The Alpha Clause

POV: CATHERINE

The air up here is too clean. Rich people's oxygen. Filtered, cold, sterile. Nothing like the sticky New Orleans heat waiting for me thirty floors down, thick as guilt, clinging like a lie you repeat so often you forget it's a lie. Eric Wood's signing stuff. He hasn't looked at me in ten minutes. Just his hand moving, steady, like a metronome, with the precision of a guy who's never doubted anything in his life. Every flick of his wrist is worth millions. Every rustle of his white cotton shirt reminds me three months of my rent are sewn into his pants hem. Three months. The price of a hem for him. A survival thing for me.

Tall dude. Carved from marble. A suit that costs more than my car, my rent, my dignity combined. Even the air up here seems to be on his payroll, calibrated for him, cooled to the perfect temp so nothing ever bothers him. So I stare at his hands. Not his mouth. Never his mouth. I slipped once, three weeks ago, a Tuesday morning when I was too tired to care. I saw his lips move as he dictated a note to Cael and I almost forgot my own name. Just because of that. Just because of a mouth forming legal words in an air-conditioned office. His hands are safer. That's what I tell myself, anyway. Big hands. Veins like roads on an old map. He signs death sentences with a pen that costs more than my fridge and he doesn't even seem to notice.

"The Ashford files, Catherine." His voice is a low rumble I feel in my ribs. Not in my ears. In my ribs. Like the low frequencies of that voice deliberately bypass my brain to hit me where I'm most vulnerable. I drop the docs on the desk. My hands are shaking from fatigue and I hide 'em behind my back before he can see.

"It's all there, Mr. Wood. I also reorganized your schedule till Friday." The Thursday lunch got moved to 12:15 'cause the Pontchartrain room was taken, and I confirmed your Singapore call for Friday morning, 7 AM local time. He finally looks up. Gray eyes. Cold. Like rain that refuses to fall, hanging in the clouds, making you wait without ever giving you what you expected. The kind of look that doesn't wanna know you. Just own you. My thrift-store suit from Magazine Street, one size too small, is burning my skin with every breath like a constant reminder I don't belong here. He's flawless. Obscenely perfect. Not a thread out of place. Not a hair wrong. Not a single sign he's made of the same stuff as the rest of us.

I look away. My body takes a beat too long to follow.

"You look exhausted, Miss Fermon. Bad for the firm's image." My blood heats up, sharp and raw, that familiar anger that rises too fast and I smother too often. The image. Always the fucking image. He has no clue what my reality looks like. No clue what it's like to walk into an apartment that smells like cold beer and find your dad slumped in a chair while your fourteen-year-old bro sleeps in his sweat 'cause the heat got cut again. No clue what it's like to calculate if the three eggs left in the fridge can make a decent dinner or if it's gonna be bread and PB again.

I hold his gaze a half-second too long for a mere assistant.

"I'll make sure to wear more concealer tomorrow, sir." My voice is calm. Perfectly calm. But the attitude hangs between us, thick as cigarette smoke in a windowless room. A muscle twitches in his jaw. Imperceptible. But I see it 'cause I spend my days studying this face without admitting it.

"Don't be sassy," he says without raising his voice. "Doesn't suit you. Go. Get home."

In the tram window, my reflection looks more tired than I feel. Or maybe more honest. The bags under my eyes are purple, and my mouth has that fold it gets when I'm tapped out but I refuse to show. I recognize this face. It's my mom's face from the last years. That way of staying upright out of habit rather than strength. I look away from my reflection.

At home, the smell hits me as I open the door: warm beer, stale cigs, and that particular desperation that settles into apartments where people stopped trying. Dad's slumped in his chair, TV flickering on some game show he's not really watching. He's staring into space with an empty can in his hand and he looks so much like the guy he was before it hurts to look.

"Catherine? Got cash? I owe the bar, need some green..." He doesn't look at me when he asks. Never does. Like looking at the person you're hitting up makes it more real, more humiliating, harder to ask next time. I don't answer. I hit the kitchen. A yogurt expired four days ago. Three eggs. A splash of milk that smells off. Great. I close the fridge and stand there a sec, hands flat on the counter, breathing.

In the back bedroom, Liam's sleeping. Fourteen, in his hoodie 'cause the heat got cut again this month. I push his door open quiet and look at him in the dark. His sneakers are on the floor. I pick 'em up. The soles are held together with gray duct tape, neatly applied, straight. He fixed 'em himself. In secret. So I wouldn't see and worry. My fourteen-year-old bro fixes his shoes in secret so I don't freak out.

I put the sneakers back. I leave his room. I close the door soft. That's when it hits me. The real weight of all this. Not just tired. Not just broke. The weight of knowing we're underwater and I feel the next wave coming to drown us with no clue how to stop it.

I go back to the kitchen. I sit on the cold tile 'cause the chairs make noise and I don't wanna wake Liam. I sit there in the dark with my knees to my chest and try to do the math again. Rent. Bills. Groceries. Liam's shoes. Dad's bar debts. Mom's meds I stopped buying 'cause she's been dead eighteen months and I still sometimes forget to cancel the auto-refill.

The numbers never add up. They're not supposed to.

My phone buzzes. Security alert from the firm. 1:45 AM.

"Shit, not now," I mutter, rubbing my burning eyes. I open the app. Grainy image, like always with those cheap cams the firm refuses to replace despite my requests. Eric's private elevator opens. Some guy steps out. Not Eric. Dude's in a dark hoodie, but he moves like a predator who knows the place. No hesitation. No glance at the cams. He knows exactly where he's going. He doesn't steal stuff. He heads straight to Eric's office, drops a red file on the marble. Then, slow and deliberate like a taunt, he opens it to the first page and slams it against the cam.

My name's scrawled across it in capital letters. CATHERINE FERMON. Below it, a blank line. Waiting. A contract. A deal with something I don't get yet. The stranger looks up at the cam. You can't see his face, just a smile that catches the infrared, white and cold like a blade. His fingers tap my name twice. Slow. Like a countdown. Then his lips move in slow-mo to the lens, and even though I don't hear shit through my phone screen I read it perfect on his mouth:

Sign.

The screen goes black. Connection lost.

I'm standing in my kitchen that reeks of defeat, phone in hand, and I realize my legs are shaking. My name. On a secret file dropped in my boss's office at midnight by some guy who knows my name and knows how to look me in the eye through a surveillance cam.

I let out a laugh. Short, bitter, nervous. The kinda laugh you make when you're too tired to be properly scared. I head back to the hall. I look at Liam's door. I think about the duct-taped sneakers. I think about the three eggs in the fridge. I think about the next wave.

Then I look at my phone's black screen again. I don't know what's in that file. I don't know who that guy is. I don't know why my name's on it or what it means or what shit I've just stepped in without even taking a step. But one thing's for sure. Tomorrow morning, 8 AM sharp, I'll be in that office. 'Cause I don't have a choice. Never have. And 'cause somewhere deep down, in that place I refuse to look too close, part of me wants to know what's in that file. Part of me wants it to be my name on it.

And that's what scares me most.