Chapter Four
Nora
Jonah Maren was a man of his word.
Exactly forty-six hours after he’d promised to fix the coffee situation, a delivery truck pulled up to the loading dock and two men in matching polo shirts carried a brand-new espresso machine onto the second floor.
Not a Breville, like the one on three. A La Marzocca.
Commercial grade. The kind of machine you saw in Italian cafes where the baristas had opinions about milk temperature and treated drip coffee like a personal insult.
I watched from my desk as they set it up in the kitchenette, replacing the broken coffee maker without ceremony.
The old one went into the recycling without anyone mourning it.
Jonah supervised the installation with his sleeves rolled up, asking the delivery guys questions about water pressure and grind settings with genuine interest, like this was the most important thing he’d do all week.
When it was done, he made two cups. Brought one to my desk.
“Forty-six hours,” I said, taking it from him.
“I said forty-eight. I came in under budget.”
I took a sip. It was perfect. Rich, smooth, the kind of coffee that made you realize you’d been settling your entire life. My eyes actually closed.
When I opened them, Jonah was watching me with a smile that could have powered the building.
“That good?” he asked.
“I might cry.”
“Please don’t. I’ll cry too and then we’ll both be a mess.”
I laughed, and he laughed, and for a moment it was just easy. Uncomplicated. Two people sharing a coffee and a joke in a building full of anxiety and restructuring and the low hum of professional dread.
Sadie appeared behind him, holding her own cup with something close to reverence. “Who do I need to thank for this? I’ll name my firstborn after them.”
“Jonah Maren,” I said. “HR director and coffee savior.”
Sadie looked at Jonah. Jonah looked at Sadie. He extended his hand with the same warm, open energy he gave everyone. “Jonah. Nice to meet you.”
Sadie shook it. Her expression was complicated, the way it always was when someone was nice to her and she didn’t know what to do with it. “Sadie Lowe. I handle client intake.”
“Sadie, you are welcome to this coffee anytime. That machine is for the second floor. No one from three is touching it.”
He said it lightly, but I caught the edge beneath it. The awareness that the second floor, the beta floor, had been drinking hot brown water while the alphas upstairs had espresso. He’d noticed the same thing I had, and he’d fixed it in two days.
Sadie looked at me after he left. Her expression was still complicated, but for different reasons now.
“Okay,” she said. “The omega gets a pass. For now.”
· · ·
The first week of the Ashworth acquisition was a controlled demolition.
That was the only way I could describe it.
The pack moved through Whitmore & Associates the way they moved through every company they acquired, which, based on my research, was with surgical precision and zero sentimentality.
Declan restructured the financial reporting system in three days.
Rhys quietly reassigned six client accounts to better-suited teams without anyone realizing what had happened until it was done.
Jonah conducted one-on-one meetings with every employee, learning names and roles and grievances with an attentiveness that left people looking slightly dazed afterward.
And Kieran.
Kieran was everywhere.
Not in the frantic, micromanaging way that bad leaders occupied space.
In the watchful, deliberate way of someone who wanted to understand a system before he changed it.
He sat in on meetings. He reviewed files.
He walked the floors, all three of them, talking to people at every level with a directness that was either refreshing or terrifying depending on your tolerance for eye contact with a man who looked like he could bench-press your car.
He was also, specifically and unmistakably, always near me.
Monday: he stopped at my desk to ask about the building’s maintenance schedule. I pulled it up in thirty seconds. He stayed for four minutes.
Tuesday: he needed a list of all active vendor contracts.
I’d already compiled it for Declan. He asked me to walk him through the highlights anyway.
It took twenty minutes and he asked questions that were surprisingly thoughtful and completely unnecessary, because Declan had certainly already briefed him on every detail.
Wednesday: he brought me a pen. A nice one, heavy and black, with a smooth grip. He set it on my desk and said, “Yours was leaking,” and walked away before I could respond. My pen had been leaking. I’d mentioned it to no one. He’d just... noticed.
Thursday: he appeared at my desk with a folder that could have been emailed, handed it to me with a “good morning” that he said like it meant something, and then stood there for a full ten seconds, looking at me, before seeming to remember that he had somewhere else to be.
