Reject Me Once,Alpha.

Still Water

Chapter Two: Still Water

The room had gone very quiet.

Not the comfortable kind of quiet. The kind that happens when everyone in a space suddenly understands that something significant is occurring and nobody wants to be the person who speaks first and gets it wrong.

Garrett had stopped mid-sentence. The second man by the window, younger, with the careful eyes of someone whose job was to watch, had gone completely still. Even the city below the glass seemed to hold itself, forty-two floors of silence pressing up against the windows.

And Damien Voss stood exactly where he had been standing and looked at me like we were the only two people in the room.

I had prepared for a lot of things. I had spent three weeks preparing, running scenarios, building Vera Cross from the ground up until she felt more real than I did. I had prepared for the possibility that someone in his circle might recognize me. I had prepared for the possibility that the mate bond might flare when I walked in, because I was not naive enough to believe six years of distance had killed it completely.

I had not prepared for him to say my name in the first sixty seconds like he was simply correcting a small, unimportant error.

"You have the wrong person," I said again. Steadier this time. My voice belonged to Vera Cross, a woman who had never set foot in Chicago before tonight, a woman who had no history in this room and no reason to feel the way my chest was currently feeling. "My name is Vera Cross. Marcus Hale arranged this meeting. If there is some kind of confusion I am happy to wait while you sort it out."

Damien said nothing.

That was what I had forgotten about him. Most men, when challenged, either back down or escalate. They get louder or they get smaller. Damien had always done neither. He simply waited, with that particular quality of patience that was not passive at all, the kind of patience that felt like a hand around your throat that had not yet decided to squeeze.

Garrett cleared his throat. A man doing his job in an uncomfortable situation, trying to find the thread of the conversation they had been having before it unraveled.

"Perhaps we should sit down," he said. "We can go over the details of the arrangement and—"

"Give us the room."

Damien had not raised his voice. He did not need to. The two words landed with the weight of something inevitable and Garrett stopped speaking immediately. The younger man by the window was already moving toward the door. Garrett followed, with one brief glance in my direction that I could not entirely read, something between apology and warning, and then the door closed behind them both and I was alone with Damien Voss for the first time in six years.

I did not let myself feel that.

I turned to face him fully. This was the moment. The thing Marcus had not accounted for, the variable that was supposed to have been impossible because nobody outside my operation knew Vera Cole had come back to Chicago. I needed to understand how much Damien knew, how long he had known it, and what he intended to do about it. Everything else was secondary.

Everything else was absolutely secondary.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

He tilted his head slightly. A fraction of a movement that I remembered meaning he was deciding how honest to be.

"Since Tuesday."

Tuesday. Four days ago. Four days before this meeting, four days before Marcus sent me in here believing my cover was intact, Damien had already known exactly who was walking through his door.

The implications of that landed one after another like stones dropping into still water.

Marcus knew. Or Marcus did not know and someone in his operation had told Damien. Either way the ground I had been standing on when I walked into this building had not been solid at all. I had been performing for an audience that already knew the ending.

"So this meeting," I said carefully. "You arranged it."

"Marcus arranged it. I allowed it."

"Why?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Something shifted in his expression, something that moved too quickly for me to name it before it was gone.

"Because I wanted to see if you would come."

The honesty of that hit me somewhere I was not prepared for it to hit me. I had expected denial. I had expected a power play, some demonstration of how completely I was in his hands now that my cover was gone. I had not expected something that sounded, underneath all the stillness and the control, like something close to the truth.

I kept my face neutral.

"And now that you have seen?" I said.

He moved for the first time since I had walked in. Not toward me. He turned toward the windows, toward the city laid out below us, and he stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked out at it the way a man looks at something he has owned so long he has stopped seeing it properly.

"Your father’s files are in this building," he said.

I stopped breathing.

"Third floor. Storage room four. There is a keypad on the door and the code has not been changed in six years." He paused. "My father kept everything. It was the one habit of his I have not been able to bring myself to destroy."

I stared at the back of his head. At the set of his shoulders. At the absolute stillness of him standing there telling me the thing I had come here to find out, handing it to me without a condition attached, without a price stated, without any of the leverage I had been bracing for.

It was the most dangerous thing he could have done.

Because I did not know what to do with a Damien Voss who was not playing a game I could identify. I knew how to fight him. I had been fighting him in my head for six years. I knew how to hate him, how to use that hatred as fuel, how to walk through his world with it burning clean and steady in my chest like something that would never run out.

I did not know what to do with this.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

He turned from the window then. Looked at me across the room with those dark eyes that the years had not changed at all, that the empire and the blood and the terrible weight of everything he had become had somehow left completely intact.

"Because you came back for the truth," he said. "And you deserve it. Even if you are not going to like everything you find."

The bond moved in my chest. Slow and certain, like a tide coming in whether I wanted it to or not.

I pressed it down.

"I am going to need more than a room number," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something that lived in the neighborhood of one.

"I know," he said. "That is why you are staying."