HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 14 Riven Makes His Move

She found him in the break room on a Friday afternoon, which she suspected was not an accident.

Riven Varek had a talent for appearing in places in ways that felt casual and probably were not, and the particular quality of ease with which he was leaning against the counter when she walked in suggested he had been there long enough to look comfortable but not so long as to look like he had been waiting.

"Ava Chen," he said, with the smile that she had cataloged by now as his default setting, warm and slightly knowing and deployed with the precision of someone who understood its effect. "How are you finding the empire?"

"The work is interesting," she said, crossing to the coffee machine with the efficient politeness she used with him now that she had established it as the register of their interactions.

"And my brother?"

She looked at him over her shoulder. "What about your brother?"

"He can be difficult," Riven said. He said it with a kind of affectionate resignation, the tone of someone acknowledging a family truth without intending criticism. "I wanted to make sure you were settling in all right. Since we have a history of a kind."

"We had two conversations at a bar," Ava said. "That is not quite history."

He smiled. "Fair enough." He was quiet for a moment in a way that felt considered rather than empty. "For what it is worth, the people on that floor who have lasted more than a month are usually exceptional. The ones who do not last do not understand that the work is the point. You understand that."

She looked at him. It was a genuine observation, delivered without the performance that usually accompanied his compliments, and she found it more disarming than the charming ones. "Thank you," she said, and meant it.

"I also wanted to say," Riven continued, and his voice shifted slightly, becoming more careful, "that what happened at Vega was what it was, and I am not holding it against you. You were right to say no. I was not asking the right way for the right reasons."

Ava looked at him for a long moment. There was something genuine in his face, something that sat underneath the charm and was quieter and more real. She had seen it before, in flashes, and she did not entirely know what to do with it.

"I appreciate that," she said.

"Good." The smile came back, lighter now. "Then we can be colleagues without it being strange."

"It was not strange for me," Ava said.

He laughed, and it was genuine. "Of course it was not. You are remarkably unimpressible, do you know that?"

"I have been told," she said, and took her coffee and went back to her desk.

She thought about the conversation on the way home that evening, turning it over with the honest attention she gave to things she was not sure if she had read correctly. There had been something real in him today. She believed that. She also knew that real and safe were not the same thing, and that people with charm that calibrated rarely deployed it without purpose.

She filed it away under things to watch and went home and helped Zara cook dinner and did not mention it because some things were easier to think clearly about when they stayed inside her own head for a while.