Chapter Eight
Nora
The request came on a Tuesday afternoon, and for once, it was legitimate.
“The Hargrove account,” he said, setting the folder on my counter.
“They’re a legacy Whitmore client and they’re threatening to leave.
Their contract renewal is next week and the transition has spooked them.
I need someone who knows the history with this account to walk me through it before the meeting tomorrow. ”
I looked at the file. I knew the Hargrove account.
I’d managed their paperwork for two and a half years.
I knew their billing quirks, their communication preferences, the name of the CEO’s assistant and the fact that she was allergic to lilies, which mattered because someone had once sent flowers to a client event and the resulting incident had become office legend.
“I can brief you now,” I said.
“It’s going to take a while. Their file is... extensive.”
It was. The Hargrove file was a three-inch-thick monument to twelve years of consulting history, most of it organized by people who had since left the company and whose filing logic could charitably be described as impressionistic.
“After hours, then?” he asked. “I’ll order dinner. We can go through it properly without interruptions.”
After hours. Alone. In the office. With Kieran Ashworth.
Every sensible instinct I had said no. Every other instinct, including several I hadn’t known I possessed until three weeks ago, said something very different.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll pull the supplementary files.”
He nodded. There was something in his expression, not triumph, not satisfaction, but something quieter. Relief, maybe. Like he’d been bracing for a no and the yes had loosened something in his chest.
“Thank you, Nora.”
He walked away. I watched him go. Then I picked up my phone and texted Sadie.
Staying late tonight. Hargrove briefing with Kieran.
Her reply was immediate.
alone???
It’s a work thing.
nora whitfield if you get murdered by a hot alpha I will resurrect you just to kill you myself
Noted.
text me when you leave. I mean it.
· · ·
By seven o’clock, the office was empty.
The fluorescent lights on the second floor had been dimmed to their after-hours setting, casting everything in a softer, warmer glow.
The city was visible through the conference room windows, lit up and glittering, the kind of view that looked expensive from a distance and lonely up close.
The hum of the building’s ventilation system was the only sound, steady and low, like a pulse.
We’d set up in the east conference room with the Hargrove file spread across the table, supplementary documents arranged by year, and two containers of Thai food that Kieran had ordered from a place I’d never heard of and that was, predictably, excellent.
For the first hour, it was genuinely work.
I walked him through the account history, year by year, explaining the relationship dynamics, the billing structure, the communication chain that had been reshuffled three times in five years.
He listened with the focused intensity that he brought to everything, asking sharp questions, taking notes in a leather-bound notebook with handwriting that was surprisingly neat for a man whose hands looked like they’d been built for breaking things rather than writing in them.
He was smart. I’d known that intellectually.
AC&S didn’t build a ninety-three percent success rate on charm and intimidation alone.
But watching him absorb information, synthesize it, identify the pressure points in a client relationship within minutes, was something else.
His mind moved fast and clean, cutting through noise to find signal, and every question he asked made me revise my understanding of the problem upward.
I caught myself enjoying it. Not just the work, though the work was good. The collaboration. The feeling of being consulted, being listened to, being treated like a person whose knowledge mattered. I’d forgotten what that felt like. Or maybe I’d never known.
By eight, the Hargrove file was handled. He had what he needed for tomorrow’s meeting. The Thai food containers were empty. There was no professional reason for either of us to still be there.
Neither of us moved to leave.
· · ·
The shift happened slowly, the way night falls in summer. One moment it’s daylight and the next you look up and the sky has changed without you noticing the exact instant it turned.
He asked me how I’d ended up at Whitmore.
I told him. The story was not dramatic. Business degree, job listing, interview, hire.
The story of a woman who had taken the first reasonable opportunity and stayed because stability was its own reward and because she was good at her job, even if no one noticed.
He listened to all of it without interrupting, and when I finished, he said, “You deserve better than this place.”
“This place is fine.”
“Fine isn’t a compliment, Nora.”
