Reject Me Once,Alpha.

The Room They Give you

Chapter Three: The Room They Give You

Staying was not a request.

I understood that the moment the word left his mouth. The way he said it, quiet and final, with that particular stillness that had always meant the decision was already made and the conversation around it was simply a courtesy he was extending because he felt like extending it. I was not being invited to stay in the Voss Tower. I was being told that I already was.

The part of me that had spent six years being nobody's anything wanted to walk straight back to that elevator.

The part of me that had come here for the truth about my father stayed exactly where it was.

"Define staying," I said.

He moved to the desk at the far end of the room. Dark wood, clean surface, the kind of desk that belonged to a man who made decisions on it that other people had to live with. He pulled open a drawer and set a key card on the surface between us.

"There is a suite on the thirty-eighth floor. It has everything you need. You will have access to most of the building." He paused. "Not all of it. Not yet."

"Not yet," I repeated. "You say that like trust is something we are building toward."

"Aren’t we?"

I looked at him across the desk. At the absolute steadiness of him. At the way he watched me like he had all the time in the world, like this conversation was not a negotiation he needed to win but simply a process he was willing to wait through.

It made me deeply, deeply suspicious.

"You blew my cover in front of your people," I said. "Garrett knows my real name now. The other man knows it. Whatever story I walked in here with is gone. You understand that I cannot exactly go back to Marcus and tell him the contract fell through when your entire operation knows who I am."

"I know."

"So I am not staying by choice. I am staying because you have made leaving complicated."

Something moved through his eyes. Not guilt. Not quite. Something older than guilt, something that had been sitting with itself long enough to stop being loud about what it was.

"You were always going to end up in this building, Vera," he said. "The only question was how."

I wanted to throw the key card back across the desk. I wanted to tell him that nothing about my being here was inevitable, that I had made every choice that led me to this room with full awareness and full agency and that he did not get to rewrite it into something fated just because it was more comfortable for him that way.

I picked up the key card.

Not because he was right. Because the files were on the third floor and I needed to be inside this building to get to them and right now the suite on the thirty-eighth floor was the fastest route to the truth I had come here for. That was the only reason. I was very clear with myself about that.

"I want access to the third floor," I said.

"In time."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I have tonight." He came around the desk then, not quickly, not with any aggression in it, just moving through the room the way he always had, like the space rearranged itself around him without being asked. He stopped a few feet from me. Close enough that the bond registered him with that low, relentless pull that I was getting very tired of suppressing. "There are things in those files that I need to explain to you before you read them. Things that will make more sense with context than without it."

"Or you want to control what I find out and when."

"Both things can be true."

That was so honest it almost disarmed me. Almost.

I looked up at him. I had forgotten how tall he was, or maybe I had just spent six years carefully not thinking about it. There was a scar along his jaw that had not been there before, thin and pale, the kind that came from something that had happened fast and close. I did not ask about it.

"If you are lying to me," I said, "about any of it. The files, my father, any of it. I will not need Marcus Hale or a rival pack or anyone else to make your life difficult. Do you understand me?"

He held my gaze.

"Yes," he said simply.

Not I would never lie to you. Not I promise. Just yes, plain and direct, like a man acknowledging a boundary rather than performing innocence he did not have.

I hated that it was the right answer.

I took the key card and I walked to the door and I did not look back at him because I had learned a long time ago that looking back at Damien Voss was the fastest way to lose ground you had worked very hard to take.

The hallway outside was empty. Garrett and the other man had made themselves scarce with the kind of efficiency that came from long practice reading their employer's moods. The elevator was waiting. I stepped inside and pressed thirty-eight and watched the doors close and stood in the silence of the moving elevator and let myself feel, for exactly the duration of that ride, everything I had been holding at arm's length since I walked off the elevator an hour ago.

The bone-deep exhaustion of pretending the bond was not there.

The specific, terrible pain of being in the same room as him again and finding that six years had not made him smaller or easier or less than he had been. He was supposed to have become something I could look at without feeling anything. That had been the plan. Time and distance and deliberate, methodical anger were supposed to have done that job.

They had not done that job.

The elevator stopped at thirty-eight.

I pressed the key card to the lock of suite 3802 and the door swung open onto a room that was warm and quiet and expensive in a way that was not trying to impress anyone. A wide window looked out over the city. There was a couch and a low lamp already lit and a door that led to a bedroom beyond.

On the kitchen counter there was a glass of water and beside it, placed with a deliberateness that could not have been accidental, a small white envelope with one word written on the front in handwriting I recognized immediately.

Vera.

My real name. Not Cross. Not the borrowed identity I had walked in wearing.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment looking at it.

Then I walked to the counter and I picked it up and I turned it over in my hands and I thought about what it meant that he had prepared this room, prepared this envelope, prepared all of it, before I ever stepped off that elevator tonight. Before I walked in wearing someone else's name and pointed myself at his empire like something sharp.

He had known I was coming. He had let me come. He had prepared a room with my name on an envelope and a glass of water like I was a guest he had been waiting for.

I set the envelope back down without opening it.

Not tonight. Tonight I needed to think, and I could not think clearly with whatever was inside that envelope sitting in my chest alongside everything else. Tomorrow I would open it. Tomorrow I would be steadier.

I went to the window instead and looked out at Chicago the way I had not let myself look at it when I arrived, taking it in properly, the lights and the dark water in the distance and the specific skyline that had been the backdrop of every important thing that had ever happened to me.

Somewhere in this building, three floors below me, was the truth about my father.

Somewhere in this building was Damien Voss, who had just handed me the most dangerous thing in the world.

Not the files. Not the key card.

A reason to trust him.