HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 15 Vera Varek

She came in on a Tuesday without a scheduled appointment, which Ava noted and which the building's reception staff appeared to consider entirely acceptable, which told her something useful about whom this woman was before she had reached the fourteenth floor.

She was somewhere in her late fifties with the particular quality of a woman who had always known what she was worth and had never found an occasion to revise that assessment downward. Her hair was dark with silver threaded through it, worn in a way that was elegant without trying to be. Her clothes were expensive and understated. She walked the corridor toward Ava's desk with the unhurried confidence of someone who had been in this building long before there was a desk outside that office.

"You must be the new assistant," she said, stopping in front of Ava with a directness that was not unfriendly but was absolutely assessing. "I am Vera Varek."

"Ava Chen," Ava said, standing because it seemed appropriate. "It is good to meet you. I will let Mr. Varek know you are here."

"He knows," Vera said, with the light certainty of someone whose son always knew when she was in the building. She did not move toward the office immediately. Instead, she looked at Ava with the focused attention of someone conducting an evaluation they intended to complete properly. "How long have you been here?"

"Four weeks."

"And how are you finding it?"

"I find the work genuinely interesting," Ava said. "The organization is more complex than it looks from the outside, which I appreciate. Simple work is boring."

Something in Vera's expression shifted by a fraction. It was not a smile exactly, but it was in the same direction. "Valdris does not keep people who find things boring," she said. "He has no patience for it."

"I have noticed," Ava said.

Vera looked at her for one more moment with those sharp, measuring eyes. Then she turned toward the office door and knocked once and went in without waiting for an answer, and Ava sat back down and went back to the contracts she had been reviewing.

Colt appeared beside her desk three minutes later with his customary silence and set a coffee down without comment.

"Did I pass?" Ava asked.

Colt's expression did not change but something in it suggested he found the question marginally amusing. "Vera Varek does not show her assessments," he said. "But she asked about you before she came upstairs."

"She asked about me?"

"She asks about everyone who sits at that desk," Colt said. "She has not asked twice about anyone before." He went back to his office before she could respond to that, which she was fairly certain was intentional.

Vera stayed for forty minutes. When she left, she stopped at Ava's desk again.

"Lunch sometime," she said. It was not quite a question and not quite a command and Ava got the impression that Vera Varek operated mostly in that space between the two.

"I would like that," Ava said, and was surprised to find she meant it.

Vera nodded once, as though something had been confirmed, and left.

Ava looked at the elevator doors for a moment after they closed and then looked at Colt's office and then looked at the closed door of Valdris's office and decided that this building contained more layers than she had yet uncovered and that she intended to understand all of them eventually.

She went back to the contracts.