Chapter 4 4

Chapter 4

...

The car eventually pulled through iron gates and up a long drive, delivering them to a mansion so grand it looked almost unreal against the rain-soaked night — and yet, for all its scale, the place had a strange hollowness to it, like a house built for far more people than actually lived there.

That wasn't an accident. Alexander trusted almost no one outside his own circle, which meant no staff, no live-in help, nothing but the small handful of men he considered family in every way that mattered. The mansion ran instead under the quiet management of Collin, who served as head butler and, more importantly, as one of the few people alive who had Alexander's full confidence.

Collin was waiting at the door when the car pulled up, and whatever composure he usually maintained slipped visibly the moment he saw his boss step out — soaked to the skin, and carrying an unconscious woman in his arms.

"Boss—"

"Hm." Alexander offered nothing more than that, brushing past him and heading straight for the stairs, Ana still cradled against his chest.

He carried her up to his private room on the second floor, laid her carefully on the sofa, and then simply stood there for a moment, looking down at her.

Her face, even pale and unconscious, held him in place longer than he meant to let it.

"Why," he murmured, mostly to himself, "does this woman have this effect on me? This is completely irrational."

He shook the thought off — or tried to — and went to shower, since he was nearly as soaked as she was.

He came back a few minutes later in a white bathrobe loosely tied at the waist, his hair still damp, and found her exactly where he'd left her, still dripping onto his very expensive sofa.

"Hm." He tilted his head, studying the problem in front of him with the same focus he might give a business decision. "She's still wet. And she's in my room. Which means, technically, her wellbeing is my responsibility right now."

He nodded to himself, apparently satisfied with the logic.

"HMMM." His ears had gone faintly red, though he'd have denied it under threat of death. He was suddenly, uncharacteristically aware of his own hands.

"I'm doing this for her sake," he informed the empty room, with the conviction of a man building a legal defense in real time. "Nothing more."

With that thoroughly settled — at least to his own satisfaction — he knelt beside the sofa and began working the wet dress loose, his expression carefully composed right up until it wasn't.

"...Huh."

Whatever he'd expected, it apparently wasn't this. A slow, entirely involuntary grin spread across his face.

"Well..." He cleared his throat, sitting back slightly. "That's unexpected."

Something hot and unfamiliar coiled low in his chest, sharper than simple attraction, closer to hunger. He wanted her. Genuinely, uncomfortably, more than he'd wanted anything in longer than he cared to admit.

But wanting wasn't the same as taking, and Alexander — for all his reputation, for everything people whispered about him in boardrooms and back alleys alike — had never once touched a woman who hadn't chosen him first. He wasn't about to make an unconscious stranger the exception.

'Besides', he thought, the grin edging back in, 'when I finally have her, I want her fully aware of exactly what's happening. Where's the satisfaction otherwise?'

"I'm losing my mind," he muttered, dragging a hand down his face. "This is the first time in my life a woman's made me feel like this, and we haven't even exchanged names properly."

His fingers brushed her skin as he worked, and even that small, clinical contact sent something electric up his arm, sharper than he expected, difficult to ignore.

He held to his own rule anyway. He changed her out of the ruined dress and into one of his own shirts — nothing more, nothing less — and left her exactly as decent as she'd have wanted, had she been awake to have an opinion about it.

Ana slept on, entirely unaware that she'd spent the night draped in the shirt of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the country.

...

Once she was settled, Alexander stepped out onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and let the last of the rain-cooled air clear his head before his phone buzzed with an incoming call.

He had three men he trusted absolutely — more brothers than employees, in every sense that counted. Kai handled field operations, quick and reliable in situations that required both muscle and discretion. Fred managed his legitimate business interests, running point as his assistant at De Group. And Sin — Sin lived somewhere in the space between hacking and sorcery, capable of pulling information out of systems that shouldn't have been penetrable at all.

It was Sin calling now.

"Boss." No preamble, as usual. "I finished tracing the attack on the north base. I've got a name for who's behind the deaths of our men. Sending it now."

"Good." Alexander's voice had already dropped into something colder. "Send it. I'll look at it myself."

He ended the call and pulled up the file the moment it landed, and his expression shifted the instant the name resolved on the screen — an old, familiar name, one that came with decades of history behind it.

"You," he breathed, something dangerous moving behind his eyes. "You actually dared."

"You'll regret this." His voice had gone very quiet, which was, for anyone who knew him, considerably more frightening than shouting would have been. "I promise you that."

Alexander De Graham did not forgive the deaths of his men. He had built an entire second life around the principle of making sure no one who crossed him walked away from it unscathed, and this was not going to be an exception.

...

By morning, the storm had passed entirely, replaced by a soft, golden light spilling through the windows.

"Mmm." Ana stirred, her head still thick with sleep, and reached out instinctively — only to find the mattress beneath her far too soft, far too unfamiliar.

"This isn't my bed," she mumbled, eyes still closed, before curiosity finally won out and she blinked them open.

The ceiling above her was easily three times the height of her actual bedroom.

"Oh my god." She sat bolt upright, heart lurching. "Where — where am I? Is this a dream?"

A low chuckle answered her from somewhere nearby, and Ana whipped her head toward the sound to find a man sitting on the sofa across the room, dressed in nothing but a loosely tied bathrobe, a book resting in one hand.

He set the book down the moment their eyes met, folding his arms and studying her with open interest.

"Finally awake, little girl?"

The words landed somewhere in her chest and stayed there, her pulse spiking without her permission.

She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again, hoping foolishly that the room might have changed in the meantime.

It hadn't.

"What happened last night—" She pressed a hand to her temple, memory returning in pieces before it arrived all at once, ugly and complete. The hotel room. Vexia's voice. Damian's answer.

Her expression crumpled before she could stop it, and she pushed herself up off the bed with the particular sluggishness of someone whose body hadn't quite caught up with her heart.

She lowered her head, formal and stiff, doing her best to hold what little dignity she had left together.

"Thank you for helping me last night, sir. I believe I fainted — I must have been overwhelmed." Her voice stayed carefully even. "I'm sorry for whatever trouble I caused. I'd like to repay you somehow — I could clean, or help around the house, though I'm afraid I don't have money to offer."

"You clearly don't need it anyway," she added, glancing briefly around the room. "So please, let me do something instead, before I go."

Alexander went quiet, watching her with an expression she couldn't quite place — something between amusement and genuine surprise.

"So you do talk," he said finally, one eyebrow lifting. "I was starting to wonder."

He considered her for a long moment, an idea clearly forming behind his eyes.

"If you really want to repay me," he said, "then work for me. Be my maid. I'll pay you properly — more than fairly, in fact."

The offer came out almost too quickly, more impulse than plan, though Alexander would never have admitted that out loud. He simply knew, with a certainty that unsettled him slightly, that he wasn't ready for this woman to walk out of his house and out of his life in the same morning.

"Wh— what?" Ana's head snapped up, eyes wide. "Wait, what did you say?"

She stared at him, stunned, because the timing was almost too absurd to process — she'd just handed over her entire paycheck the night before, was actively in need of more income, and now, out of nowhere, a stranger with more money than she could imagine was offering her exactly that.