Beta Claimed (The Beta Claim #1)

Chapter One

Nora

The coffee maker was broken again.

Not broken in the dramatic, sparking, someone-call-maintenance way.

Broken in the slow, pathetic, beta way, where it still technically worked but produced something closer to hot brown water than actual coffee, and nobody cared enough to fix it because it was on the second floor, where the betas sat.

The third floor had a Breville espresso machine.

I knew this because I’d been sent up there once to deliver files to Marcus Webb, the senior account manager, and had caught a glimpse of it gleaming on the counter like a stainless steel altar.

I’d stood there for a full three seconds, staring at it, before Marcus’s assistant, an omega with a sleek blond ponytail and a smile that didn’t reach her eyes, had asked if I needed something.

“Just dropping off the Henderson file,” I’d said.

She’d taken the folder without looking at it. “You can go.”

That was six months ago. I still thought about that espresso machine at least twice a week, which probably said something profound about my life that I wasn’t ready to unpack.

I poured myself a mug of the brown water, added enough creamer to make it almost palatable, and leaned against the kitchenette counter.

The second floor of Whitmore & Associates was already humming with low-grade anxiety.

I could feel it in the air. Not the way an alpha could scent fear or an omega could read the emotional temperature of a room, but in the regular, human way.

People were talking too fast. Laughing too loud.

Checking their phones every thirty seconds like they were waiting for a text from God.

The acquisition was official. Ashworth Crisis & Strategy had bought Whitmore & Associates for an undisclosed sum that everyone pretended not to have opinions about.

The announcement had come two weeks ago in a company-wide email so sterile it might as well have been a medical diagnosis.

We are pleased to announce a strategic partnership.

Synergies. Alignment of values. Growth opportunities.

Translation: new owners were coming in, and half of us would probably be unemployed by spring.

“You’re doing that thing again.”

I looked up. Sadie Lowe was leaning in the kitchenette doorway with her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised, which was more or less her default state of existence.

Sadie was the only other person on the second floor who treated the broken coffee maker as a personal affront rather than an inevitability.

“What thing?” I asked.

“The quiet brooding thing where you stare into your coffee like it holds the secrets of the universe.”

“I’m not brooding. I’m strategizing.”

“About?”

“Whether it’s worth washing this mug or if I should just throw it away and accept that caffeine is no longer part of my life.”

Sadie snorted and pushed off the doorframe.

She was tall, taller than most of the alpha women in the building, which I suspected was a source of private satisfaction for her.

She moved through the kitchenette with the focused energy of someone who was always slightly pissed off about something, which, to be fair, she usually was.

“They come in today,” Sadie said, pouring her own cup of brown water and grimacing at the first sip. “The new overlords.”

“They’re not overlords.”

“A pack of alphas who just bought the company we work for. What would you call them?”

“Three alphas,” I corrected. “One omega.”

Sadie waved her hand dismissively. “Still a pack. Still coming in to big-dick the place and restructure us into oblivion. You know how this goes, Nora. They’ll keep the alphas on three.

Probably keep the omegas in client relations because omegas are so good with people.

” She said the last part in a singsong voice dripping with venom.

“And us? The betas? We’ll be the first ones with boxes on our desks. ”

I wanted to argue. I really did. But Sadie wasn’t wrong, and we both knew it.

Whitmore & Associates was a mid-tier consulting firm, unremarkable, the kind of company that did fine without ever doing great.

It had forty-two employees. Roughly thirty of them were betas, handling the day-to-day operations, the scheduling, the filing, the thousand small tasks that kept the machine running.

Eight were alphas, occupying every senior position and corner office.

Four were omegas, slotted into client-facing roles where their natural warmth and emotional intelligence could be leveraged (a word I hated) for the company’s benefit.

I’d been the office administrator for three years.

Hired at twenty-four, fresh out of a state college with a degree in business administration that nobody had ever asked about, I’d spent every day since making myself indispensable in the way that betas did.

Quietly, efficiently, and without any expectation of recognition.

