Marked by the Alpha Billionaire

CHAPTER 7

Elena's POV

"You're doing the thing again."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you go quiet for ten seconds and I know you're about to lie to me." Mia's voice crackled slightly through the phone, home noise behind her… a television, a spoon against a bowl, the ordinary sounds of a life I'd left three states and one fake name behind. "How was the first day, Elena. Really."

I sat on the edge of my mattress in an apartment that still smelled like fresh paint, knees pulled up, my work blazer draped over a chair like it belonged to someone braver than me. "Long."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the honest one I've got right now."

Mia went quiet on her end, and I could picture her exactly… curled into the corner of our old couch, feet tucked under her, the same worried crease she'd worn since the night Dad died and never quite lost. She was the only person alive who knew the whole truth: not Elena Marsh, assistant, but Elena Voss, daughter of a man who'd spent the last year of his life trying to prove Cross Industries had gutted his company on purpose, and the last month of it too sick and too broke to finish the fight.

"Did you see him?" she asked. "Cross."

"I work for him. Of course I saw him."

"You know what I mean."

I did. I thought of pale grey eyes gone almost silver under office light, of a voice asking *have we met before* like the answer mattered more than it should have for a man who'd known me for four hours. I thought of the way my whole body had leaned toward him without permission, some old, stupid instinct I didn't have a name for yet.

"He's not what I expected," I said finally.

"That's not good, Elena."

"I know."

"You went in there with a plan. Get close, get proof, get out. You didn't go in there to..." She stopped herself, and I heard her exhale, long and careful, the sound of someone choosing patience over panic. "Just be careful. Whatever else he is, he's still the man whose name is on that letter."

"I found something today." I hadn't meant to say it, not yet, not until I understood it myself, but the words came anyway, spilling out into the dark of my new apartment like they'd been waiting all day for somewhere safe to land. "A file. Buried under a name that isn't Cross Industries. It might prove someone set him up to look responsible for what happened to Dad."

Silence, long enough that I checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.

"You think he's innocent," Mia said, and it wasn't a question.

"I think I don't know what I think yet."

"Elena." My name again, careful this time, the way you'd say it to someone standing too close to a ledge. "Dad believed that man ruined him. He believed it until the day he died. Are you really going to walk into that building every morning and let some rich stranger's pretty eyes talk you out of the one thing you promised him?"

The accusation landed harder than she probably meant it to, mostly because some small, traitorous part of me couldn't argue with it. I hadn't planned on the pull. I hadn't planned on any of it… not the scent of cedar that seemed to follow me home in my own memory, not the way his voice dropped when he asked about the number texting me, not the strange, steady comfort of being looked at by a man I was supposed to be destroying.

"I haven't forgotten why I'm here," I said, and I meant it, even if my voice didn't come out as certain as I wanted.

"Good." Mia's tone softened, the argument draining out of it as fast as it had risen. "I'm not trying to fight with you. I just... I'm the only family you've got left, and you're three states away pretending to be someone else inside a building owned by the man who might have killed our father. Forgive me for worrying."

"You don't have to forgive anything. You're allowed to worry."

"I'm going to worry anyway. Just answer your phone when I call, alright? Even if it's three in the morning."

"I will."

We talked for another few minutes about nothing that mattered… her job, the leaking faucet in the old apartment, a neighbor's dog that had started howling at nothing every night around midnight… and by the time we hung up, the ordinary rhythm of it had loosened something tight in my chest that I hadn't realized was still there. I set the phone down on the nightstand, screen dark, and let myself breathe for the first time since the elevator doors had closed on me hours ago.

That was when I heard it.

A sound outside, low and deliberate, not the city noise I'd already started tuning out… footsteps, maybe, though the street below my window had gone quiet an hour ago, or something closer to breathing, slow and even, like it was pacing itself on purpose. I crossed to the window without turning on a light, some instinct older than reason telling me not to give whoever it was a silhouette to aim at.

The street looked empty. Streetlights, a parked car with a cracked taillight, the shuttered bakery on the corner. Nothing that explained the sound, or the way the hair on my arms had lifted, or the strange, sharp awareness crawling up the back of my neck like something was watching me watch it.

I told myself it was nerves. First day, new city, new name, a phone full of messages from a stranger who knew too much… of course my mind was inventing shadows.

Then the shadow at the mouth of the alley across the street moved.

Not far. Not fast. Just enough to prove it wasn't a trick of the streetlight, a shape peeling itself half a step away from the brick like it had been standing there long enough to grow comfortable in the dark. I couldn't make out a face, couldn't even be certain it was human, not with the way it held itself too still and then too suddenly still again, the way stillness had felt in Damian's office that first morning… coiled, waiting, aware of being watched right back.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand behind me, and I didn't need to look to know.

I looked anyway.

*Turn off your light and step away from the window. Now.*

The street outside was already dark… I hadn't turned anything on… and my hands were shaking as I backed away from the glass regardless, my pulse loud enough to fill the silent apartment. When I made myself look back through the gap in the curtain thirty seconds later, heart hammering, breath held, the alley across the street stood empty.

Whatever had been standing there was already gone.