The Alpha Kings Secret Son novel · Chapter 2 of 6
Chapter 2: Wrong Name on the File
Mira withstands Roman’s alpha dominance during a job interview, protects the truth about her five-year absence, and leaves while Marcus sends Roman a message about her scent.
Roman slid her personnel file across the desk before she sat down.
The folder stopped beside her hand. Her name was printed on the tab in black block letters, with a red stripe across the top. Someone had decided her employment history needed special handling.
Mira looked at the folder, then at him.
‘That’s a promising start. I was hoping for coffee first, but I can see the company likes to build trust through paperwork.’
‘You can have coffee after you answer a question.’
Of course she could.
She pulled out the chair and sat. The office was too warm for the snow outside, though the glass wall behind Roman had begun to fog at the corners. A silver tray held a black coffee and a second cup that had gone untouched.
Roman wore a charcoal suit with a narrow silver pin at his collar. His hair was cut close at the sides, but a lock near his temple had fallen out of place. He left it there. His attention stayed on her face, steady and direct, with the patience of someone used to waiting for other people to give in.
Mira opened the file.
The first page held her name, address, temporary placement, education, tax records, and the five-year gap between her last permanent position and Voss Industries. The second held references from the three small businesses she had listed as clients. The third contained the hiring audit she had submitted two weeks earlier.
She closed the folder.
‘You’ve had the full file for less than a day.’
‘It was available.’
‘That is a very polite way to say you had someone dig through it.’
‘I asked for it.’
‘Yes. I noticed the distinction.’
A small movement touched the corner of his mouth. It vanished before she could decide whether it had been amusement or a muscle obeying the wrong command.
Roman leaned back in his chair.
‘Why did you leave your last permanent position?’
‘The company changed ownership. My department became three departments, then two, then no longer my department.’
‘And after that?’
‘Freelance bookkeeping.’
‘For five years?’
‘Small pack businesses mostly. Grocers, repair shops, a transport company that had an unfortunate relationship with receipts.’
‘Unfortunate?’
‘They kept losing them. The receipts were innocent.’
He did not smile.
Mira had spent five years answering questions from landlords, school offices, clinic clerks, and one very judgmental preschool teacher. She knew how to keep talking when silence started asking questions of its own.
Roman opened the hiring audit instead of commenting on the joke. The pages were marked with neat black notes, most of them made in a hand she recognized from the boardroom documents.
‘You identified the unapproved liability adjustments in the North District report.’
‘They were sitting in the wrong column.’
‘They had been sitting there for six quarters.’
‘Then nobody had looked at the column very carefully.’
His finger stopped beside a line of figures.
‘You also forecast the quarter-end changes before the regional directors submitted their revisions.’
‘The revisions were predictable.’
‘They were not predictable to my finance team.’
‘That sounds embarrassing for them.’
His eyes lifted at once.
Mira felt the mistake before she finished the sentence. She had not meant to insult anyone. She had meant to make the work sound less impressive. Praise had always arrived with a request attached. Better to cut it down before someone asked for more.
‘That was meant to be reassuring,’ she said. ‘I can see it did not arrive that way.’
‘You’re very modest about work that saved this company a significant amount of money.’
‘Modesty is cheaper than a professional reputation.’
‘Is that what you were doing for five years?’
There it was.
The second question had the same calm voice. That made it worse. He was not accusing her, and he was not giving her anything solid to push against. He had placed the question between them and expected her to fill it with the truth.
Mira rested both hands on the closed folder.
‘Bookkeeping.’
‘That is the cover answer.’
‘It is also the accurate answer.’
‘Accurate answers can be incomplete.’
‘So can personnel files.’
The room changed before she could decide whether she had gone too far.
Cold pressed down across the office. The fog on the glass thickened, and a white line of frost spread from the lower corner of the window. Her body recognized Roman’s authority before her mind caught up. Her shoulders tightened, but her chair stayed where it was.
Beyond the glass partition, two assistants stopped moving. One stepped back from her desk. The other lowered her eyes and put a hand against the wall.
Roman’s grey-blue eyes bled silver.
Mira looked at them for a moment, then returned her attention to the audit.
‘If you’re trying to make me nervous, the timing is poor. I’ve spent the morning being reassigned, interrogated, and promoted without anyone asking whether I wanted the promotion. I’m running out of fresh reactions.’
His voice dropped.
‘You’re unaffected.’
‘No. I’m affected. I’m just employed.’
The pressure increased. Her lungs had to work harder, and the skin along her arms prickled beneath her sweater. White clouds formed with every breath in the room. Behind Roman, the frost reached the edge of the window frame.
She did not step back.
Roman watched her. The silver in his eyes gave nothing away, but his hand had stopped turning the page.
‘You knew the ledgers were pack accounts before the interview.’
‘The report said so.’
‘The company did not.’
‘Then your report had a generous definition of company.’
‘You expect me to believe you found those rules by accident?’
‘You expect me to confess to something I didn’t do because you lowered the temperature?’
A muscle moved beside his jaw.
‘Most analysts would have corrected the figures before building a model.’
‘Most analysts would have missed the fraud.’
The pressure vanished.
Warmth returned in a slow, unpleasant rush. A pen rolled across the desk and struck the leather portfolio near her elbow. Beyond the partition, somebody made a small sound and covered it with a cough.
Roman’s eyes were grey-blue again.
Mira kept her gaze on the audit. She had not come here to win an argument with an alpha king. She had come to keep the salary, the health coverage, and the chance to pay Axel’s clinic fee before the waiting list moved on without them.
‘You’re asking the wrong question,’ she said.
‘Am I?’
‘You want to know whether I can do this job.’
‘That is one question.’
‘The answer is on your desk.’
He looked down at the marked pages.
‘And the other question?’
‘You can keep asking it if you like. I’ll keep giving you the answer that appears in my records.’
‘Freelance bookkeeping.’
‘Very respectable work. Terrible parties.’
A pause settled between them.
This time she let it remain.
Roman closed the audit and placed it beside the personnel file. His thumb covered the line where her employment gap began.
‘Your answer is technically true.’
‘That’s the nicest thing anyone has said about my work history.’
‘It was not a compliment.’
‘Then I’m especially pleased with it.’
The corner of his mouth moved again. It stayed this time, barely, before his face returned to its usual calculation.
He pushed the personnel file back toward himself.
‘Report to me at eight tomorrow.’
‘That early?’
‘You’re my direct analyst.’
‘Right. I’ll bring the audit, three pencils, and a personality suitable for executive meetings.’
‘Bring two pencils.’
‘You’re planning for loss?’
‘You’re planning for jokes.’
‘It’s a small comfort.’
‘Keep it small.’
Mira gathered the audit pages. She had given him the story she needed him to keep. In return, he had left her with a job and no clean reason to reopen the file.
She turned toward the door.
Behind the glass partition, Marcus had not moved. His face was angled toward Mira, his attention fixed on her with an expression that had lost its ordinary patience.
Roman’s phone lit in his hand.
A message from Marcus appeared on the screen: ‘Her scent.’
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