Chapter 2

Nichole pov

Tate had a standing order. Lunch to his office by one. No delays or excuses.

I picked up the tray from the kitchen and took the executive corridor, the way I always did.

Derek came around the corner first. He saw me from twenty feet away and didn't change his direction. Instead his shoulder hit mine hard.

"Watch where you're going, traitor's daughter."

The tray lurched in my hands. I caught it, just barely, and kept walking.

I almost made it to the next stretch of corridor before I heard footsteps speed up behind me. I turned in time to see one of the junior kitchen staff plant his foot directly in front of mine, grinning about it.

My foot hit the wet patch on the tile where someone had moped and not dried it, and the world tilted. The tray left my hands. I tried to catch myself and missed and came down hard on my right knee, palms skidding across the tile, the sound of breaking ceramic ringing off every wall in the corridor.

I stayed there for a moment, hands flat against the floor.

The junior kitchen boy laughed, an ugly, satisfied sound, and kept walking.

I heard footsteps approaching from the other direction. Two of the upstairs maids came around the corner together, took one look at me on the floor in the middle of shattered crockery, and neatly redirected their path around me without slowing down or speaking.

A junior pack member crossed the far end of the corridor, clocked me on the ground, and found something urgent on his phone.

My knee was bleeding. I could feel it — the warm, steady pull of it soaking through the fabric of my clothes, which meant that the injury was deep enough.

After I witnessed my fathers tragic death, my wolf has been in an endless hibernation, so I could no longer heal my wounds as quickly as before. Now I simply bled like a full human.

I started gathering the broken pieces myself, reaching for the overturned bowl, when a shadow fell across the tile in front of me.

"Here." A hand extended into my line of sight as I looked up.

He was tall, auburn-haired, with an open and direct expression that felt immediately foreign in this house. He was already crouching before I could protest, helping me to my feet.

"Can you put weight on it?" He nodded at my knee.

I tested it and winced. "Yes."

He unwound a scarf from around his neck - crouched again, pressing it carefully against the torn skin at my knee.

"You don't have to do that," I said.

"I know." He finished the makeshift bandage and stood. "Do you need anyone called?"

"No. Thank you." I hesitated. "I'll return the scarf. If you tell me your name"

He was already waving it off, stepping back, someone calling him from the far end of the corridor. "Don't worry about it," he said, and then he was gone.

He had helped me while asking for nothing, and left. I had almost forgotten that was something people did.

I salvaged what I could onto the tray, found a kitchen trolley someone had left unlocked, and rebuilt the lunch into something presentable. Twenty minutes later I knocked on Tate's office door.

"Come in."

He was behind his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow. He didn't look up when I entered. I crossed the room and set the rebuilt tray on the side table, straightening the plate.

I was turning to leave when he said, very quietly, "Stop."

I stopped. He rose from behind the desk slowly, crossed the room to where I was standing and his nostrils flared, once, and his eyes went dark.

"Whose scent is that."

"I fell in the corridor," I said, keeping my voice low. "Someone helped me up."

"Someone." He stepped closer. "A man."

"He helped me and left, it was nothing."

"You smell like him." His voice had dropped low.

He moved toward me and I stepped back and my back found the wall. "Did you think I wouldn't notice? Did you think I don't know exactly what you are?"

"Tate, I didn't"

"Don't." His other hand found my wrist and the word died in my throat.

The mate bond did what it always did. My body had never learned to separate the bond from the man, the warmth from the harm, and that betrayal — my own biology working against every piece of sense I had was its own kind of humiliation on top of everything else. He knew it too, he had always known it.

He turned me around, pushed me back until I hit the edge of his desk, and made me bend over it. I grabbed the desk with both hands and stared at the wall in front of me.

Tate didn’t say anything. He pulled my dress up to my waist and tugged my underwear down just enough. Then he undid his pants, took himself out, and pushed into me in one hard movement.

