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ChapterTwo
Two yearslater
Dominic Dane.
The name made my flesh rise in goose bumps every time I heard it whispered among my colleagues. He came into the office with his chin up, those massive shoulders wide. He strode between the desks and to the other side like we lowly creatures were too unimportant for his attention.
By the time he made it to the door to his office—which he had all to himself with windows and blinds and a whole desk he usually used to rest his feet on—someone would have brought him a cup of warm coffee. He never even acknowledged any of the poor souls who actually fought among one another to be the one to bring him coffee each morning. No sugar, no cream, just black, like his clothes. Like his soul. He just took the steaming cup, walked in his office, and slammed the door shut loud enough for the entire building to hear. A hundred percent werewolf. A hundred-and-one percent asshole. Hence the reason why I called him wolf-ass in my head.
Then, he put the coffee cup on his wide desk, took off the leather jacket he always wore no matter the weather outside, and proceeded to turn the blinds so that he could shut us all out for the rest of the day.
Not that I was watching like everybody else in the office—I wasn’t. I hadn’t in a long time now, but I’d seen it happen so many times before that I knew every single one of his movements by memory—and they never changed. I refused to give him even a glimpse. Instead, I opened my journal to make a small red plus on the calendar under 9 am, just like I did every morning. That small plus meant that I hadn’t budged, hadn’t even darted my eyes his way for a single second until I heard the door of his office close.
My first win for the day.
I was already feeling better.
“Psst,” came a voice from ahead. “Did you hear? Merry from the second had sex with Double D last night.”
The muscles of my stomach clenched, and I looked up at Patricia, her head lowered almost to the surface of her desk as she whispered. The others—Hunter, who sat on her left, and Eva, who sat on my right, aah’ed and ooh’d at the news, like it was the most important piece of information they’d ever received.
“No way,” Hunter said, lowering his head to the desk, too. “I don’t believe it.”
“Why not? Even though he acts like one of these marble pillars, he’s still a man underneath all that sneering,” Eva said, fanning herself.
“I just saw him come in. Trust me—he does not look like a man who got laid last night,” said Hunter.
“He always looks like that.” Patricia rolled her brown eyes extra slowly, like she always did. “That doesn’t mean anything. Merry told Jenna just this morning on the way to work, and Jenna told Arthur, and Arthur told Cecile—we all know Cecile’s got the best info dishes to serve.”
Yeah, there wasn’t much that went on around here without Cecile knowing about it. She was one of the maintenance staff at the ODP Headquarters who worked twelve-hour shifts willingly, but that’s brownies for you.
“I’m stamping it with a maybe,” Hunter said, raising his hands as if he was already exhausted.
“Definitely a yes. Last year he fucked Jennifer, too. You guys remember Jennifer, right?” Eva asked.
“Oh, yeah. She was hot,” Hunter said, wiggling his brows.
“The point is, he does have sex. Werewolves are men, too,” Patricia said, then flinched. “Technically speaking.”
“Why are you so quiet?” said Eva, turning her squinted eyes at me.
“Yeah, Teddy. Why are you so quiet?” Hunter asked, folding his arms in front of him.
“Believe it or not, I have much more important things to think about than whom Dominic Dane beds,” I said, a bit more bitterly than I’d have liked.
They all watched me for a beat.
“Like what?” Patricia asked, completely serious.
“My job,” I said, rolling my eyes, though not as slowly as she did. “That’s what we’re all here for, aren’t we?”
“But we hardly ever hear rumors about him,” Hunter whispered, like he really didn’t understand what I meant.
“Are you serious? You talk about him every single day.” I should know—my ears kept suffering because of it.
We all knew about his incredibly bad manners, his gigantic ego, and his unmatched track record. We all heard about his heroics—how he killed a berserker once, all by himself, and trapped within hours a family of kelpies in Jersey who were eating human children, and how he saved the inhabitants of an entire neighborhood in Queens who were being held against their will by a pack of boggarts.
The problem was, they all believed the rumors. I worked in a wide area with fifty-two carrels spread out in eight perfect rows, with fifty-one other agents ranging from twenty-one to sixty years old. They all believed the rumors about Dominic Dane, no matter how impossible they sounded.
