Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
He didn’t look at me.
There was no reason for him to look at me. I was a junior designer carrying sample boards. He was the Prince of Atlantis.
But when he passed the intersection where my corridor met his, I caught the briefest glimpse of his profile, the sharp line of his jaw, the aristocratic slope of his nose, and something inside my chest did this awful, traitorous little flip that I recognized immediately because it was exactly how I used to feel when—
No.
No.
I shut that down so fast you’d think my brain had an emergency kill switch specifically designed for this purpose. Which, after Billy, it kind of does.
Because here’s the thing.
I’ve already been the girl who developed feelings for a preter who was way out of her league. I already played that game, bought the ticket, rode the ride, and got thrown off at the end without so much as a warning sign. And Billy was a wolf shifter. From a regular pack. With a modest territory in the foothills.
Prince Alexei Lykaios is a stallion shifter from Atlantis. He holds a seat on the Blood Oval. His bloodline is older than most countries.
If I couldn’t hold onto a boy whose family ran a mid-tier wolf pack, I have absolutely zero business feeling anything, not even a tiny, stupid chest-flip, for a man who is literally supernatural royalty.
So I don’t.
I see him in the hallway, I acknowledge that he is objectively beautiful, the same way I’d acknowledge that the sun is objectively hot, and I move on with my day.
That’s it.
That’s all it is.
MY DESK IS ON THE FOURTEENTH floor, in the design wing of the product development division. It’s an open-plan space with big windows that look out over the mountains, and I’ve decorated my little corner with a few photos, a small cactus that the office supply catalog described as “virtually unkillable” (which I’m choosing to take as a personal challenge), and a mug that says I’m not a morning person, I’m an always person that I bought at a thrift store for two dollars and which makes no sense but somehow feels accurate.
I like my job. I really, genuinely like it, which still surprises me sometimes, because for the first four months after graduation, I was so convinced that my degree was essentially an expensive piece of paper that I’d started mentally preparing for a lifetime career in coffee.
Not that there’s anything wrong with coffee. I loved working at Beans 4 U. But I didn’t spend four years studying sustainable product design so I could perfect my latte art, even though my latte art was getting pretty good.
Here, I actually get to do what I trained for. The design team works on packaging and product interfaces for preter-human trade goods, everything from biodegradable shipping containers for temperature-sensitive Caro medical supplies to the user-experience design for new safety devices that preters and humans both need in a post-That Day world. It’s fascinating. It’s meaningful. And every morning when I sit down at my desk and pull up whatever project I’m working on, there’s this little hum of satisfaction in my chest that tells me I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
My thesis advisor would probably cry if she could see me now.
She’d also probably ask why I still eat onigiri for lunch three days a week, but that’s between me and my budget.
TRISH FINDS ME AT NOON, which is how most of my favorite parts of the workday begin.
I hear her before I see her, which is funny because Trish Park is the quietest person I’ve ever met. So quiet you lean in when she talks, because everything she says feels like whatever she’s about to say is a secret she’s trusting you with. She works in IT security, two floors down, and she’s brilliant in the way that people who are genuinely brilliant often are: completely unaware of it, slightly uncomfortable when anyone notices, and happiest when she’s buried in code and nobody’s looking at her.
But I hear her today because she’s speed-walking, and Trish speed-walking means something has happened that she needs to talk about immediately but can’t say out loud until she’s in a safe zone, ergo, me.
I’m not sure how that happened, honestly. We met during my first week when I accidentally wandered into the IT floor looking for the supply closet and found her sitting alone in a server room, eating a sandwich and reading something on her phone with an expression that was equal parts dreamy and terrified. I apologized for interrupting. She said, “It’s fine, I’m just having a crisis.” And somehow that turned into lunch, which turned into daily lunches, which turned into the closest friendship I’ve had since college.
The crisis, as I later learned, was a boy.
Not a boy.
A man.