HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 10 Riven AppearsUntitled Episode

CHAPTER 10

Riven Appears

She smelled the trouble before she saw it.

Not literally. It was more that on Monday of her second week she arrived to find the atmosphere on the executive floor carrying a different charge than it had the previous week, a subtle tension in the way Colt moved through the corridor and the particular closed quality of Valdris's office door that suggested whatever was behind it was not the regular Monday morning brief.

She settled at her desk and got to work and told herself it was not her concern.

At ten-fifteen, the elevator opened, and she looked up out of the habit she was developing of monitoring the corridor, and the man who stepped out was not someone she recognized from the company directory she had been quietly memorizing all week.

He was tall and dark-haired with the kind of face that made people look twice, broad-shouldered in a jacket that was expensive without being formal. He moved across the floor with the ease of someone for whom ease was a default state, and there was something in his bearing that reminded her of Valdris without being anything like Valdris. Same fundamental architecture, different from everything else.

He saw her at the desk and his stride changed. Not noticeably. Just by a fraction that she caught because she had been paying attention all week, and she had learned to read fractions.

Then she recognized him.

He recognized her at approximately the same moment. She watched it happen across his face, the brief flicker of genuine surprise before something more careful settled in over the top of it.

"Well," said Riven Varek. "This is unexpected."

"Good morning," Ava said pleasantly. "Do you have an appointment?"

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she could not entirely read. Then he smiled, and it was almost the same smile she had seen across the bar at Vega, almost but not quite, because there was something underneath it now that had not been there before. "I do not need an appointment," he said. "He is my brother."

"I will let him know you are here," Ava said. She picked up the desk phone and dialed the internal line. Valdris answered on the second ring. "Your brother is here," she said.

A pause. "Send him in," Valdris said, and the line went quiet.

She gestured toward the office. Riven did not move immediately. He stood at her desk with his hands in his pockets and looked at her with the thoughtful attention of someone reconsidering a situation they had believed they understood.

"You are full of surprises, Ava Chen," he said quietly.

"I am just doing my job," she said.

He looked at her a moment longer. Then he crossed to the office door and knocked once and went in, and the door closed behind him, and Ava went back to the morning reports she had been finalizing.

She did not think about the way he had said her name.

She thought instead about the fact that the company directory had a photograph of Riven Varek in it, and she had memorized it along with everyone else's and had not made the connection until she saw him in person, which was a small professional failure she intended not to repeat.

Down the corridor, Colt appeared from his office and stopped beside her desk with a coffee cup in each hand. He set one on her desk without a word, which she had come to understand in the past week was his version of a gesture.

"How are you settling in?" he asked.

"Well, I think," she said. "You would know better than I would."

"You are doing well," he said simply. He glanced at the closed office door and back at her with an expression she was not yet equipped to interpret. "Let me know if anything seems unusual."

"Unusual how?" she asked.

He considered the question with more seriousness than it might have warranted. "You will know it when you see it," he said, and went back to his office, leaving her with a coffee she had not asked for and a sentence she found herself turning over in her mind for the rest of the morning.