Too Late, the Alpha Lost Me After Two Weeks' Notice novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Notice
Ebba puts two weeks' notice under the Alpha's coffee cup, his hand closes on her wrist, and that night he knocks on her door with a counteroffer.
I put my two weeks' notice under the Alpha's coffee cup at five minutes to nine on a Tuesday.
I put it there so he would have to lift the cup to find it.
Cass Dahlgren was on the phone with the sawmill foreman, standing at the window of the pack office with his back to me.
He is six foot one, lean and long-boned, with black hair buzzed close and gone grey at the temples.
He was thirty-four that fall, and he had been the Alpha of the Bend pack for five years.
I had been his accountant for all of them.
"Then tell him the saw can wait until Thursday," he said. "Yes. I'll sign for the blade."
He hung up and turned around and saw me in the doorway.
"Morning, Ebba."
"Morning."
"Is the payroll run done?"
"It's done. It went out at seven."
"Of course it did." He smiled at me, quick and tired and honest. "Thank you."
That was tick number one thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven.
I knew the number because I kept the count in pencil, in the margin of the ledger, where nobody ever looked.
He reached for his coffee and the cup scraped, and he saw the envelope.
"What's this?"
"My notice."
He didn't move.
"Notice of what?"
"Of resignation. Two weeks. My last day is Tuesday the twenty-seventh."
He picked up the envelope and read the single page inside.
He read it twice.
I stood very still and let him.
It said the dates and the handover list and that I had enjoyed the work, and nothing else.
I had rewritten it nine times to make sure it said nothing else.
"You're leaving the pack?" he said.
"No. I'm leaving the job. I'm taking a position at the credit union on Main Street."
"As what?"
"Staff accountant. Forty hours a week. Starting the twenty-eighth."
He put the page down on the desk and flattened it with his left hand.
Two of its fingers were crooked from a break that never set right.
"How much are they paying you?"
I told him.
"I'll match it."
"Cass, it isn't the money."
"I'll beat it."
"It isn't the money."
"Then what is it?"
I took a breath, and what came out was true and small.
"It's the hours. I work seventy a week, and you pay me for forty."
"And?"
"And in six years nobody has asked what I do on a Saturday."
His face changed.
"What do you do on a Saturday?"
"The books, Cass. I do the books."
He was quiet for a second.
"I didn't know it was that bad," he said.
"I know you didn't."
That was the true part, and it hurt more than I'd planned for.
Nobody in the Bend pack reads another wolf's feelings by scent unless they are asked to.
It is the worst manners we have, worse than reading a person's mail.
Cass keeps that rule better than anyone I know.
So in six years, he had never once smelled what I felt when he said thank you.
I turned to go.
"Ebba."
His hand closed around my wrist.
It was warm and dry and it didn't squeeze.
His thumb came to rest across the inside of my wrist, right on the pulse.
My pulse did something stupid under it, and I know he felt it, because his thumb stopped moving.
He looked down at his own hand like he had not told it to do that.
"Your hand is on my wrist," I said.
"Yes."
He didn't let go.
He let go slowly, a finger at a time, and he did not look sorry.
"I'm going to fix this," he said.
"There's nothing to fix. It's a two-week notice, and it's polite."
"It's not polite. It's you leaving."
I went down the stairs and out into the lot with my heart going.
I sat in my car for four full minutes before I could turn the key.
I worked until seven.
I went home to my cottage behind the Hall and heated soup and ate half of it standing at the counter.
It was raining by then, a cold hard October rain on the tin roof.
At nine, somebody knocked on my door.
Nobody ever knocked on my door.
I opened it.
Cass stood on the porch with water running off his hair and down his jaw, in a grey Henley soaked dark across the shoulders.
He had a yellow legal pad in one hand.
He had my notice in the other, folded in four.
He had never once, in six years, come to my door.
"I wrote you a counteroffer," he said. "I need you to tell me what's wrong with it."
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