The Alpha who Watched Over Me

Chapter 15 — Don’t Follow Me

ELARA POV

Two days passed without Cassian.

Not without the company. Without him.

The mezzanine stayed empty through the morning briefings. The glass room ran without his silhouette at the window. No one called me upstairs. No one stood at the edge of the open floor after hours.

I told myself that was normal.

CEOs did not spend their time on junior analysts. Men who knew too much about Mill Street did not sit in small apartments and leave a clear path to the door.

Except he had.

And now he wasn’t.

By the third morning, the absence had a shape.

I had begun expecting him. Not hoping. Expecting—the way you expect a door to open when you hear footsteps on the other side. When the footsteps never came, the quiet did not feel empty.

It felt withdrawn.

Marcus asked about the northern board. I answered correctly and kept working. Lang passed my desk without stopping. I almost asked if she had seen him, then kept the question where it belonged.

The work did not pause for the lack of him. Finance still sent notes that assumed I would be wrong. I fixed what I could fix and refused to let the quiet become an excuse for falling behind.

Rhea watched me once from across the floor and did not approach.

Whatever file was being built on me had not stopped.

Cassian’s absence did not make that safer.

It only made the quiet louder.

On the second afternoon, I saw him.

Not at my desk. Not in the glass room.

Through the far window of the executive corridor, for less than three seconds, as I delivered a file to Procurement. He was standing with two men I did not recognize—neither Finance nor Operations.

Their conversation stopped when the door opened.

Cassian’s gaze found me once across the length of the hall.

He did not nod.

He did not speak.

He looked at me the way he had looked at the street from my doorstep: already informed, already measuring something I could not see.

Then the door shut.

That was worse than the empty mezzanine.

Absence I could explain as busyness.

That look I could not.

I delivered the file to Procurement and took the long way back. In the stairwell between floors, I passed two men in dark coats who were not wearing visitor badges.

They stopped talking when I appeared.

One of them glanced at a phone, then at me, then away too quickly.

I did not slow down.

By the time I reached Operations, my hands were steady and my pulse was not.

Lang found me at the edge of my desk ten minutes later.

“You’re being careful,” she said.

Not a question.

“Should I be more careful?”

Her mouth tightened.

“Stay on the main floors during the day. Don’t leave alone after dark if you can help it. And if anyone from outside Operations asks for your personnel file again, you tell me before you answer.”

“Again?”

“Third request this week.” She held my gaze. “I denied the first two. The third came from a number that doesn’t sit in our directory.”

She left before I could ask whether Cassian knew.

I sat down hard.

Someone was still building the file.

Cassian was still choosing not to stand in the same room with me.

And the two facts were starting to feel less separate than I wanted them to be.

On the second evening, my phone sat face-up on the desk with his number still saved under the line he had left:

Call me if anything feels wrong.

My thumb hovered.

Then I put the phone face-down.

If something felt wrong, I would handle it. If nothing felt wrong except his missing presence, that was not an emergency.

That was something else—and I was not ready to hand it to him like a problem he was required to solve.

I stayed late once.

Not for the summary. The summary was finished by six.

I stayed because some part of me was still waiting for the elevators to open the way they had after hours.

Nothing came.

At seven, I shut the laptop and left before I could stand there staring at empty glass like a person who had forgotten how to go home alone.

The lobby was half-lit. Outside, the air was cool.

I did not request the company car.

Walking the first block felt like a test I was giving myself for no good reason except pride.

I made it to the corner before I felt it.

Not the Mill Street pressure.

Something else.

The sense of being watched returned before I reached the next corner.

I stopped under the streetlight and turned.

Across the avenue, under the deeper shadow of the opposite building, a figure stood without moving.

Tall.

Still.

Coat familiar even at that distance.

Cassian.

He did not cross.

He did not raise a hand.

He did not call my name.

He watched me the way he had watched the street from my doorstep—measuring something I couldn’t see, and making no move to cross the distance between us.

For a second, I almost stepped off the curb.

Then I didn’t.

If he wanted the distance, he could have it.

I turned toward the route that would take me home and walked.

At the next light, I looked once more.

He was still there.

Same place.

Same stillness.

No closer.

A man who had sat in my apartment and asked Up or outside? was now choosing the width of a street over the length of a conversation.

Not indifference.

Restraint with a cost.

I kept walking.

Halfway down the next block, a second figure peeled away from a doorway behind me—not Cassian.

Hood up.

Tall.

Still.

The same measured distance that had unsettled me outside my building two nights ago.

Not close enough to touch.

Close enough that the sidewalk narrowed around him.

I did not run.

I turned the corner hard, cut through the alley behind the closed bakery, and came out on the parallel street with my keys already between my fingers.

The hooded man did not appear at the far end.

Neither did Cassian.

My phone buzzed once in my pocket.

Unknown number.

One line:

He can’t protect you if he’s the reason they’re watching.

No signature.

No explanation.

I stopped under the next light with the message still open and the street empty in both directions.

Cassian had kept his distance.

Someone else had not.

And whoever sent the warning knew enough to put his absence and my danger in the same sentence.