Prologue
Finneas
The fourth candidate of the morning had been wandering past the elevator bank for two full minutes.
I watched him through the glass wall of my office, suit jacket off, sleeves rolled to my elbows, one hand flat on the desk.
The man was clutching his portfolio to his chest like a lifeline and scanning the floor numbers above every door he passed.
He’d already walked by my office twice. There was a sign on the door. A large one. With my name on it.
Whitfield, my HR lead, was half out of his chair. “Should I go get him?”
“Sit down.”
Whitfield sat.
The candidate found the door on his own eventually, which was the only point in his favor, because the next twenty minutes were a disaster.
He fumbled his introduction, mispronounced the company name twice, and when I asked him a straightforward question about how he’d handle scheduling conflicts, the man stared at me with his mouth hanging slightly open and said absolutely nothing for eight seconds. I counted.
I looked at Whitfield. Whitfield practically escorted the guy out by the elbow.
When the door clicked shut, I leaned back in my chair. “That’s four.”
“The next one has a strong resume,” Whitfield offered, already flipping through his stack of folders. His fingers left damp marks on the paper. “Graduated top of her class, two part-time jobs during college, solid references.”
“The last one had a strong resume. He couldn’t find this room.”
“Sir, I really think-”
“Bring her in.”
Whitfield left. I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck.
My wolf had been pacing behind my ribs all morning, restless and agitated, clawing at me from the inside like he was trying to dig his way out.
He’d been like this for weeks. Wound tight, shoving at me for reasons I couldn’t name.
Not anger, not threat. Just this constant, gnawing pull that I couldn’t shake.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathed through it.
The last five assistants HR had sent me didn’t survive a month.
The longest lasted two weeks before she burst into tears over a filing error that I hadn’t even raised my voice about.
So now I was conducting interviews myself, which I hated, because it meant carving hours out of a day I didn’t have to sit across from people who couldn’t handle basic job functions.
The morning had been a waste. Four candidates, four disasters.
If the last one was anything like the rest, I was pulling the listing entirely and doing the work myself.
The door opened.
A woman walked in.
She was small, couldn’t have been more than five foot three, with blonde wavy hair pulled up high behind her head, the loose curls spilling past the tie and falling between her shoulder blades.
She was wearing a pastel pink blouse tucked into white trousers with a white blazer over the top, the fabric sitting clean against her petite frame, and she had bangs that stopped just above a pair of big round eyes that caught the light from the window and held it.
Her skin was fair, her features soft, her mouth curved in a way that made her look like she was half a second from smiling at all times.
She stepped fully into the room, saw me, and did smile.
She had a dimple on the right side of her mouth, just one, and it creased deep when her lips pulled up.
My wolf stopped pacing.
Then he howled.
Mate.
The word hit me so hard my hand crushed the armrest of my chair.
The leather groaned under my grip and something cracked underneath, wood or metal, I didn’t know and I didn’t care because every muscle in my body had locked just to keep me in the seat.
My wolf was shoving at me, frantic, more desperate than he’d ever been in my life.
Go to her. Touch her. Claim her. She’s ours.
“Hi!” she said, bright and clear, not a single tremor in her voice. “My name is Andrea Grey. It’s so nice to meet you both.”
She extended her hand to Whitfield first.
My wolf hated that.
She shook his hand with a firm grip and a warm expression, then turned to me.
I reached for her hand before I could think about it, because my wolf was already pulling me forward, and if I didn’t give him this one small thing he was going to shove me across the desk.
Her fingers were small and warm and the second our skin touched, my wolf made a sound between a whine and a purr that I had never heard before in my thirty-two years of existence.
I let go before I did something I couldn’t take back.
She sat down across from my desk. Crossed her ankles. Folded her hands on her lap. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I had been alive for thirty-two years and seen plenty. But none of them had ever made my chest feel like it was caving in just by sitting down in a chair.
She looked straight at me.
A blush crept up her neck and spread across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, warm and pink, and she pressed her lips together like she was trying to control it but she didn’t look away.
Her pulse was visible at the base of her throat, ticking faster than it had when she walked in, and I could hear her heartbeat with my hearing, the way it stuttered and picked up when our eyes locked.
