Chapter 3 Finneas
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Finneas
I was reading Andrea’s report for the third time.
It didn’t need corrections. I’d finished reviewing it an hour ago and signed off on it mentally somewhere around page six.
The data was clean, the cross-references were accurate, the index was organized in a way that made it easy to pull individual sections without flipping back and forth. It was, objectively, excellent work.
I was reading it again because of the margin notes.
She wrote in pink pen and dotted her i’s with tiny circles.
On page fourteen she’d scrawled a small annotation in the margin: cross-ref Q2, numbers don’t match original filing, corrected here.
The handwriting was neat but rushed, like she’d been writing fast and still made it look precise.
I ran my thumb over the edge of the page where the ink sat and then caught myself doing it and set the report down.
I looked through the glass wall.
Andrea was at her desk. She was leaning back in her chair with a pen tucked behind her ear, scrolling through something on her phone, and whatever she was reading made her laugh.
Her head tilted and that dimple appeared on the right side of her mouth, deep and quick, and she bit her bottom lip while she typed a reply.
My wolf shoved at me so hard my chair creaked. Go to her.
I didn’t go to her. Just sat in my chair watching her bite her lip, thinking about what it would feel like if I was making her laugh instead of whatever was on her phone screen.
Walking out there and saying something, anything, that made her face light up like that, made that dimple come out for me.
She smiled at everyone. At Whitfield, at the mailroom staff, at the receptionist on the first floor who she always stopped to chat with for five minutes even when she was running late.
But never at me like that. What I got was sarcasm, raised eyebrows, the occasional glare, and a whole arsenal of threats involving pink office supplies.
I’d earned all of it. I knew that. But I wanted the smile for myself.
I wanted it so badly my jaw ached from clenching it.
A guy from the third floor was at her desk now.
Young, decent suit, leaning against the partition and talking with too much hand movement and standing about six inches closer than he needed to be.
Andrea was polite, nodding along, but her body was angled slightly away from him, which meant she wasn’t interested but was handling it gracefully because that’s what she did.
She handled everything gracefully. Even me.
I picked up my phone and dialed the guy’s desk extension. It rang at his empty workstation two floors down. After a moment he frowned, pulled his phone out of his pocket, checked the screen, said something quick to Andrea, and headed for the elevator.
I hung up.
I didn’t have a question for the man. Had never had a question for the man.
Didn’t even know his name. What I did know was that he’d been finding excuses to come up to this floor twice a week for the past month and every single time he ended up at Andrea’s desk, and every single time I found a way to make him leave.
I’d been running this play for two years.
Calling desk lines, sending sudden emails requesting meetings in conference rooms on other floors, appearing in doorways at convenient moments, glaring at anyone who parked themselves within arm’s reach of her chair for more than ninety seconds.
It was pathetic, possessive, irrational, and completely beneath me, and I did it anyway, every time, without hesitation.
Nobody had figured out why the CEO of Kingsley Corp seemed to have a personal interest in managing who got to talk to his assistant and for how long. The entire company probably thought I was just territorial about my floor. Which I was. But not for the reasons they assumed.
Luca had figured it out. But Luca didn’t count.
That evening I was in the study at my estate, phone on speaker, scrolling through a territory report while Luca talked.
Luca was my right hand, my beta in everything but official title.
He was a few inches shorter than me with a lean, toned build and spiky hair that made him look younger than he was, which he used to his advantage constantly.
People underestimated him because he had the energy of someone who’d just rolled out of bed and found the whole world amusing, but he was sharp, ruthless when he needed to be, and the only person in the pack who could tell me I was being an idiot and walk away with all his teeth.
“The rogue wolf from the western perimeter turned out to be a loner,” he said. “Young, maybe twenty. No pack. He’s requesting sanctuary.”
“Background?”
“Clean. Left his birth pack voluntarily. No criminal flags. Just a kid who didn’t want to be where he was anymore.”
A loner seeking sanctuary wasn’t uncommon, but it wasn’t simple either. Taking in a wolf from outside the pack meant vetting, integration, assigning a mentor. It meant trust, and trust was something I didn’t hand out easily. “Bring him in for an audience. I’ll decide after I’ve spoken to him.”
“Done. Council meeting tomorrow at eight. Aldric is going to push back on the eastern trade route again.”
“Let him push.” Aldric had been pushing on the eastern trade route for three months because his family held land along the border and any route adjustment would cut into their hunting grounds.
It was a valid concern wrapped in self-interest, which was Aldric’s specialty.
I’d handle it the way I handled everything at council: listen, decide, move on.
The elders respected efficiency even when they didn’t like the outcome.
“Also, we’ve got two new complaints from the southern district about noise from the construction near the river,” Luca continued. “And someone reported a beta shift in broad daylight near the park on Fifth, but it turned out to be a large dog. False alarm.”
“A large dog.”
“A very large dog, apparently. German Shepherd mix. The humans panicked anyway.”
“Noted.”
Luca went quiet for a second, and I could practically hear him grinning through the phone. “So. You want to talk about it or should I just guess?”
“Talk about what.”
“Whatever’s got you sounding like you’ve been staring at a wall for the last three hours.”
“I’m fine, Luca.”
“Right. You’ve been ‘fine’ for two years. I’m starting to think you don’t know what that word means.” He waited a beat. “Andrea wore that pink skirt today, didn’t she.”
I hung up.
Luca was the only person who knew Andrea was my fated mate.
I’d told him the day after the interview because I needed someone to talk me down from walking back into that building and carrying her out of it.
Luca did not talk me down so much as stare at me for thirty seconds and say, “Well, you’re screwed. ” He wasn’t wrong.
