Marked by the Alpha Billionaire

CHAPTER 6

Elena's POV

"You're still here."

Ruth's voice snapped me back into my body so fast I nearly dropped the phone. I locked the screen and set it face-down on the desk, my heart still hammering out the rhythm of those four words. *Neither do you. Yet.*

"Just finishing the Kessler notes," I said, and I was almost proud of how normal it sounded.

Ruth studied me the way she had in the hallway earlier, that same sharp, careful attention aimed just slightly past what I wanted her to see. Whatever had pulled her toward the stairwell had left a mark on her… her lipstick was fresh, reapplied like armor, but her hands weren't quite steady when she set a stack of folders on the corner of my desk.

"Everything okay?" I asked, mostly to see what she'd do with the question.

"Fine." The word came too fast, the same way mine had earlier when Damian asked how much I'd heard. "Building maintenance. Nothing exciting." She smoothed her blazer, and just like that the careful, unbothered Ruth from that morning slid back into place, like a mask clicking shut. "Don't stay too late. First-day exhaustion is real, even if you don't feel it yet."

"I won't."

She was gone before I could ask anything else, heels clicking that same brisk rhythm down the hall, and I was left alone with the hum of the office and a phone I didn't dare look at again in case the screen lit up with something worse.

I finished the Kessler notes instead, because it was easier to trust numbers than my own thoughts right then. Page four didn't match the summary… I'd been right about that… and the deeper I dug, the more the mismatch looked less like an accounting error and more like something built on purpose, a seam meant to stay hidden unless someone happened to read fast and trust nothing. I printed the pages, squared the edges twice out of habit, and made myself walk them to his door instead of leaving them on the desk like a coward.

The frosted glass was dark at the edges, evening settling over the city behind it, and for a second I almost turned back. Then his voice came, low, "Come in," before I'd even knocked, like he'd heard my hand lift toward the wood.

He was standing at the window when I stepped inside, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, the whole skyline burning gold and grey behind him. He didn't turn right away.

"You found something," he said.

"How do you know that?"

"You walk differently when you're sure of something." He turned then, and his eyes moved over the pages in my hand before they moved to my face. "Most people shuffle in here like they're bracing for bad news. You're not shuffling."

I set the file on his desk instead of answering, because he wasn't wrong, and I didn't like how easily he'd read it. "The discrepancy isn't a rounding error. Someone restructured the payment schedule after the fact and backdated the summary to hide it. Whoever did it wasn't sloppy. They were careful. Careful enough that I don't think it was you."

Something shifted in his face… not surprise, exactly, more like a door he'd expected to stay shut for a while longer creaking open sooner than planned. He picked up the file, and this time he actually read it, silent long enough that the city lights finished coming on behind him.

"You did this in under three hours," he said finally.

"You said I read fast."

"I didn't think you meant *this* fast." He set the pages down and looked at me with something that wasn't quite the coiled stillness from that morning. It was closer to interest, unguarded in a way that made my pulse do something inconvenient. "Where did you learn to catch things like this?"

The question sat too close to the truth for comfort, close enough that I had to choose my next words the way you choose footing on ice. "I used to help my father with his books. Small company. You learn to notice when numbers are lying to you."

"Used to."

"He's not in business anymore." True, in the way a lie can be true if you leave out enough of it. My father wasn't in business anymore because he was dead, because six years ago a signature at the bottom of a letter had taken the last thing he had left to lose, and the man reading my handwriting in his office right now had no idea he was looking at proof that maybe, just maybe, it hadn't been his signature at all… not really.

Damian was quiet for a long moment, and something about the quiet felt deliberate, like he was giving me room to say more if I wanted to. I didn't.

"I'll take this to the board tomorrow," he said eventually, tapping the folder. "Quietly. If someone's been altering records inside my own company, I need to know who before I know why."

"You don't seem surprised."

"I'm not." His jaw tightened, just slightly, the same tell I'd started cataloguing without meaning to. "I've had a feeling for a while that not everything wrong at Cross Industries has my fingerprints on it. I just didn't have proof. Now I do." He looked at me a bit too long. "Thanks to you."

"Just doing the job."

"No," he said, quiet and certain. "Not just that."

The air between us did the thing it kept doing, pulling tight in a way that had nothing to do with static or nerves, and I made myself look away first, down at the darkened window, at both our reflections standing closer together than either of us had actually moved.

"I should go," I said. "Long first day."

"Elena."

I stopped at the door, hand on the frame the way his always was.

"That number," he said, and my whole body went still, because there was no reason, none at all, for him to know about the messages sitting in my phone. "The one that's been texting you. I saw the screen light up on your desk earlier, before Ruth found you." His eyes had gone darker than the grey I'd catalogued that morning, something sharper underneath the calm. "You should block it."

"How do you know it's not just my sister?"

"Because your sister doesn't make you go that pale." He said it simply, no accusation in it, just a fact laid flat on the table between us. "Whoever it is, they're watching you closely enough to know when your phone lights up in a room I'm standing in. I'd like to know why."

I didn't have an answer that wasn't a lie, so I gave him a small, careful truth instead. "So would I."

He held my gaze a moment longer, like he was deciding whether to push, and then he let it go, the door of the conversation swinging shut the way his office door always did… softly, but final. "Go home, Elena. Get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

"Is it always like this?"

"No." Something almost like a smile ghosted across his mouth. "Usually it's worse."

I left before he could see whatever my face was doing in response to that, and I made it almost to the elevator before my phone buzzed against my palm, the screen lighting up before I could stop myself from looking.

*He's already started watching you the way he watches threats. That's not a bad thing. That's the only reason you're still alive.*

I stared at the words until the elevator doors opened in front of me, empty and waiting, and for the first time since I'd walked through that revolving door that morning, I wasn't sure which one of us was supposed to be afraid of the other.