You Should Be Scared

Chapter Seven

Damien gave Victor exactly one hour after Zara walked out before he called him in.

Not because he needed the hour. He does not need it. He knows what Victor had done the moment Zara said an unknown number and Isla Vane in the same sentence. He gives himself the hour because he learned a long time ago that walking into a conversation while your blood is running hot is how you hand the other person exactly what they want.

Victor wants him angry.

So Damien takes the hour. He reads three reports. He answers two emails. He drinks a full glass of water. And then he picks up his phone and tells his assistant to send Victor Graves up.

He is completely calm by the time Victor walks through the door.

That is so much worse.

Victor knows it too. Damien can tell from the way he adjusts his smile by half a degree when he reads the room. Still confident. Still smooth. But underneath it something recalibrates.

Good.

"You called?" Victor says, taking the chair across the desk without being invited to sit.

Damien looks at him for a long moment without speaking. He lets the silence do work.

"You called her," he says finally. Not a question.

Victor's expression does not change.

"I do not know what you mean."

"You called Zara Mensah last night from a blocked number and you used Isla's name."

"Damien. That is a serious accusation."

"It is a fact. Save the performance for someone it works on."

Victor is quiet for a moment. Then he leans back in his chair and crosses one leg over the other and the pretense drops just enough to show what is underneath it.

"She deserves to know what she is getting into," he says. "You are going to bond with a human woman. The council is going to push back hard. And the last time someone close to you ended up in the middle of pack politics they did not survive it."

The room temperature drops.

"Say her name again," Damien says quietly, "and this conversation ends differently."

Victor holds his gaze. Testing. Then he uncrosses his leg and sits forward.

"I am trying to help you."

"You are trying to destabilize me before the council vote. There is a difference. I know which one this is."

"And if I told you the council already has three votes to remove you? Before the session even starts?"

Damien says nothing.

"I could fix that," Victor says. His voice drops, smooth and reasonable. "I have relationships on that council. I could make those three votes disappear. All you have to do is step back from the girl."

The silence is complete.

Damien stands up.

He does not raise his voice. He does not move around the desk. He simply stands and looks at Victor with the full weight of what he is, not just the CEO, not just the man in the suit, but the Alpha, and Victor feels it because everyone feels it when Damien stops holding it back.

"Get out of my building," he says. "Your consulting arrangement with WolfeGroup is finished as of today. If you contact Zara Mensah again for any reason I will take it to the full council myself. Do you understand me?"

Victor stands slowly. Straightens his jacket. His face is neutral but his jaw is tight.

"You are making a mistake," he says.

"I have made mistakes before," Damien says. "This is not one of them. Goodbye, Victor."

Victor walks to the door. He opens it. Then he pauses with his hand on the frame and says without turning around:

"You could not save Isla. What makes you think you can save her?"

He leaves before Damien can answer.

The door clicks shut.

Damien stands behind his desk for a long time after that. His hands are flat on the surface. His jaw is tight. The question hangs in the room like smoke.

He does not have an answer for it.

That is the part that scares him.

* * *

Zara is staring at the same seating chart she has been staring at for forty minutes when Marcus knocks on the open conference room door.

She looks up. He is holding two cups of coffee. He raises one toward her like a question.

She nods.

He comes in and sits across from her and sets the coffee on the table and looks at her with those dark eyes that are so much like his brother's but warmer around the edges.

"He told you about Isla," Marcus says.

Not a question. She is starting to notice the Wolfe brothers do not ask many questions when they already know the answer.

"Some of it," she says.

"Some of it is all anyone gets at first."

She wraps both hands around the coffee cup.

"How did she die, Marcus?"

He is quiet for a moment. He looks at the table. Then he looks back at her.

"She got caught in something that was meant for Damien. Pack business. A rival who wanted to send a message and chose the wrong way to do it."

Zara goes very still.

"She was killed," she says.

"Yes."

"And the death notice said peacefully."

"Her family did not want questions. Damien made sure they were taken care of. He also made sure the person responsible was dealt with. Permanently."

The word permanently sits in the air between them.

"He blamed himself," she says. Not a question this time either.

"He still does. Every day. He built half this company in the two years after she died because working was the only thing that made the other noise quieter."

Zara looks down at her coffee.

She thinks about the man upstairs who looked at her this morning with that deep, old pain behind his eyes. She thinks about a woman with a quiet smile in the edge of a photograph. She thinks about what it costs a person to carry something like that for four years and never put it down.

"Why are you telling me this?" she asks.

"Because he will not," Marcus says simply. "Not all of it. Not yet. He is still trying to protect you from the weight of it and the problem is you cannot make a real decision about something you only know half of."

She looks at him.

"You are a good brother," she says.

Something crosses his face. Complicated and quick.

"I am trying to be," he says.

He stands. Take his coffee.

"For what it is worth," he says at the door, "Isla would have asked the same questions you are asking. In the same tone. On the same timeline."

He leaves.

Zara sits alone in the conference room with that sitting in her chest like something warm and heavy at the same time.

She goes back upstairs at four in the afternoon.

She does not knock. She opens the door and he looks up from his desk and she can see from across the room that his conversation with Victor left a mark even if he will never say so.

She crosses the office and puts a coffee on his desk. She bought it from the cart outside twenty minutes ago. It is probably still warm.

He looks at it. Then at her.

"Marcus told me how Isla died," she says.

He is very still.

"I told him not to," he says.

"He told me anyway. Because he was right to."

Damien looks at her for a long moment.

"Now you know what you are dealing with," he says. His voice is low. "People who want to hurt me will use whoever is close to me. Isla was close to me and it got her killed. That is not a small thing to walk into."

"I know."

"You should be scared."

"You said that to me once already."

"I meant it then too."

She pulls the chair out and sits across from him. She leans forward, both arms on the desk, and looks at him the way she looks at every problem she has decided to solve.

"I appreciate the warning," she says. "But I need you to understand something about me. I do not walk away from things because they are complicated. I walk away when I decide they are not worth it. I have not decided that yet."

He looks at her for a long time.

The afternoon light comes through the floor-to-ceiling windows and falls across his desk between them. Outside Atlanta keeps moving. Inside this office everything is very quiet.

"Soon," he says. "I will tell you everything soon. Not eventually. Soon."

"I know," she says. "I am holding you to that."

She stands. Picks up her bag. Walk to the door.

She is almost through it when he says:

"Thank you. For the coffee."

She looks back. He is still watching her with that steady, careful look that she is starting to understand means he is feeling something he does not yet have permission to say out loud.

"You are welcome," she says.

She walks out.

In the elevator going down she presses her back against the wall and breathes out slowly.

She is not scared.

She probably should be.

But the thing growing quietly in her chest every time she is near Damien Wolfe is starting to feel a lot less like a warning and a lot more like something she does not want to walk away from.