Ruby stares at me.
“It’s a...never mind. It’s a TV reference. The point is, I’m not an executive assistant. I’m going to do my best, but if you’re expecting me to glide around in heels and anticipate his every need before he voices it, I should be honest with you right now that I will absolutely let you down.”
A pause.
Then something extraordinary happens. Ruby’s mouth twitches. Just barely. Just enough that I know, with complete certainty, that somewhere deep inside the crisp navy fortress of Ruby’s professionalism, there is a person who almost smiled.
“The heels have already been arranged,” she says. “Size seven.”
How does she know my shoe size when I never...wait a minute, is that a twinkle in her eye?
“If you can’t be Secretary Kim, then how about Park Min Young in Her Private Life instead?”
My jaw drops. I can’t believe someone like Ruby knows her Kdrama, but before I can get another word out, she’s already pointing to the door. “Please do not keep our CEO waiting. Go.”
Oh, right.
The car’s already waiting when I make it out of the building, and I’m taken straight to a private airfield twenty minutes outside the city. I spend every one of those twenty minutes reviewing my notes on the V-Series and absolutely not thinking about the fact that I’m about to board a plane with Prince Alexei Lykaios.
I’m not thinking about it.
I’m thinking about adaptive frequency protocols and biodegradable polymer casings and the moisture-wicking test results from last Thursday.
Not the four sightings in three months. Not the way the air changed when he walked past. Not the chest-flip I’d shut down so hard I’d practically given myself emotional whiplash.
Polymers, Zia. Polymers.
The car pulls onto the tarmac, and I see the plane, and my brain goes blank.
It’s not a plane. It’s a statement. Sleek and dark and somehow managing to look fast even while standing still, like a predator crouched on the runway. The Lykaios Holdings logo gleams in silver on the tail, and everything about it, the polished exterior, the quiet hum of its engines, the way even the ground crew moves around it with a certain reverence, saysyou are entering a different world now.
Ruby is already walking toward the stairs. I follow, clutching my tablet like a shield.
The interior is...
Okay.
I need a moment.
Because the interior of this plane looks like what would happen if a five-star hotel and an art gallery had a baby and then that baby was raised by someone with impeccable taste and unlimited money. The seats aren’t seats; they’re wide leather chairs that look like they could swallow you whole. The lighting is warm and low. The surfaces are some dark wood that gleamslike it’s been hand-polished every day for the last century, which, given the owner, it possibly has been.
And there, already seated by one of the wide oval windows, tablet in hand, is Alexei.
The first thing I notice, the thing I always notice, is the presence.
I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s not just that he’s beautiful, although he is, past handsome and into something that doesn’t have a word in English. Maybe not in any language. His features are too sculpted, too perfectly arranged to belong to anything human. The blue-black hair. The pale eyes. The jaw that looks like it was designed by someone who understood mathematics on a level the rest of us can’t access.
But it’s more than that.
It’s the way he occupies space. He’s sitting still, utterly still, reading his tablet, and the air around him feels different. Denser. Charged. Like the atmosphere is holding its breath. There’s an energy to him that isn’t quite power and isn’t quite danger but lives somewhere between the two, and it reminds me, almost primally, that this man is not human. That underneath the tailored suit and the aristocratic stillness, he is something enormous and wild. A stallion. An Atlantean. Something from before human memory.
The ground crew, I notice, don’t look at him directly. They move around the cabin with their gazes lowered, the way you might move through a forest where you know something magnificent is resting among the trees.
I understand the impulse.
I also can’t seem to follow it, because my eyes are stuck on him and I’m having a very stern internal conversation with myself about how this is exactly what I’m not going to do.
“Miss Morgan.”
