Chapter Two
Nora
They were in the conference room for three hours.
I knew this because I could see them through the glass. I knew this because I counted every minute. And I knew this because for three straight hours, I could not stop looking.
It wasn’t intentional. My desk faced the conference room. There was nowhere else for my eyes to go. That was the excuse I gave myself, anyway, and I was sticking with it.
Through the glass wall, I could see Declan at the head of the table, standing, gesturing at something on the screen behind him.
His movements were precise and economical.
He didn’t waste a single motion. Rhys sat at the far end, quiet, his chair pushed slightly back from the table like he was observing from a distance even when he was in the room.
Jonah was between them, leaning forward, animated, his hands moving when he talked.
And Kieran.
Kieran was pacing.
Not the anxious, back-and-forth kind of pacing. This was slow, deliberate, the way a caged animal moves along the edges of its enclosure. He’d walk to the window, stop, turn, walk back. Every few minutes, his head would turn toward the glass wall. Toward my desk. Toward me.
Every single time, I looked away too late.
I tried to work. I answered emails. I updated the shared calendar with the new meeting schedules I’d been sent that morning.
I processed three vendor invoices and reorganized the supply closet inventory spreadsheet, which absolutely did not need reorganizing, but it gave my hands something to do while my brain refused to cooperate.
The pull was still there.
That was the part I couldn’t explain. The moment in the lobby, when Kieran had walked toward me and the air had gone strange and electric, I’d told myself it was adrenaline.
Nerves. The natural human response to having a very large, very intense man with a reputation for violence staring at you like you’d just rearranged his molecular structure.
But adrenaline fades. Nerves settle. And three hours later, I could still feel it.
A low hum in my chest, warm and steady, like a second heartbeat.
It wasn’t unpleasant. That was the worst part.
It should have been unpleasant, or at least unsettling, but it felt.
.. right. Natural. Like it had always been there and I’d only just noticed it.
Betas don’t feel pulls. I reminded myself of this approximately forty-seven times between 10 a.m. and noon.
It didn’t help.
· · ·
Sadie appeared at my desk at 12:15, holding two sad sandwiches from the vending machine on the first floor.
“Lunch,” she announced, dropping one on my keyboard. “And you’re going to tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Nora.” She pulled a chair from the empty desk beside mine and sat down, crossing her legs and fixing me with a look that said she was fully prepared to wait me out.
“That man walked off the elevator and looked at you like you were the only person on the planet. Half the office saw it. Trisha from accounting texted me about it and Trisha notices nothing. She didn’t notice when the ceiling tiles fell on her desk last March. ”
I unwrapped the sandwich. Turkey and something that might have been cheese. “He was probably just surprised. I was the first person he saw.”
“He saw Declan Voss first. Declan Voss was already at your desk talking to you. Kieran Ashworth walked past his own packmate like he didn’t exist and grabbed your desk like he was trying to keep himself from grabbing you.”
I took a bite of the sandwich to avoid answering. It tasted like refrigerated disappointment.
“And the way he said your name?” Sadie continued, because Sadie never let anything go, ever, in her entire life. “The way he said ‘Nora’ like it was a word he’d been trying to remember for years? You’re going to sit there and tell me that was nothing?”
“I don’t know what it was,” I said honestly. “I really don’t.”
Sadie studied me. She had a way of looking at people that was uncomfortably perceptive for someone who claimed she didn’t care about anyone’s business but her own.
“Have you ever heard of scent matching?” she asked.
My stomach did something complicated. “That’s an alpha-omega thing.”
“Usually. But you should have seen his face, Nora. I’ve seen alphas catch a scent before. I know what it looks like. And that’s what he looked like.”
“I’m a beta. I don’t have a scent.”
“I know.”
“So it can’t be that.”
“I know,” she said again, softer this time. Then, after a pause: “But what if it is?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I ate my terrible sandwich and tried not to look at the conference room and failed at both.
· · ·
The pack emerged at 1:30.
Declan came out first, because of course he did. He walked to my desk with his phone already in his hand, scrolling through something while he talked to me. “We’ll need the east conference room reserved for daily use. Seven a.m. to nine a.m., every morning. Can you set that up?”