She shifted in her seat, just barely, leaning a fraction closer before catching herself.
She was human. She didn’t feel the bond, not the way I did.
But she felt something. I could see it in the flush on her skin and the way her eyes kept dropping to my mouth before snapping back up, the way her fingers tightened in her lap every time I held her gaze too long.
She was attracted to me and she was trying very hard to be professional about it and I wanted to cup her face with both hands and watch exactly how red she could get.
Whitfield cleared his throat. “Thank you for coming in, Ms. Grey. Could you tell us about your experience?”
She turned to Whitfield and started talking.
She was articulate and specific, no filler words, no hedging.
She talked about her degree in business administration, an internship where she’d restructured the entire filing system within two weeks, organizational processes she’d built from scratch that were still in use at her previous workplace.
Her voice was warm but precise. She knew exactly what she was worth and she wasn’t shy about it.
“And how do you handle pressure?” Whitfield asked.
“I worked two part-time jobs through college while maintaining a 3.8 GPA,” she said, with a half-smile that showed the dimple again. “Pressure and I are well acquainted.”
She was smart and she was funny and she was so damn beautiful sitting there in her pink blouse with that dimple and that confidence, and my canines were threatening to extend. I bit down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste blood and forced them back.
She had no idea what I was, what any of this was. She had no idea that the man sitting across from her had just destroyed his own furniture because she walked in and smiled at him.
Whitfield asked about long-term goals. Andrea didn’t hesitate.
“I want to be excellent at whatever I do. I know that sounds simple, but I’ve found that if you focus on being the best at the job in front of you, the rest follows.
” She paused, and there it was again, the dimple pressing into her cheek as her mouth curved.
“Also, I should mention that I’m very good at this.
I don’t mean that arrogantly. I just believe in being upfront. ”
I almost smiled. I never smiled in interviews. I barely smiled at all. But this woman just told me she was the best candidate in the room with a dimple and zero hesitation and I wanted to hear her talk for the rest of the afternoon.
My wolf was panting. His whole body pressed forward inside me, straining toward her like she was the only real thing in the room. I gripped what was left of the armrest and held myself still.
Whitfield turned to me, clearly expecting me to ask my own questions. I was supposed to be running this interview. I had insisted on conducting it myself. I had a list of twelve questions that I’d written out this morning in the car because I didn’t trust Whitfield to be thorough enough.
I looked at her. She looked at me. The blush came back, softer this time, pinking the tops of her cheeks, and she held my gaze without flinching. Her fingers flexed once in her lap, then stilled, and her tongue darted across her lower lip so fast I almost missed it.
I didn’t miss it.
“When can you start?” I said.
Whitfield blinked. Andrea blinked.
She recovered faster. “Monday. I can start Monday.”
“Good.”
Whitfield turned to me with his mouth open, clearly about to say something about the remaining questions or the interview protocol or any number of things that I did not care about. I didn’t look at him.
Andrea stood up. She thanked us both, reached across the desk to shake our hands again. Up close she barely reached my chin. She smelled like something clean and faintly sweet, and my wolf was going so haywire that I had to lock my jaw completely to keep my expression neutral.
“Thank you for the opportunity,” she said, looking up at me with those big round eyes, and this close I could see they were a light green with flecks of gold near the center, and my wolf committed every detail to memory like he was filing it away to keep forever. “I promise you won’t regret it.”
She walked out. The door closed behind her.
I stared at it.
Whitfield shuffled his papers. “She was quite good. Shall I cancel the remaining candidates for the afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“All of them. No more interviews. She’s the one.”
Whitfield opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He gathered his folders into a messy stack and left without another word.
I sat in my cracked chair and watched through the glass wall as Andrea crossed the open floor toward the elevator.
She was a small figure in pink and white among the gray and navy of the office, and she moved with a sureness that had nothing to do with her size.
She adjusted her blazer. Tucked a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear.
The elevator arrived and she stepped inside.
She turned around, and for one second, she looked in my direction.
Then the doors closed and she was gone.
I looked down at the armrest. The leather was warped where my fingers had dug in, and a crack ran through the wood frame underneath. Blood sat on the inside of my cheek from biting down on my own canines.
My wolf was howling.
I was in so much trouble.