Marked by the Alpha Billionaire

CHAPTER 9

Elena's POV

"Claw marks."

Ruth didn't look up from her monitor, though her typing slowed by half a beat, just long enough for me to know the words had landed somewhere they weren't supposed to.

"I'm sorry?"

"On the locked drawer in the archive room. Four lines, evenly spaced, like something tried to claw its way out from the inside." I kept my voice light, curious instead of accusing, the same tone I'd have used asking about a coffee order. "Any idea what that's about?"

"Old building." Ruth's fingers found their rhythm again, quick and even. "Things get damaged. Probably a filing cart, or a cart wheel catching the metal wrong for twenty years."

"They looked deliberate."

"You've been here two days, Elena." She finally glanced up, and whatever careful warmth she usually wore had cooled several degrees. "I'd focus less on decorating theories for old furniture and more on the gala seating chart, if I were you. Mr. Cross wants it finalized by the end of day."

It wasn't unkind, exactly, but it was final, a door closing as firmly as any of Damian's ever did, and I understood well enough not to push a second time. I went back to my desk, pulled up the seating chart, and let the conversation sit at the bottom of a very long list of things nobody in this building wanted to explain to me.

By the time I left that evening, my head was too full to hold one more unanswered question. Victor's voice threading through my thoughts… *this building has a way of answering questions you didn't actually want answered* … Ruth's too-quick deflection, the warmth that still lived in my chest from the low, protective note in Damian's voice that morning when he'd warned me off his own cousin. None of it fits together. All of it felt like it was supposed to.

I fell asleep faster than I expected, the exhaustion of two strange days finally catching up with me, and the dream came before I even felt myself drift.

I was running.

Not walking, not startled awake and stumbling… running, full and unbroken, through trees that blurred past too fast to name, my breath coming in a rhythm that didn't feel like breath at all, low and steady, timed to four legs instead of two. The forest smelled alive in a way nothing had ever smelled to me awake… pine and wet earth and something colder underneath, moonlight, if moonlight had a scent. Somewhere behind me, something else was running too, matching my pace stride for stride, close enough that I could feel the heat of it without turning to look.

*You're not supposed to be here.*

The voice wasn't spoken so much as felt low and rough, threading directly into my chest the way Damian's voice had that first morning across his desk. I knew, with the strange, absolute certainty dreams sometimes hand you without explanation, that the voice belonged to him. I knew it the way I knew my own name… the real one, the one I hadn't said out loud since I'd crossed the city line.

*Then why does it feel like I belong here,* I thought back, or said, or simply was, the boundary between thought and voice already dissolved somewhere in the trees behind me.

The presence beside me went quiet, and the running slowed, the forest thinning ahead into a clearing full of silver light, and I understood, again with that same dream-logic certainty, that if I looked at whatever was running beside me, I would see something I wasn't ready for. I looked anyway.

Grey eyes. Silver, really, catching moonlight the way glass catches fire, set into a shape too large and too dark to be anything that belonged on two legs, fur black as the space between trees, a presence so much bigger than the man in the tailored suit that some small, distant part of my sleeping mind understood it as the truest version of him rather than a stranger.

I woke with my heart slamming against my ribs, sheets tangled around my legs, breath coming too fast in a room gone completely dark and completely silent, no forest, no moonlight, just the ordinary hum of a city outside my window.

It took a full minute before I noticed my hand.

Four thin red lines ran across the inside of my forearm, shallow, barely broken skin, spaced exactly the width of claws.

I sat frozen on the edge of the mattress, staring at marks that had no business existing outside of a dream, my pulse a drumbeat too loud for the silence around it. I told myself it was nothing… nails, a rough night, some ordinary explanation my rattled brain would land on if I gave it enough time. I told myself that twice, and believed it neither time.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand, and this time I didn't hesitate before looking.

*You felt it too, didn't you.*

I stared at the words until my vision blurred, my thumb hovering uselessly over the keyboard, no idea in the world how to answer a question that shouldn't have been possible to ask.