What Luca did not know, what nobody in the pack or the company or anywhere else on this planet knew, was what I did on the nights I couldn’t stand it anymore.
The shifting, the porch, the dog.
It wasn’t every night. Some nights I managed to stay away, to channel the restlessness into work or a run through the estate grounds in my full wolf form.
But on the nights when my wolf was clawing at me and the silence in this house got loud enough to hear, I’d shift into the smaller form and go to her.
It had been happening more and more lately.
Three times this week already, and it was only Wednesday.
If Luca found out that the Lycan King of the Ironridge Pack had been shrinking himself down to husky size and sitting on his assistant’s porch while she read Scottish romance novels to him in a terrible accent, I would never hear the end of it.
Not in this lifetime or the next. Luca would bring it up on his deathbed and use his last breath to laugh about it.
I dropped the phone on the desk and pressed both hands flat on the surface and stared at the wall.
Yes, she wore the pink skirt. The flowy one that stopped at her knee and moved when she walked.
She’d leaned across my desk to hand me a file earlier and her blouse pulled at the collar and I saw the line of her collarbone and my canines extended half a centimeter and I had to bite down until I tasted copper.
Two years of this. Two years of wanting her so badly my teeth ached, and never once letting my hand linger or standing too close or doing anything that would cross a line. Because if I started, I wouldn’t stop. My wolf had no restraint left, and every day the leash got thinner.
I needed to shift. To run, to burn off whatever was building inside me before it cracked through the surface. But mostly I needed to see her, and all three of those things collapsed into the same destination. They always did.
I left through the back of the estate, crossed the grounds to the tree line, and shifted into the smaller form. My wolf settled the instant the change was done, calmer in this body, because this body meant we were going to her.
Her porch light was on when I got there. She left it on for me, which she’d admitted once with a laugh like she was embarrassed about it, and my wolf had been smug about it ever since.
I settled on the top step and waited. Her neighbor across the street was watering his lawn in the dark, which he did every night at this hour for reasons I’d never understand, and he waved when he saw me. “Evening, Fin!”
I wagged my tail because that’s what dogs did. The indignity of a Lycan King wagging his tail at a retired man in gardening clogs was something I chose not to examine.
Andrea came home twenty minutes later. Her blazer was off, slung over her bag, and her hair was down around her shoulders. She looked tired, not the surface-level tired that coffee fixed but the bone-deep version that sat behind her eyes even when the rest of her face was still bright.
Then she saw me and her whole face changed.
She dropped her bag on the porch, knelt down, and wrapped both arms around my neck.
“Fin,” she said it like an exhale, like she’d been carrying something all day and my name was where she put it down.
Her fingers dug into my scruff and her cheek pressed against the top of my head and I could feel her pulse through her wrist, could smell the vanilla in her hair, could feel her breath warm against my fur.
I closed my eyes. If I were in human form right now and she held me like this, I wouldn’t let go. I’d pull her in and bury my face in her neck and hold her until she stopped being tired.
She pulled back and grabbed her book and a blanket and settled against the railing. I lay beside her and she opened to her bookmark and started reading aloud.
Her Scottish accent was fully committed and fully terrible, as always, with a low brogue for the hero that came out sounding more like a drunk pirate and an English accent for the heroine that was marginally better but still not good.
My wolf settled deep in my chest, calmer than he’d been all day.
At one point the heroine told the hero he was being an idiot and Andrea pulled the book away from her face and said “Thank you!” to no one, like the character could hear her, and then went right back to reading.
My wolf huffed, which was the closest thing to a laugh this form allowed.
Between chapters she talked. But tonight was different from the usual rants about my coffee consumption or my inability to say thank you. She was quieter. The energy was off.
“Fin, do you think people can tell when someone likes them?” She was pulling at a loose thread on the blanket, not looking at me.
“Like, is there a vibe? Because I swear sometimes at work I catch him looking at me and I think, okay, that’s not a normal boss look.
That’s... I don’t know. It’s intense. And then he looks away and goes right back to being a brick wall and I think maybe I imagined the whole thing. ”
My wolf went completely still.
“He never smiles at me,” she said it quietly, almost to herself. “Smiles at clients, sure. I’ve seen it. This polite, professional thing that doesn’t reach his eyes. But for me? I just get the grunts and the staring and the...” She waved her hand vaguely. “Whatever that is.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. Her fingers found my fur and she stroked absently, her eyes on the dark yard.
“I think I’d give a lot to have him smile at me. Like, actually smile. Because of me.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “God, is that pathetic? I’m sitting on my porch telling a dog that I want my boss to smile at me. This is rock bottom, Fin. We have officially hit rock bottom.”
I didn’t move. My wolf was so still it hurt.
She wanted me to smile at her. And I had, once, yesterday. That jaw twitch that barely counted. But she noticed, and she wanted more.
She picked the book back up and read for another hour. Her voice shifted between the accents, lazy and warm, and my wolf lay quiet inside me, just listening. This was the only time he was ever truly calm. Here, on this porch, with her voice filling the dark.
She finished a chapter and closed the book with a sigh, pressing it against her chest. “That’s a good stopping point.” She stretched her arms above her head and her back popped and she winced. “Okay. Bed. I have to be up in five hours because my boss is insane.”
She stood up and gathered the blanket, tucking the book under her arm. Then she crouched down and cupped my face in both hands, scratching behind my ears. “Thanks for listening, Fin. You’re a very good therapist. Way cheaper than an actual one too.”
She went inside. The lock clicked and the porch light stayed on.
I waited until the bedroom light went on, then off, before crossing the yard, slipping through the gap in the fence, and shifting back behind the tree line. Fully human again, standing in the dark, my hands were shaking.
She wanted me to smile at her.
Tomorrow, I would.