The shuttle’s already waiting. I climb on, find my usual seat near the back, and pull out my phone to scroll through absolutely nothing of importance while the bus fills up around me.
This is my life now.
Wake up too early. Lie to my mom about breakfast. Ride a shuttle up a mountain to a job I genuinely love but still can’t believe I have. Come home. Read. Sleep. Repeat.
It’s small. It’s quiet.
And after everything that’s happened with Billy, small and quiet is exactly what I need.
LYKAIOS HOLDINGS ISthe sort of place that makes you feel like you’ve accidentally walked into the wrong building.
Every single day.
I’ve been working here for three months, and I still get that little jolt ofwait, me? really?every time the shuttle crests the last hill and the building comes into view. It’s all glass and dark stone, built into the mountainside like it grew there, and on clear mornings like this one, the windows catch the sunrise and turn the whole structure gold.
Inside, it’s even more intimidating. The lobby alone is bigger than my entire apartment complex, with these impossibly high ceilings and floors made of some stone that seems to have light embedded in it. Not reflecting light. Containing it. Like someone figured out how to trap starlight in marble, which, given that the company’s founder is a preter, is probably exactly what happened.
The founder.
Prince Alexei Lykaios.
I’ve seen him exactly four times in three months. Which, according to Trish, who has worked here for two years and keeps a running tally on a sticky note inside her desk drawer, makes me statistically blessed.
“Most people go their whole employment without a single sighting,” she told me on my second week, her voice dropping toa whisper even though we were alone in the break room. “He’s like a cryptid. A really, really beautiful cryptid.”
She wasn’t wrong.
The first time I saw him, I was coming out of the elevator on the twelfth floor, balancing a stack of sample boards that were taller than my head. I didn’t even know he was there until the air in the hallway changed. That’s the only way I can describe it. One second it was normal office air, slightly too cold from the AC, smelling vaguely of someone’s afternoon coffee. And then it was something else.
I lowered the sample boards just enough to peek over them, and there he was at the far end of the corridor, walking with two people I didn’t recognize. He was taller than I expected from the company website photos, and lean enough that his dark suit looked like it had been designed specifically for his body, which it probably had. His hair was blue-black under the corridor lights, and he moved with a grace that made everyone around him look like they were operating at the wrong speed.
He didn’t look at me.
There was no reason for him to look at me. I was a junior designer carrying sample boards. He was the Prince of Atlantis.
But when he passed the intersection where my corridor met his, I caught the briefest glimpse of his profile, the sharp line of his jaw, the aristocratic slope of his nose, and something inside my chest did this awful, traitorous little flip that I recognized immediately because it was exactly how I used to feel when—
No.
No.
I shut that down so fast you’d think my brain had an emergency kill switch specifically designed for this purpose. Which, after Billy, it kind of does.
Because here’s the thing.
I’ve already been the girl who developed feelings for a preter who was way out of her league. I already played that game, bought the ticket, rode the ride, and got thrown off at the end without so much as a warning sign. And Billy was a wolf shifter. From a regular pack. With a modest territory in the foothills.
Prince Alexei Lykaios is a stallion shifter from Atlantis. He holds a seat on the Blood Oval. His bloodline is older than most countries.
If I couldn’t hold onto a boy whose family ran a mid-tier wolf pack, I have absolutely zero business feeling anything, not even a tiny, stupid chest-flip, for a man who is literally supernatural royalty.
So I don’t.
I see him in the hallway, I acknowledge that he is objectively beautiful, the same way I’d acknowledge that the sun is objectively hot, and I move on with my day.
That’s it.
That’s all it is.
