Page 44 of Witchwolf

I had about half a second before she told Igarashi Minori to go fuck herself, I realized with some clarity.

I stepped between them. “That sounds reasonable to me,” I said. “You want Crescent to take care of their people, and wouldn’t want to be associated with a company that didn’t. I think Crescent rather feels the same way.” Turning back toward Minori, I lifted a brow. “Of course, Maia can help prove to you how we treat our employees. We’ll have to figure out how that will work the other way, don’t you think? How one treats one’s coworkers is very important.”

“I fired him,” she said, point blank and apparently changing the subject. But she wasn’t changing the subject. She was talking about the man in the meeting who’d called the Crescent people beasts.

I nodded to that. “Probably for the best. You wouldn’t want someone to bring shame on your company, and he was trying rather hard to do so.”

She made a face like she’d just bitten into a piece of wax fruit, and nodded. “Indeed.”

Maia, on the other hand, was flummoxed. “Um, who are we talking about?”

“The man who called us beasts at the meeting.”

Maia scowled at that, as did Minori, but not at each other, so that was a start. Also, neither of them denied that I’d been included in that particular “us,” so that seemed like a good sign to me. Maia was accepting me as part of Crescent, and Minori understood where my loyalties were.

I considered, then shrugged. “Maia, do you have time to go over the compensation package the company offers?” Even as she nodded, I swung my attention back to Minori. “Which I’d like to say is one of the most generous I’ve ever even heard of—and address everything else you want to know. And maybe while she gets that, you can tell me why the contracts you sent over are so vague on intellectual property?”

That, unlike anything before it, got Minori’s attention. “They what?”

I smiled like a shark. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you decided to visit, Igarashi-san. Let me go get the contracts.”

I left them together, Maia explaining the paid-time-off system that Crescent had implemented, since as wolves, they apparently didn’t get the common cold, but as she said, still deserved time off for other things. Sometimes, she was explaining as the elevator closed behind me, a person just needs a day off.

For the first time since I’d met her, Igarashi Minori was smiling at something.

20

Jax

Kent stayed behind to show me some contracts, smiling like the cat who’d gotten the cream. I didn’t think he particularly enjoyed spending time in HR, and I knew, thanks to no small amount of griping from Jillian, that the women in the pack found him irksome.

Apparently, he’d asked my sister out more than once. If he weren’t so personable, I might’ve thought he was vying for my place as alpha and trying to use my sister to get there, but Jillian and I had founded Crescent together. He wasn’t prying me out of the CEO’s suite, and Jillian was more than capable of handling any unwanted attention.

If she ever wasn’t, she knew all she had to do was come to me. So far, whenever I brought it up, she waved it off and said Kent was fine—albeit with a rather dramatic eyeroll.

He was good in the office, good at handling people, charming with clients and partners alike, but he had those same wolfish instincts that made some alphas downright intolerable. I couldn’t judge him too hard, though. Wasn’t I prone to dig my heels in when I thought I knew right? I tried not to bethatkind of alpha, but it took time and effort.

Mostly, I chalked Kent’s posturing up to arrogance and leaning too hard on old pack dynamics to figure out where he belonged. If we tossed out every werewolf who’d gotten in their own head about hierarchy and strutted around trying to find a mate, we wouldn’t have much of a pack left.

He was... well, he was better than when he’d joined us. He hadn’t been there at my side when I fought the alpha like Seth had. He didn’t know what we’d fought for and what we’d risked. He certainly hadn’t been sleeping half a dozen to a room, scraping to get by.

But he’d chosen us, and he was willing to learn. That was what I wanted in my pack—people who hoped for something better and were willing to compromise to get it.

Overall, I thought Kent was a decent guy, an asset. He just needed a little more time to settle. We all had, at first. How many times had Seth grabbed me by the back of the neck and growled that I was being a fucking asshole before I learned how to say what I meant like a goddamn adult?

Though I tried to be patient, sometimes, he still got under my skin.

Like a while later, when he stretched, setting work aside, and leaned in conspiratorially.

“Man,” he said, flashing his gleaming white canines, “I’ve got to know—did twinkledee out there get the job before or after you started rubbing your scent all over him?”

Dakota. Kent was talking about Dakota.

When a low rumble sounded in my throat, he held up his hands. “No offense, but you can’t blame me for being curious. You don’t normally bring this stuff into the office.”

My nose flared.

He was right. I didn’t normally date at work.

---