The first rule of surviving Thorne Group is simple: be forgettable.
So I wear black-framed glasses thick enough to blur my face. I hide in shapeless gray suits. I pull my hair into a knot so tight it gives me a headache by noon. I speak only when spoken to, carrying tablets, cold coffee, and other people's messes.
In a corporate empire run by apex predators, invisibility isn't just a skill.
For me, it's biological.
The penthouse boardroom sits on the eighty-eighth floor, all sharp lines and tinted glass. Inside, the air feels thick enough to chew. It reeks of money, expensive cologne, and wolf.
Too much wolf.
Dominant males smelling of cedar and aggression. Polished female executives wrapped in jasmine and ambition. Nervous Beta assistants radiating the sour edge of stress. Every emotion leaks out of them in a mess of pheromones they all pretend to control.
I smell none of it.
To them, I'm just Elara Vance from Data Analytics, temporarily filling in as board secretary because someone realized I type fast and don't ask stupid questions. The fact that no wolf in this building has ever stopped to ask what I am is the only reason I'm still alive.
At the head of the long mahogany table sits Silas Thorne.
He doesn't fidget. He barely blinks. The room still bends around him.
Dressed in immaculate black, his expression looks carved from ice. One hand rests flat on the table. The other turns a silver Montblanc pen with lazy precision, like he's deciding whether to sign a contract or stab someone in the throat.
I've worked here for nearly a year. I've seen arrogant men lose the ability to form full sentences under his stare. The rumors about the Alpha King live in stairwells and encrypted chats.
He's cursed.
He's a germaphobe.
He's clinically insane.
The truth is worse.
Silas Thorne suffers from Sensory Overload. Other wolves' pheromones don't just bother him. They drive pain straight into his nerves and push him toward something feral.
Right now, half the executives in this room are one bad quarterly report away from a bloodbath.
My tablet glows in my hands.
Slide 47.
Slide 48.
"Your numbers are garbage."
Silas's voice doesn't rise. It doesn't need to. It cuts through the room anyway.
The CFO, a Beta with more ambition than spine, freezes. "I—"
"Your debt exposure assumptions are a fairy tale." Silas clicks the pen once. "Did you think I wouldn't notice?"
Silence crashes down.
Outside, rain lashes the glass.
The CFO swallows hard, sweat gathering at his hairline. His panic is written all over him—in the twitch of his jaw, the shake in his fingers as he reaches for his tablet.
"Sir, if I could just explain the revised—"
Then the air changes.
A faint mechanical hiss slips through the ceiling vents.
A sharp synthetic bite floods the room.
The CFO jerks backward, claws ripping into the leather armrests. Across the table, a female director gasps and clutches her throat.
Sabotage.
Someone just pumped concentrated pheromones through the HVAC system. Aggression. Heat. Distress. Territorial challenge. Too many signals at once.
Chairs crash backward.
A junior analyst hits the floor, his body folding under instincts older than reason.
At the center of the chaos, Silas Thorne goes utterly still.
Snap.
The silver pen shatters in his grip. Dark ink spills across his knuckles like blood. He lifts his head.
His eyes are wrong.
The cold gray is gone, replaced by a furious crimson. His pupils blow wide. The veins in his neck stand out against his collar.
Then the Alpha aura drops.
It isn't a scent.
It's pressure.
Crushing. Absolute.
It slams through the room like a shockwave. Glass fractures on the side table. The CFO collapses against the table edge, gagging as if invisible hands are crushing his lungs.
My posture doesn't even shift.
I stand in the middle of the disaster, still holding my tablet, with one practical thought cutting through the chaos.
If he slaughters the executive board, my quarter-end bonus is gone.
Silas clears the length of the table in a blur. His hand closes around the CFO's throat and lifts him off the floor like he weighs nothing.
"Who," he snarls, voice rough and inhuman, "tampered with my air?"
No one answers.
No one can.
They're all choking under his presence.
And I'm standing in the middle of it, perfectly unaffected.
That is the first problem.
The second is worse.
If Thorne Group goes down, so do I.
And without Silas Thorne, the trail to my family's killers goes cold.
I lower my tablet slowly, watching the Alpha King hold a man over polished wood like he's deciding whether murder is worth the paperwork.
My quiet little life, it seems, is about to become extremely inconvenient.