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.