“Done,” I said, already pulling up the calendar. “Do you want recurring through a specific date, or indefinitely?”
He paused his scrolling. Looked at me like he was recalculating something. “Indefinitely. And I’ll need a full audit of your current vendor contracts by end of week. Billing, cleaning, IT support, catering. All of it.”
“I can have that to you by Wednesday.”
Another pause. Longer this time. “Wednesday works.”
He walked away. No thank you. No acknowledgment. Just the back of a perfectly tailored charcoal suit disappearing down the hall. I didn’t take it personally. Some people communicated in transactions, and Declan Voss seemed like the kind of man who had never wasted a syllable in his life.
Rhys passed my desk without stopping. His eyes moved over me, brief and unreadable, the way you might glance at a piece of furniture to confirm it was still in the same place. Then he was gone, trailing Declan like a shadow with better posture.
That left Jonah.
He didn’t walk past my desk. He walked to it, leaned his elbows on the counter, and smiled at me like we were already friends.
“So,” he said. “About that coffee situation.”
I couldn’t help it. I smiled back. There was something about Jonah Maren that made resistance feel pointless, like trying to be unhappy in a sunbeam. “I warned you.”
“You did. And yet I was unprepared.” He leaned closer, conspiratorial. “Is there a secret good coffee source? A hidden stash? An underground beta coffee resistance?”
“There’s a Breville on the third floor.”
“Third floor. Alpha territory.” He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it. An awareness. “Of course there is.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
He held my gaze for a moment, and I saw it again, that flicker of understanding I’d caught when we first shook hands. The recognition of someone who knew what it was like to be categorized before you were known.
“I’ll fix the coffee situation,” he said. “Consider it my first official act.”
“You’re going to replace the coffee maker?”
“I’m going to do better than that.” He pushed off the counter and winked. Actually winked, like a character in a movie, and it should have been ridiculous but somehow it was just... warm. “Give me forty-eight hours.”
He headed for the hallway, and I watched him go with a feeling I couldn’t quite name. Something between gratitude and confusion. In three hours at this company, Jonah Maren had shown me more genuine warmth than most of my coworkers had in three years.
He was an omega. They were supposed to be warm. I knew that. I knew the biology, the social conditioning, the evolutionary purpose behind an omega’s instinct to connect and comfort.
But this didn’t feel like biology. It felt like him.
· · ·
Kieran found me at 4:47 p.m.
I’d been bracing for it all day, which didn’t make it any less overwhelming when it actually happened. One moment I was reviewing a catering contract, and the next his shadow fell across my desk and every nerve ending in my body lit up like a switchboard.
I looked up. He was standing on the other side of the counter, hands in his pockets, which I suspected was a deliberate choice to keep them from gripping my desk again.
His sleeves were still rolled to the elbows.
The tattoos on his forearms were intricate, dark, beautiful in a way I was trying very hard not to notice.
“Hi,” he said.
Just that. Hi. Like we were two normal people having a normal interaction and he hadn’t rearranged my entire nervous system four hours ago.
“Hi,” I said back. My voice came out steady. Small victory.
He looked at me. I looked at him. The hum in my chest, the one that had been a low background frequency all day, swelled into something louder.
“I need...” He stopped. Cleared his throat. Started again. “I wanted to check on the transition timeline. For the client files.”
It was a terrible excuse. The transition timeline was on the shared drive. I’d sent three emails about it. He knew this. I knew he knew this. We both stood there in the knowledge of how transparent this was, and he didn’t even have the decency to look embarrassed about it.
“The timeline is on the shared drive,” I said. “I can resend the link if you need it.”
“That would be great.”
I turned to my computer, pulled up the email, and forwarded it. The whole process took about fifteen seconds. He could have left. Any normal person would have left.
He didn’t leave.
“You built the transition checklist,” he said.
I turned back. “Yes.”
“Declan mentioned it. Said it was thorough. That’s high praise from him, by the way. He doesn’t use the word ‘thorough’ unless he means it.”
Something warm flickered in my chest. Not the hum. Something more human. The simple, pathetic pleasure of being noticed. “Just doing my job.”
“No.” He said it quietly, but with a certainty that pinned me to my chair. “You’re doing everyone’s job. That’s not the same thing.”