THE BILLIONAIRE ALPHA'S FORBIDDEN HYBRID

EMMA'S POV

The hum of the breakroom refrigerator sounded like a chainsaw inside my skull.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, counting backward from ten. Ten, nine, eight... Usually, the numbers helped; they built a wall between me and the noise. But tonight, the wall was paper-thin. I could hear the security guard in the lobby thirty floors down tapping his pen against his desk. I could hear the janitor on the floor above dragging a mop bucket across the tile. It was too much. It was always too much.

"You okay, Em?"

I jumped so hard my knee slammed into the underside of my desk. I pulled my hands away from my face and looked up. Sarah, one of the senior analysts, was standing at the edge of my cubicle with her coat on and her purse slung over her shoulder. She looked blurry, like a camera lens that wouldn't focus.

"I'm fine," I lied. The words tasted like lemon in my mouth. "Just a migraine. The lights in here are aggressive tonight."

Sarah frowned sympathetically. "You work too much. Seriously, Blackwell Global isn't going to collapse if you go home at a normal hour. It's nearly eight o'clock. Even the sharks in legal have gone home."

She smells like dying flowers, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. And fear. Why is she afraid?

I gritted my teeth. Shut up, Artemis, I thought, directing the command at the part of my brain Dr. Aris called my "dissociative projection."

"I just need to finish this risk assessment for the merger," I told Sarah, ignoring the voice. "Mr. Blackwell wants it on his desk by morning. You know how he is about deadlines."

"I know how he is about everything," Sarah said, lowering her voice and glancing around the empty office floor. "Terrifying. I rode the elevator with him yesterday. I swear the temperature dropped ten degrees. The man doesn't blink. Anyway, get some sleep, Emma. You look... well, you look like you need it."

"Thanks, Sarah. See you tomorrow."

I watched her walk toward the elevators. The sound of her heels clicking on the linoleum echoed like gunshots. Click. Click. Click.

Hungry, Artemis hissed again. That sandwich you ate was grass. We need real food. Rare. Bloody.

"It was a turkey club," I muttered out loud, opening my desk drawer. I rattled the orange prescription bottle and shook two white pills into my palm. Antipsychotics. Low dose. They were supposed to quiet the auditory hallucinations and dull the sensory overload. Dr. Aris said I had a unique presentation of schizophrenia, high-functioning, specifically focused on animalistic delusions.

I dry-swallowed the pills and waited for the fog to roll in. I hated the pills. They made me feel like I was moving through underwater currents, slow and heavy. But they were better than the alternative. The alternative was letting Artemis take the wheel, and the last time that happened, I woke up in a park