Friday: he didn’t come to my desk at all. I spent the entire day feeling his absence like a missing tooth and hating myself for it.
The pattern was clear. Kieran Ashworth was circling me with the careful, deliberate attention of a man who was trying very hard not to spook something fragile.
He never crowded me. He never touched me.
He never said anything inappropriate or presumptuous or overtly alpha.
He just showed up, again and again, with his dark eyes and his rough voice and his transparent excuses, and every single time, the hum in my chest got louder.
I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t know what to do with him.
Sadie had opinions.
· · ·
“He’s dangerous, Nora.”
Friday lunch. We were sitting in the kitchenette with our La Marzocca coffees and leftovers from home, and Sadie was wearing the expression she reserved for serious conversations, which was identical to her regular expression but with slightly more intensity behind the eyes.
“You know what he did to that alpha in Chicago,” she continued. “Everyone knows. The guy was in the hospital for two weeks. Two weeks, Nora. That’s not a bar fight. That’s someone who knows how to hurt people and chose to do it.”
“The other alpha cornered his omega,” I said. “The footage showed...”
“I’ve seen what the footage showed. And I understand the instinct.
But there’s a difference between protecting your pack and putting someone in a hospital bed for fourteen days.
” She set her coffee down. “He’s an alpha with a hair trigger and a violent history, and he has fixated on you. That doesn’t concern you?”
I thought about it. Really thought about it, because Sadie deserved a genuine answer and not a reflexive one.
“He’s not what I expected,” I said finally.
“What does that mean?”
“It means... he’s careful. With me. He doesn’t crowd.
He doesn’t push. He shows up and he looks at me like.
..” I trailed off, because I didn’t have words for the way Kieran Ashworth looked at me.
Like I was precious. Like I was a problem he wanted to spend the rest of his life solving.
Like he was holding himself back with both hands and the effort was costing him everything he had.
“Like what?” Sadie pressed.
“Like he’s afraid he’ll scare me,” I said quietly. “The most dangerous man I’ve ever met, and he’s afraid of scaring me.”
Sadie was quiet for a long moment. She picked up her coffee. Put it down. Picked it up again.
“Just be careful,” she said. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She didn’t look convinced. Honestly, neither was I. Careful implied a level of control over the situation that I absolutely did not have.
· · ·
The incident happened on the following Tuesday.
I was in the copy room, because the second-floor printer had jammed for the third time that week and I was the only person who knew how to unjam it without making it worse. I had the side panel open and was elbow-deep in toner cartridge mechanics when Marcus Webb walked in.
Marcus was a senior account manager. Alpha. He’d been at Whitmore for twelve years and had the particular brand of entitlement that came from being a medium-important person at a medium-important company for a very long time. The acquisition had not improved his disposition.
“Nora, I need the Benton file reprinted and on my desk in ten minutes,” he said, not looking up from his phone.
“The printer is jammed. I’m fixing it now. I can have it to you in twenty.”
“I said ten.”
“And the printer is jammed,” I repeated, keeping my voice even. “Twenty minutes.”
He looked up then. Something ugly crossed his face, the kind of expression that alphas sometimes got when a beta didn’t fold on command. It was brief and it was small and I’d seen it a hundred times before, from a dozen different people, and it still landed somewhere it shouldn’t have.
“You know what, Nora? Maybe if you spent less time chatting with the new owners and more time doing your actual job, things wouldn’t be falling apart down here.”
The words hung in the air. I stood there with toner on my fingers and a jammed printer at my back and felt the familiar, exhausting weight of being put in my place.
I could have responded. I had responses.
I had a list of everything I’d done in the past ten days to keep this office from collapsing under the weight of the transition, none of which Marcus had noticed or would care about.
But I’d learned a long time ago that arguing with an alpha who’d already decided you were beneath him was like shouting into a hurricane. The wind didn’t care.
“Twenty minutes,” I said again, and turned back to the printer.
Marcus opened his mouth.
And then he closed it. Because a shadow had appeared in the doorway, and the shadow was six-foot-three and covered in tattoos and looking at Marcus Webb with an expression that made the temperature in the copy room drop by about fifteen degrees.