Chapter 4

SOPHIA'S POV

I cleaned my face in the restroom mirror and went back to my desk, though Mia's words were still making the rounds, drifting from one desk to another in whispers that weren't nearly as quiet as the people making them seemed to think.

"Did you hear? She actually cried in the copy room," someone murmured, not lowering their voice nearly enough.

"Careful, or the rejected mate might start marking her territory," Jessica added from somewhere behind me, and the laughter spread down the row of desks like something contagious.

I kept my eyes on my screen, willing myself to focus on anything else, but it wasn't long before Mia appeared beside me, arms crossed, clearly not finished with her morning.

"Are you even listening to us?" Mia asked.

"I'm working," I said, not looking up.

"You should be used to being ignored by now. Your own Alpha managed it," she said, the words landing exactly where she'd aimed them.

"Is there a point to this, Mia, or are you just bored?" I asked, finally meeting her eyes.

"Watch it, cleaner in training," she warned.

"I haven't been demoted yet," I said, though something in her tone made the words feel less certain than I wanted them to.

"Give it time," she said, and walked off with the satisfied air of someone who knew something I didn't.

I grabbed my bag and left instead, unable to sit there another minute.

"Don't bother coming back!" Jessica called after me, and I let the door shut behind me before she could see it land.

I cried the whole walk home, and most of the night after. My apartment was cold when I got in, and I curled up on the couch still in my work clothes, thinking about Blake, how gentle he used to be, how certain I'd once been that we'd built something real.

"You should have seen it coming," I told the empty room. "You should have known."

My phone buzzed. My mother. I let it ring twice before I picked up, not trusting my voice yet.

"Sophia? You sound terrible. What happened?" she asked the moment I answered.

"Nothing, Mom. Bad day at work," I said, pressing the heel of my hand against my eyes.

"You can tell me the truth, you know," she said gently.

"I am telling you the truth. It was just a bad day."

"All right. Get some sleep. Call me tomorrow," she said, letting it go, though I could tell she didn't quite believe me.

"I will. I love you."

"Love you too, sweetheart."

I hung up and sat there in the dark a while longer, the television murmuring something I never registered, and his rejection played on a loop until I finally fell asleep from exhaustion rather than peace.

I woke up with my neck stiff and my eyes swollen, the apartment still dim with early morning gray.

"Just get up," I told myself out loud, my voice rough in the empty apartment. "Getting out of bed is the whole victory today. You don't have to win anything else."

I made myself do it anyway.

"One foot in front of the other," I muttered on the walk to the station. "That's all today has to be."

Derick was waiting at the entrance when I arrived, apparently surprised I'd shown up at all.

"If you want to keep working here," he said, without preamble, "you're being demoted to cleaner."

"Excuse me? Cleaner?" I asked, certain I'd misheard him.

"You heard me," he said, unmoved.

"Yesterday I was answering client emails. Today I'm mopping floors. What exactly changed?" I demanded.

"Nothing changed. I just stopped pretending it hadn't already been true," he said.

"That's not an answer, Sir Derick. That's an excuse," I said, my temper slipping despite my best efforts.

"Careful. Insubordination is a good way to lose the mop job too," he warned, the threat delivered with the same ease as everything else he said.

"Why are you doing this, Sir Derick?" I asked, needing to hear him say it.

"It's simple. You're a rejected mate, banished from your pack. No status, no power, no place in the community. I'm not putting someone like that in a position of authority in my company," he said.

"So this is about my pack, not my performance," I said, the realization settling into something colder in my chest.

"Call it whatever helps you sleep tonight," he said.

"That's not fair, and you know it isn't," I said.

"Fair has nothing to do with it. Take the demotion, or leave. That's the offer," he said, folding his arms.

"And if I walk out right now?" I asked, testing the weight of the question even as I asked it.

"Then you walk out with nothing, and we both know you don't have anywhere else to go," he said, and the truth of it stung more than any insult could have.

"I need this job," I said, keeping my voice level with effort. "I've earned my place here."

"Then earn a mop instead," he said.

"You enjoy this, don't you? Watching me have no choice but to say yes," I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice.

"More than you'd think," he said, and I almost admired the honesty of it.

"Fine." I said it quietly. "I'll take it."

"Smart girl," he said.

He nodded and walked off, and I stood there a moment longer than I needed to, absorbing how far I'd fallen, from a father's favorite daughter to a demoted stranger cleaning floors in her enemy's building.

Someone else was already sitting in my old seat when I went to collect my things, typing away as though the desk had always been hers.

"That's my chair," I said, more out of reflex than anything else.

"Not anymore, it isn't," she said. She didn't even look up.

I found the cleaners' room instead, changed into the uniform, and had barely stepped back out when Mia "accidentally" spilled coffee across the floor in front of me, the cup tipping at an angle that looked anything but accidental.

"Come clean this up, maid," she said, laughing, and walked off before I could answer.

I stood there a second with the mop already in my hand, staring at the brown puddle spreading across the tile.

"You've got to be kidding me," I muttered.

"Better hurry," Mia called over her shoulder. "Wouldn't want your first day as cleaner to end in a written warning."

"Noted." I bent down and started wiping it up anyway.

"Careful with that mop. Don't want to slip and add a workers' comp claim to the day," she added, not even bothering to turn around.

"I'll manage," I said, more to myself than to her.

The rest of the day went the same way, extra tasks, snide comments, Mia finding new angles to remind me exactly how far I'd fallen.

"Don't even think about quitting," she said, catching me at the door on my way out. "You're lucky to have this job at all, considering your situation. Rejected mate." She laughed all the way back to her desk.

"Goodnight to you too, Mia," I said, mostly to myself, and pushed through the door before she could hear it.

I didn't answer her out loud. But walking home, I noticed her cruelty had a rhythm to it, too pointed, too specific, like she knew exactly which words would land hardest.

"Rejected mate." "Your own pack banished you." "No status, no power." Every single insult circled back to the same handful of facts, the ones nobody outside my own family should have known in that much detail, this fast.

"Where is she even getting this?" I asked myself, half aloud, letting the cold night air clear my head. "It's like she's reading off a list."

No one answered, of course, except the sound of my own boots on the pavement.

"Someone's feeding her lines," I said anyway, needing to hear it out loud to believe it. "But who? And why me?"

"You already know why," I told myself, quieter. "You just don't want to admit you don't know who yet."

I didn't have an answer for that. But the question followed me all the way to my door and refused to let go.

If Mia was working from a script, someone had to be writing it, and I had a sinking feeling I wasn't going to like whoever held the pen.