"—can't even shift, and she's pushing a mop cart through Daddy's building like she earned it."
The atrium has excellent acoustics. When six pack employees decide to hold a public roast of the dead Alpha's hybrid daughter, the sound carries beautifully to the vaulted ceiling.
"My cousin applied for that janitor spot." A woman with a finance lanyard crosses her arms, her upper lip curling just enough to show canine. "Actual wolf, actual qualifications—but sure, give it to the half-blood who smells like grocery-store soap."
Two weeks of different entrances, different badges, mop water and industrial bleach. I stand still, fingers locked on the cart handle, calculating—retreating only makes them chase.
"She doesn't even register on a scent scan." A man in the back tilts his chin at me like I'm a specimen pinned under glass. "Standing next to her is like standing next to furniture."
Here's what my father never explained in his neat little will: how exactly I was supposed to integrate into his pack and produce a werewolf child when every wolf in this building treats me like something stuck to the bottom of their designer shoe.
Maybe there was a clause for that too, buried somewhere between the blood-verification protocols and the contingent stipend for my mother's care. I must have missed it between all the other ways Edric planned my life from beyond the grave.
"Does she talk? I've genuinely never heard her—" The guy steps forward, grinning at his own audience like he's workshopping material.
The sentence dies mid-word, like someone yanked the power cable on six voices simultaneously. The lanyard woman steps back, the man drops his gaze to the marble floor, and pack instinct rolls through the atrium like a pressure change before a storm.
Miles Wallace crosses the lobby like it was built as a runway for specifically this entrance. Six-one, dark hair that costs more to look that careless than most people's rent, and green-hazel eyes that sweep the group once before dismissing them.
My ribs lock before my brain catches up. One summer—I was sixteen, he was eighteen, and my father decided three months of bonfires and lake days might fix the problem of me. Miles handed me drinks without checking my blood status first.
He laughed at my jokes like they were actually funny, and he looked at me like a person instead of a case file. The kind of boy you remember at sixteen and tell yourself you've forgotten by twenty-four.
I told myself I outgrew those feelings years ago. Standing here with bleach on my uniform and his scent hitting me from fifteen feet away, I'm learning that outgrowing something is not the same as erasing it.
"Don't you all have departments to be in?" His voice is calm, nearly friendly, and it clears the group faster than a pulled fire alarm. He doesn't watch them scatter—he's already watching me.
"You okay?" No performance in it, no angle—just the question, delivered like he'd stand here all day waiting for the honest answer.
"Fantastic." I adjust my grip on the cart, my knuckles aching. "Nothing quite like finishing a shift with a team-building exercise in group humiliation."
"How long has that been going on?" He tips his head, something shifting across his mouth—not a smile, but the architecture of one.
"Define 'that.'" I force my fingers to loosen around the handle. "The general hostility, or the organised group sessions?"
"Both." He steps closer—not crowding, just closing distance the way someone does when they don't plan to leave anytime soon. Something comes off him, warm and layered, pulling at a spot behind my sternum that I don't have vocabulary for.
"Since day one, but they've really found their rhythm this week." My hybrid senses pick up his scent like a frequency I've never been tuned to before, and my brain stalls somewhere between cataloguing it and running from it.
"I can talk to Celeste about it. Get you reassigned to a different floor, different shift hours—"
"No." Too fast—I soften it, barely. "I don't need Celeste knowing I can't handle her employees, that's a card I'm not putting in her hand."
He studies me for a beat too long, something shifting behind his expression. "You always did play the long game."
The air between us rearranges itself. He said always, he said did—and that word has a whole summer pinned underneath it, three months of almost-belonging that ended the way everything with my father ended, without warning or explanation.
"I don't know what you mean." My voice is flat enough to land a commercial aircraft on, and I hold it there.
"Sure you don't." He doesn't press—just stands there, not pressing, leaving the door wide open without stepping through it. My feet file a dissenting opinion about walking away.
"Your father talked about you." Quieter now, like he's adjusting the volume so the words won't crack anything. "At board meetings—never by name, but I always knew."
"Edric talked about a lot of things." My throat works around the sentence like it's swallowing glass. "Follow-through was more of a hobby."
He reaches past me for the supply-closet door—his hand finding the handle behind my shoulder—and the space between our bodies collapses to something that shouldn't be legal in a workplace.
His forearm passes close enough that heat radiates off his skin without contact. His scent wraps around me like a palm pressed flat against my spine.
Neither of us breathes. His fingers brush the outside of my elbow—barely there, a half-second of skin that seizes my chest. My pulse slams upward, hammering in my wrists and the base of my throat.
Something shifts behind my eyes—that gold flicker I've never been able to control—and I watch him notice it. His gaze drops to my irises and holds there, very still, very deliberate, and the moment tilts toward something neither of us has any business naming.
My phone screams from my pocket—shrill, furious, timed with the precision of a universe that has never once been on my side. Whatever was building between us shatters like a window hit.
I step back so fast my hip catches the cart. The screen shows a clinic prefix—a number configuration that has never, in the history of phones, preceded good news, so I rush to pick up.
"Ms Reed? This is Portland General." The voice on the line is professional and rushed—the worst combination a hospital can offer you.
"I'm calling about your mother, Mara Reed—she collapsed at home and paramedics have transported her." Something in the woman's tone strips the floor out from under my feet.
"How bad?" The words leave my mouth while my bag is already climbing my shoulder and my legs have already started their own commute toward the exit doors.
"Her condition has destabilised significantly. We need you here as soon as possible." I'm already calculating—distance to the hospital, minutes on the bus, whether a cab will break what's left in my account.
"Bailee—" Miles's voice reaches me from behind, carrying everything I don't have time to unpack or answer.
I don't look back. The atrium doors swing open, cold air hits my face like a slap, and I'm running before they close behind me.
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