Marked by the Alpha Billionaire

CHAPTER 5

"Elena. How much of that did you hear?"

"Nothing." The lie came out fast, too fast, and I watched it land wrong on his face before I'd even finished saying it. "I was working. I didn’t…. "

"You didn't hear me say your name?"

My stomach dropped. I hadn't been sure, not completely, but the way he said it now confirmed everything I'd been trying not to believe. He stood in the doorway still, phone gone from his hand, his eyes fixed on me with an intensity that made the desk between us feel smaller than it was.

"I heard something," I admitted, because a flat denial would have insulted us both. "I wasn't trying to listen. The walls aren't exactly soundproof."

"No," he said slowly. "They're not."

He didn't move, didn't invite me in or dismiss me, just studied me the way he had that first morning, like he was reading a sentence written in a language he almost understood. I made myself hold still under it, made myself breathe evenly, though my pulse was doing something loud and unsteady beneath my ribs.

"Are you going to fire me?" I asked, because the silence was worse than any answer he could give.

"For hearing four words through a door I chose not to close all the way?" Something almost like humor flickered across his face. "No. Though I'm curious why you look like you're bracing for it."

"Old habit. My last job didn't end well."

"What happened?"

"Nothing interesting," I said, which was, at least, technically true. "It's fine," he said finally, though his voice didn't quite sound like it meant it. "Family business. Complicated. Nothing that concerns you."

"Of course."

"You don't believe me."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." A ghost of something almost like amusement crossed his face, gone before it could settle into a real expression. "You have a very readable face for someone who clearly doesn't want to be read."

The observation landed closer to true than I liked, and I busied my hands with the edge of my laptop, needing something to do that wasn't meeting his eyes. He was still watching me, though, that same careful, searching attention from my first hour here, and something about it made my skin feel too warm, too aware of every inch of distance still between us.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You're the boss. I don't think I can stop you."

"You could try."

"I'll allow it, then."

That earned the faintest curve of his mouth, there and gone so fast I almost doubted I'd seen it. He crossed the small space between the door and my desk, slower than before, like he wanted to give me time to object if I needed to. I didn't.

"Have we met before?" he asked. "Before today, I mean."

The question hit harder than it should have, considering how simple it sounded on the surface. I kept my expression carefully still, running through every possible answer in the half-second I had before the silence stretched too long to be natural.

"I think I'd remember," I said.

"That's not really an answer."

"It's the only one I have."

He studied me a moment longer, head tilting slightly, like he was trying to catch me from a different angle. "There's something about you. I noticed it the second you walked in. I can't place it, and it's driving me a little insane, which isn't a feeling I enjoy."

"Maybe I just have one of those faces."

"I don't think that's it." His voice dropped, quieter now, more careful, like he was choosing each word from a very short list of safe ones. "It's not your face. It's something underneath it."

My pulse spiked again, sharp and sudden, because that sentence sat far too close to the truth for comfort. I thought of the strange dreams I'd started having, the moonlit forest, the black wolf running just ahead of me like it wanted me to follow. I thought of the messages on my phone, of a stranger who claimed to know exactly what I was, as though I were something other than simply human.

"I get that a lot," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "People think they recognize me from somewhere. I have a common kind of face."

"I've met a lot of common faces," Damian said. "None of them made me forget what I was saying mid-sentence on a phone call I've been dreading for weeks."

The confession surprised us both, I think, judging by the way his jaw tightened right after he said it, like he'd let something slip he hadn't meant to share. I didn't know what to do with it, so I said nothing, and the silence between us filled with something heavier than either of us seemed willing to name.

"You dread a lot of phone calls?" I asked, mostly to fill the quiet before it swallowed something neither of us was ready for.

"Only the ones that decide things I'd rather decide myself." He rubbed a hand across his jaw, and for a moment he looked less like a billionaire and more like a man who hadn't slept properly in a long time. "It's not important. Or it wouldn't be, if I didn't have a deadline I can't talk my way out of."

"That sounds ominous."

"It's complicated," he said again, the same word from before, worn smooth from overuse. "I'm not usually this transparent with people I've known for four hours."

"Maybe I have that effect on people."

"Maybe you do." He said it quietly, almost to himself, like the thought had only just occurred to him and he wasn't entirely comfortable with where it led.

"I should get back to work," I said eventually, because someone needed to break it before it broke something else.

"Right." He stepped back, the careful distance returning to his posture like a door swinging shut. "The Kessler contract. I still need those notes by the end of the day."

"I'll have them ready."

"Good." He turned toward his office, then paused, one hand braced against the frame the same way it had been that first morning. "Elena."

"Yes?"

"If you do remember where we might have met," he said, not quite looking at me now, "I'd like to know."

He disappeared behind the frosted glass before I could answer, the door clicking shut with that same soft, heavy sound that always seemed louder than it should. I sat frozen at my desk for a long moment, my hands pressed flat against the cool surface, trying to slow a heartbeat that refused to cooperate.

We hadn't met. I was almost certain of that. I would have remembered a man like Damian Cross, remembered those pale grey eyes and that careful, coiled stillness long before today.

Almost certain wasn't the same as certain, though, and the longer I sat with the question, the less steady that certainty felt. My mother had died when I was young enough that most of my early memories blurred together, half real and half imagined, patched together from photographs and stories other people told me. There were gaps in those years I'd never questioned before, empty spaces I'd simply accepted as the ordinary fog of early childhood.

I remembered summers I couldn't place on a map. I remembered a house that wasn't the one my father raised me in, a kitchen with a window facing trees instead of the cracked pavement of our old street, though I'd never once asked him about it, never wondered why the memory felt more like something borrowed than something lived. Children didn't question their own gaps. I hadn't, not until a man with silver eyes looked at me like he was trying to solve a puzzle he'd been carrying for years.

For the first time, sitting outside a stranger's office with my pulse still racing from the weight of his stare, I wondered if those gaps were as empty as I'd always believed, or if something had simply been taken out of them, carefully, deliberately, the way you'd remove a single page from a book without disturbing the rest of the binding.

My phone buzzed against the desk, and I reached for it automatically, already half expecting the unknown number before I saw the screen light up.

*You have met before. He just doesn't remember it right.*

I read the words twice, my mouth going dry, my mind racing through every possible explanation and finding none of them satisfying. A common face didn't explain gaps in a childhood. A common face didn't explain a stranger who claimed to know what I'd been before I ever set foot in this building. Before I could type a response, a second message landed right behind the first, shorter, colder, impossible to misread.

*Neither do you. Yet.*