Except, the moment I bring him a file he requested, the nightmare begins.
"Fix your posture."
His hand cracks across my knuckles, and I straighten my spine so fast my back pops. "Yes, sir. Sorry."
"Don't apologize. Just do it correctly." He doesn't look up from his monitor as I arrange the morning's correspondence on his desk, but his hand shoots out and stops mine when I place the first folder. "The angle is wrong. Tabs face me, not you. How many times do I need to explain this?"
"I apparently need to hear it once more." The words slip out before I can catch them. The silence that follows turns my blood to ice.
Richard's gaze lifts from the screen and settles on me with the flat patience of a man who has all the time in the world to make a point. "Would you like to repeat that?"
"No, sir. I'm sorry, sir, I misspoke." My voice goes small and I hate how fast I fold, my body wanting to bare its throat andgrovel when three seconds ago some tiny part of me was actually talking back.
He studies me for a long moment, then returns to his monitor. "Your scent is still not muted enough for my preferences. Increase your dosage."
I'm already at triple. The fact that he can still smell me through it sends a chill through my gut. "Yes, sir."
"And you slouch like your mother. Correct it."
The rest of the morning follows the same pattern. He critiques my typing speed even though I'm faster than his last assistant. My footsteps earn a sharp word for being too loud. My pen grip is apparently wrong in ways I didn't know a pen grip could be wrong. Each critique is delivered without heat, almost bored, and the boredom gets under my skin because it means I'm not even worth getting angry at.
By the time lunch arrives, my knuckles are pink from a mixture of his hand or the metal ruler he started using and my jaw aches from clenching. The ache in my hands keeps blurring into the ache in my chest from last night until I can't separate what hurts from what wants.
The break room is all vending machines and windows and awful lighting that makes everyone look slightly ill. Ignoring everyone, I take my sandwich to the farthest corner where I eat in small bites with my eyes down. Coworkers glance over and whisper before looking away, except for a woman around my age who sets her coffee down two tables over and studies me with a smile she pulls back almost immediately. Nobody is going to sit with the CEO's new stepson, and honestly I wouldn't sit with me either.
"You look like you're having the time of your life."
Amos appears in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his glasses halfway down his nose. His scent reaches mebefore he takes a step forward, my body responding with a pull low in my belly that the triple dose barely dents.
"I'm fine, just eating lunch."
"In the most depressing corner of the building." He tilts his head toward the hallway. "My office is quieter and the coffee doesn't taste like it was brewed last week."
Everything Mom trained into me says an Alpha who seeks you out is an Alpha who wants something. Dominic's directness I can see coming and brace for, but Amos' warmth puts me more on edge because I never learned how to defend against kindness. Mom's marks were never kind enough to require it, and kind is exactly what Marcus was right before everything blew up in my face.
But Richard might come looking if I stay visible, and Amos is already walking away like my following is a foregone conclusion. The break room is depressing enough that even a potential trap sounds better than another twenty minutes of eating alone.
I follow, the ease of the decision bothering me more than the decision itself.
His office is smaller than I expected, cluttered with the organized chaos of someone who actually uses their desk for work instead of intimidation. His scent saturates the space with a thread of Dominic underneath that tells me the two of them spend time in here together.
The combination hits me in the chest and I press my nails into my palms as he drags a chair from the other side of his desk and positions it right beside his own, close enough that our elbows will nearly touch.
I sit because objecting would mean explaining why the proximity bothers me, and that explanation would crack open things I can't afford to let out.
"You studied business, right?" He angles his monitor toward me. "Finance concentration?"
"How did you know that?"
"Your file." He says it like reading someone's personal history is just how Tuesdays work around here. "Father keeps dossiers on everyone in this house. Yours mentions a degree from Baruch with a focus on financial analysis."
Nobody has ever shown the slightest interest in my education. Mom called it a waste of time and Richard hasn't acknowledged it all morning. I went to school on scholarships and stubbornness, fitting classes between Mom's operations, and the degree has sat unused since graduation. Hearing Amos mention it does something to my chest that I don't trust at all, because the one piece of me nobody's ever valued is suddenly being held up to the light by an Alpha whose warmth already makes me stupid.
"Look at this." He pulls up a spreadsheet and shifts closer. "Southeast division revenue forecasts. See these projections for Q3?"
My training kicks in before I've finished scanning the column. "They're inflated. The growth rate doesn't track with the historical trajectory. Someone has adjusted the baseline to make the upward trend look organic, so the real value is somewhere between twelve and fourteen percent."
Amos goes still beside me.