I looked at him across the conference table, this man who kept saying my name like a prayer he’d memorized, and I asked the question I’d been holding since the day he’d walked off the elevator.
“Tell me about the firm. About how it started.”
He leaned back in his chair. The city lights caught the tattoos on his forearms, dark lines against warm skin.
“Dec and I met in business school,” he said.
“We hated each other for about six months. He thought I was reckless. I thought he was a machine. We were both right.” A pause, and something that was almost a smile.
“Rhys was Dec’s roommate. Quiet. Watched everything.
I didn’t trust him at first because I couldn’t read him, and I don’t trust what I can’t read. ”
“And Jonah?”
“Jonah came later. After the pack formed. We found him, or he found us, depending on who you ask.” The almost-smile became a real one, brief and warm.
“He walked into a meeting we were having at a coffee shop and told us our business plan had three structural flaws and that our branding was terrible. We hired him on the spot.”
I laughed. The image was so perfectly Jonah, confident and warm and utterly unintimidated, that it clicked into place like a puzzle piece I’d been missing.
“The firm came after the pack,” Kieran continued.
“We bonded first. Built the business second. Most people think it was the other way around, that we’re a professional unit who happen to be bonded.
But the truth is that everything I’ve built, everything AC&S is, comes from them.
Comes from having people at my back who I trust completely. ”
His eyes met mine across the table, and I understood what he was telling me. The firm wasn’t the foundation. The pack was. And whatever was happening between us wasn’t a footnote to his professional life. It was touching the thing that mattered most.
“Ask me about Chicago,” he said.
I went still. “You don’t have to...”
“I want to. You’ve heard the stories. You should hear the truth.”
The conference room was very quiet. Outside, the city hummed. Inside, there was just him, and me, and the space between us that had been charged with electricity for three weeks.
“The alpha’s name was Grant Holloway,” Kieran said.
His voice had changed. Quieter. Harder. “He worked for a competing firm. We’d beaten them on a major contract and he took it personally.
At the conference, he found Jonah alone in a hallway and he.
..” Kieran’s jaw clenched. The muscle flexed once, twice.
“He put his hand on Jonah’s throat and told him that omegas who spread their legs for entire packs deserved what they got. ”
Something cold moved through me. Not fear. Fury.
“I found them twelve seconds later,” Kieran said. “I know because the security footage was timestamped. Twelve seconds between when Holloway put his hands on my omega and when I put him on the floor.”
“Two weeks in the hospital,” I said quietly.
“Three broken ribs, a fractured orbital socket, and a dislocated shoulder.” He listed the injuries without inflection, like items on a report. “I stopped when I knew he couldn’t get up. I didn’t stop because I wanted to. I stopped because Declan pulled me off.”
The honesty of it was staggering. He wasn’t softening the story. He wasn’t justifying or minimizing. He was giving me the raw, unedited truth and letting me decide what to do with it.
“I’m not going to apologize for it,” he said. “Someone threatened my omega. I made sure they never did it again. I would do the same thing tomorrow, and the day after, and every day for the rest of my life. That’s what I am.”
I looked at him. The tattoos. The jaw. The hands that had broken a man’s bones. The eyes that were watching me with a vulnerability so raw it made my chest hurt, because what he was really saying was: This is the worst of me. Can you live with it?
“What happened to Jonah?” I asked.
Something softened in his face. Just slightly. Just enough. “He was okay. Shaken. He had bruises on his throat for a week and he didn’t sleep well for a month. But he’s strong. Stronger than people give him credit for.”
“I know,” I said. And I did. I’d seen it. The steel underneath Jonah’s warmth, the quiet backbone that held him upright in a world that wanted to define him by his designation.
Kieran looked at me like I’d given him something he hadn’t expected. Like my knowing Jonah, my seeing him clearly, was a gift.
The silence settled between us, warm and weighted, and I could feel the conversation shifting, moving from what he’d done to what was happening now, to the thing that had been humming between us since the day he’d walked off the elevator.
“Ask me,” he said. “About the scent match. I know you want to.”
· · ·