THE REJECTED FOURFOLD LUNA: FATED TO TWO ALPHA TWINS

Chapter 15—Complicated Repercussions

Jayden's POV

Torren looked between us.

For a man who prided himself on reading a room before he walked into it, he looked genuinely and completely thrown.

"Do you know her?" He said it carefully, the way he always approached things that just became unexpectedly complicated. "Or is there a reason I should be concerned about the account? Is she a scammer of some kind?"

"She is not a scammer," Aiden said.

"Then what is the issue here?"

"She was our mate." Aiden cut across him cleanly. "Our fated mate. We rejected her."

The study went quiet.

Torren stood very still. Something shifted in his expression, the particular kind of recalibration that happened when a person was placing a face they recognized somewhere in their memory but could not immediately find.

"The bonding ceremony." He said it slowly, the pieces landing one at a time in the right order. "The public rejection. That was her."

Neither of us answered. Neither of us needed to.

He let out a slow breath through his nose. "And she is now the financial consultant managing your accounts," he said. "At the firm you retained two weeks ago. The one I just came from."

"Apparently," I said.

Torren looked at the file on the desk. Then back at us. "That is an extraordinary coincidence."

"You could certainly say that," I said.

Aiden was already at the window, his back to the room. That particular stillness about him that meant he was working through something and did not want company while he did.

"We cannot be in the same space as her." He said it without turning around, voice flat and final. "When we go to the firm for account reviews, we cannot sit across a desk from Celeste Reed. I need that to not be how this goes."

"That will be a significant problem," Torren said.

"Then find a solution for that."

Torren made a small gesture with his hand. It was the particular one that meant he was about to say something neither of us would want to hear.

"With respect, there is no solution here. She is your assigned consultant. You visit, you sit in her office, you go through your accounts. That is how a firm like this works."

Aiden turned from the window slowly and looked at Torren. "Then we request a different consultant. There has to be a process for that."

"On what grounds?"

Aiden looked at him.

"Does it matter?"

"Yes," Torren said simply. Torren was patient the way he always was when he was explaining something that was not going to change regardless of how the conversation went.

"Corporate policy at a firm like Mercer and Vale requires documented misconduct before a client account gets reassigned.

Celeste Reed has done nothing wrong. By all accounts she has done everything right. You cannot walk in and request a new manager without cause and you have no cause to give them."

The room settled into a silence that was not comfortable for anyone in it.

I looked at Aiden. He looked at me.

We both knew Torren was right.

He was always right about these things, which was the entire reason we employed him and also frequently the most irritating thing about him.

"She is beautiful," Torren said.

His voice shifted into something considerably more conversational. "I noticed this morning when I met her."

"I was giving thought to whether it would be appropriate to pursue that further, given my professional relationship with your accounts." A pause. "I wanted to be transparent about it rather than act without informing you first."

"He said it without any particular concern. "I wanted to inform you both before acting on anything. Out of respect for the shared history."

I looked at him for a moment.

The thing is, she is not our mate anymore. We made that choice publicly and clearly and there is no path backward from it. We are not looking for one.

I kept my voice level and even. "She has not been since the day of the ceremony. If you want to pursue her, that is entirely your business to pursue. We hold no claim over her whatsoever."

Something about saying it out loud landed differently than I expected.

My wolf noticed it too. I felt him shift the way he did when something landed that was more true than I was ready to admit.

Torren nodded once. "I appreciate the go ahead but I think I will leave it alone."

I did not correct him, neither did Aiden.

Aiden said nothing to any of that. The silence from his side of the room said enough.

We spent another ten minutes going over the remaining items Torren brought from the meeting. Neither Torren nor Aiden brought up Celeste again and neither did I.

By the time he left and pulled the study door quietly shut behind him I was leaning back in my chair with my eyes on the ceiling, not looking at anything specific.

Celeste Reed.

Sitting in an office on the fourteenth floor of Mercer and Vale, going about her day, managing accounts, probably not thinking about us at all.

The two men who destroyed her at the ceremony were the same ones whose files she signed off on this morning.

In a matter of months we would have to walk into that building and sit in her office and act like none of it happened.

Aiden did not go back to his desk. He dropped into the chair across from me instead.

For a long moment neither of us said anything. The study was quiet around us. Outside the pack grounds moved on without any interest in what was happening inside this room or what it meant.

"We will figure it out," I said. "When the time actually comes to go there, we deal with it then. Not sitting here worrying about something that is months away."

Aiden looked at me for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes that he did not put into words.

"Okay," he said quietly. A pause. "Okay. We will figure it out when the time comes."