. In an elevator. With your fiancée listening.”

“Eden.”

“Cross,” I said, because the name was still ringing and I wanted it to cut him. “He said Cross blood. That is my mother’s name. What did your father pay for, Cade. What did you reject.”

For the first time since The Hollow, something like fear moved behind his eyes. Not of me. Of a door he had nailed shut and heard breathing again.

“Not here.”

“Then where. In the contract. In Clause Nine. In the bed you told me not to get into last night.”

He backed me into the desk.

Not a shove. A decision. My hips hit wood. His hands landed on either side of my thighs and stayed there, caging, not yet taking.

He bent to my throat and breathed me in like a man who had been drowning on purpose.

My head tipped without my permission. I hated that. I hated the sound I almost made. I put my hand in his hair anyway, not gentle, and held him there because if he was going to steal this I was going to leave a mark on the thief.

His mouth opened against my skin.

Not a kiss.

A near-bite. Heat. The scrape of teeth that knew exactly where a mate mark went and had no right to go there.

“Cade,” I said, and it came out wrong. Too much breath.

“I know.” His voice was wrecked against my throat. “I know.”

The glass wall held a whole floor of people who thought he was in a meeting.

His teeth pressed. Stopped. Pressed again.

I turned my face and bit his mouth.

Not sweet. A warning with blood in it. He made a sound I would take to bed and hate myself for keeping.

Then his phone buzzed on the desk beside my hip. Once. Twice. A third time, the pattern of someone who did not get ignored.

He didn’t move.

I reached back, because I am not a girl who lets a man drown on her throat while the world knocks, and turned the screen.

SILAS CROWE

The preview cut across the dark.

*Registry pinged. Lot 47 is not unclaimed human-passing. Maren Cross, maternal. Old Luna line. You did not buy a debt, Mercer. You bought a bloodright. Council wants her in front of them before your engagement statement. Come alone or they collect her.*

Cade read it over my shoulder.

His body went to stone against mine.

Down the hall, Vivienne’s laugh carried, bright as champagne, already selling June to someone with a camera.

I looked at Cade’s mouth, red from my teeth.

“Assistant,” I said softly.

His hands were still on the desk. His wolf was still at my throat.

“You didn’t buy a girl with a number,” I said. “You bought the thing you stood in a hall and threw away. And now the council wants to see the receipt.”

Cade picked up the phone.

He did not step back.

“If they come for you,” he said, eyes on mine, “they come through me.”

“That would mean more if you hadn’t already let them watch you do it once.”

His thumb brushed the place his teeth had almost broken.

“Get used to the badge,” Cade said. “Tonight you stand in front of Ironfang. Not as lot forty-seven.”

“As what, then.”

He looked at the door. At the glass. At the city that had let him pretend for six years.

“As the mate I rejected,” he said. “And the heir clause they are going to try to take out of my hands.”

The office phone on the wall lit red.

Reception. Building security.

A voice came through before he hit speaker, tight, young, already afraid of him.

“Mr. Mercer. There are pack enforcers in the lobby. They say they have authority to escort Miss Ward. Do I send them up?”

Cade looked at me.

I smiled with nothing kind in it, badge crushed in one hand, his bite still ghosting my throat.

“Well,” I said. “Let them up, Alpha. Let’s see what thirty million buys when the council wants it back.”