No condom — there never was. Tracy had told him I was barren, a hen that wouldn't lay, and he had believed it completely, so the thought never crossed his mind. One less thing for him to consider.

He held my hips tight and started moving—fast, deep, steady. Each thrust pushed me against the desk. The edge dug into my stomach as my legs shook from holding myself up.

I could hear the sound of our bodies hitting together and his breathing getting heavier, but he stayed controlled.

A knock came at the door.

I froze as my whole body tightened around him.

“Alpha,” Jonathan said from the other side. “The North Maple people are here. They’re waiting in the east room.”

Tate didn’t stop, instead he kept going, harder now.

“Alpha,” Jonathan said again. “They’ve been waiting a while.”

My heart was pounding so hard it hurt. I pictured Jonathan opening the door, the visitors seeing us, the story getting out to every pack by tonight.

“Please,” I whispered. Tears were already running down my face. “Please, I’m sorry. I was wrong. I’m sorry. Please”

I’d said those words so many times they came out automatically. I hated how easy they were now.

Tate paused — just for a second. I felt his eyes drop to me, felt the shift in the air like he was really seeing me for once. Something changed in the way he held me, but then it was gone. He started moving again, same as before.

“Tell them five minutes,” he said to Jonathan, voice calm like nothing was happening.

“Yes, Alpha.” Jonathan’s steps went away.

He gripped my hips harder, drove in deep one last time, and held there. I felt him spill inside me, hot and wet, filling me completely. He stayed buried until he finished, breathing hard against my back. L

Then he stepped back. I heard him fix his pants, tuck in his shirt, shrug on his jacket like it was nothing.

I slid down to the floor, feeling hollow. My dress was still up around my waist as I pulled it down and smoothed it flat with my hands over and over.

Tate looked at me. “Everyone already knows you’re trash,” he said in a normal voice. “You could walk in here naked and nobody would care.” He adjusted his sleeves. “Clean this up before you go.”

He walked out as the door closed quietly behind him.

I stayed on the floor a little longer than I needed to. He wasn't always like this. The thought arrived uninvited, the way it always did after moments like this one.

I had watched him in high school from the edge of the elite class's orbit. I was born an omega, and have since lived a life of poverty with only my father since birth. It is almost unsurprising that someone like me would become a target of bullying at school. Once, when I was fifteen, he had seen three girls with my notebook and said give it back to her in a voice so certain of being obeyed that they simply did.

He hadn't known my name but he had already moved on before I finished processing what happened.

But I had stood there holding the notebook against my chest, heart doing something embarrassing and entirely against my better judgment, thinking — he didn't have to do that.

The night I left for the institute I had covered my face with a scarf, terrified my bullies would recognise me and find a way to ruin it before I even reached the border. I had worked too hard for that acceptance to lose it to three girls with nothing better to do than destroy things.

The patrol lights swept across me anyway. My heart was in my throat because I didn’t have an exit permit. The vehicle slowed and he stepped out, and even in the dark I knew exactly who he was.

He looked at me — at the scarf, at the bag on my bag — and understood all of it in one beat. He could have demanded I remove the scarf. Could have detained me until morning.

Instead he turned back to the vehicle, said something low and dismissive to the men inside, and got back in as the vehicle moved on.

He never saw my face. He never knew it was me he had let go. I used to find a strange comfort in the idea that somewhere underneath everything that came after, there was still a version of him capable of quiet mercy but at this point I might just be fooling myself. After all, everything changed the morning of the succession ceremony. And it was my father who changed it.

Which meant that every minute of this — was mine to bear. I had understood that from the beginning.

I got up eventually, gathered the spilled containers back onto the tray, and was preparing to leave when I saw it.

The scarf was on the floor near the door, a torn corner of wool that must have caught on something then pulled loose in the chaos of everything after.

I picked it up without thinking, turned it over in my hands and folded it.

That stranger was a decent person. The thought settled in me. I don't want to owe him anything. Maybe I can find out who he is.