I managed the office calendar, coordinated between departments, handled vendor relationships, organized every company event, maintained the filing system (digital and physical, because Marcus Webb still printed everything like it was 1997), trained new hires, stocked supplies, fielded client calls when reception was overwhelmed, and once talked a delivery driver out of leaving forty boxes of printer paper in the parking lot during a rainstorm.

My last performance review had described me as “reliable.”

Not exceptional. Not impressive. Not even particularly good. Reliable. Like a Honda Civic. Like a Tuesday. Like the kind of person you never thought about until she wasn’t there, and then suddenly nothing worked and everyone was confused about why.

I’d smiled at my manager, a beta himself, which somehow made it worse, and said, “Thank you.”

Because what else did you say?

· · ·

The Ashworth pack was not coming to make friends.

I knew this because I’d done what I always did when faced with uncertainty: researched. Thoroughly. Obsessively. In the two weeks since the acquisition announcement, I’d read every article, every profile, every industry blog post I could find about Ashworth Crisis & Strategy.

The firm was boutique. Exclusive. Terrifying.

They specialized in corporate crisis management, the kind of work that meant going into companies that were drowning in scandal, hemorrhaging money, or both, and tearing them apart to save them.

Or tearing them apart and walking away. It depended on what they found.

AC&S had a ninety-three percent success rate. The seven percent they’d failed represented companies so far gone that no one could have saved them, and even then, the Ashworth pack had managed to salvage enough to keep the lawsuits at bay.

The pack itself was four men, bonded for four years, which was notable in a world where pack bonds averaged six years before someone got restless. Three alphas. One omega. And the name on the door belonged to the most dangerous one.

Kieran Ashworth.

I’d stared at his photo on the company website for longer than was professionally appropriate.

He looked like someone had tried to stuff a motorcycle gang leader into a CEO’s life and only partially succeeded.

Dark hair, cut short but not neat. A jaw that could have been carved from granite.

Eyes that were either very dark brown or black.

The photo wasn’t high enough resolution to tell.

Tattoos visible at his collar, creeping up the side of his neck, disappearing into his sleeves.

And the story. Everyone knew the story.

Three years ago, at an industry conference in Chicago, an alpha from a rival firm had cornered Jonah Maren, Ashworth’s omega, in a hallway and made the kind of comment that got sanitized in news reports but that everyone understood.

Kieran Ashworth had found them. What happened next was variously described as “an altercation,” “a physical confrontation,” and, in one memorable Reddit thread, “a mauling.”

The rival alpha had spent two weeks in the hospital. Kieran Ashworth had spent zero days in jail, because the surveillance footage showed exactly who had started it and how, and because the Ashworth pack’s legal team was apparently composed of demons in bespoke suits.

The story had solidified his reputation. Kieran Ashworth was not someone you crossed. Not someone you challenged. Not someone you even looked at wrong, unless you wanted those dark eyes turning in your direction with the kind of focus that made grown alphas reconsider their life choices.

And he was coming to my office. Today. In... I checked my phone... forty-seven minutes.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Sadie said.

“I’m going back to my desk,” I said.

· · ·

My desk was the first thing anyone saw when they stepped off the elevator on the second floor.

This was by design. Not mine, but the building’s.

The reception area on two was a wide, open space with a curved desk positioned directly across from the elevator doors, flanked by two glass-walled conference rooms and a hallway that led to the open-plan office beyond.

It was my job to sit at that desk and be the first face people saw, which was ironic given that most people looked straight through me.

I settled into my chair and pulled up the transition checklist I’d built. Twenty-three items. I’d completed nineteen of them. The remaining four required input from the new owners, which meant they’d been sitting incomplete for two weeks because nobody at AC&S had bothered to respond to my emails.

I’d sent three. Polite, professional, progressively more detailed. I’d cc’d my manager. I’d cc’d Marcus Webb. I’d gotten nothing back except a read receipt from someone named Declan Voss, which felt like the corporate equivalent of being acknowledged and then immediately forgotten.