8. Charlotte

Charlotte

Still, it was good to know where the woman stood. The next couple of days would be a trial by fire, but they’d let Charlotte know exactly what she could expect from her.

“Good, then consider the next couple of days as your job interview. I’ll be assessing your attitude, your ability to fit in seamlessly with what I need, and your ability to anticipate not only the mood of the room, but the needs of the people in it.”

“No pressure,” Bonny said with another bright giggle.

Charlotte fixed her with a steady gaze. “Bonny, I want to make this absolutely clear. With lots of pressure. The news hasn’t leaked yet, but an absolute tragedy happened this morning, two young lives were lost, one shifter, one human. Tensions between our peoples is at an all-time high and the incident took place in Branxton. What we do in the next few days will determine the course of human-shifter relationships for the next few centuries. You don’t get much more high-pressure than this, and if you can’t keep up with me, I need you to step back and get out of the way right now.”

Bonny blinked at her. “Someone died?” she whispered. “How awful.”

That’s what she took from everything Charlotte had just said? There was no way this was going to work.

Sighing, Charlotte looked up and down the hallway, trying to find some sign of where it was she was supposed to be going, because Bonny hadn’t even begun to move in either direction.

“Okay Bonny, I can see this isn’t going to work. What I need right now, is for you to focus long enough to get me to the conference room. I’ll take it from there.”

“No, wait, I can do this?” Bonny pleaded, gripping onto her arm. “I’m the right person, you’ll see, just give me a chance.”

If anything, she was only making herself look worse.

“First of all, let go of my arm. Now,” Charlotte said coldly, her anger beginning to rise. Movement from the corner of her eye had her turning defensively, only to relax when she saw it was a security guard rounding the corner.

“Ma’am, let the acting senator go right now, and step back toward the wall,” he said in an authoritative voice.

Bonny jumped as though stung, but only clutched at Charlotte tighter.

“No, no, you’ve got it wrong, I’m not hurting her. I’d never hurt her. She just needs to listen to me for a second,” Bonny explained frantically.

A second guard rounded the corner, the two of them advancing steadily.

She could see exactly how this was going to play out. The foolish younger woman was already panicking, and the threat posed by the two larger male shifters would only make her beast more upset. This would make her begin to shift, her claws would come out, digging into Charlotte’s arm, albeit accidentally, but wounding her enough that not only would she have difficulty typing, but possibly also to the point where she wouldn’t be fit to attend the press conference.

Which meant she had to prevent it, before things could become overly-complicated, and this stupid young woman ruined her own life with charges of assault and more.

“Stop right there,” Charlotte commanded, the authority in her voice making the men halt immediately. “Bonny, you are not in trouble, but if you don’t let me go now, you will be. Do you understand?”

Bonny let her go like she was diseased, even going so far as to leap back a step or two, before raising her hands in the air. “I didn’t do anything,” Bonny protested. “I just needed her to listen to me.”

Now that the other woman had let her go, Charlotte was able to examine her properly. Her pulse pounded at her throat, her pupils were dilated three times the size of a human’s, and highlights already brightened her blonde hair. Her lioness was close to the surface, clouding the woman’s thoughts, likely since she’d scented the president. It meant she wasn’t as stupid as she appeared to be, just heavily affected by the man’s natural pheromones.

“She’s in a hormone haze,” Charlotte said with a sigh.

The guards looked around, confusedly. There was nobody else near them, so they didn’t understand what was going on.

“The president was just here, talking to both of us,” Charlotte explained. “She’s a lioness. I’m telling you, she’s in a haze. One of you needs to get her down to medical and supervised until she snaps out of it. The other needs to show me where the damn conference room is.”

The guard who first rounded the corner gave a flick of his head to the other one, who stepped forward and put an arm around the bewildered woman’s shoulders.

“Just go with him, Bonny. You’ve had a funny turn and he’s going to get the doctor to check you out,” Charlotte told her gently.

“But I need to tell you something,” Bonny said, becoming agitated again.

“You already did, honey. Don’t you remember? You told me all about it, and then you had your funny turn. So, we’re going to look after you, and when you’re feeling better, you and I will have a cup of tea and a good old chat and see what we can work out, okay?”

“Oh, okay,” she replied, settling again. “I’ve got to go now, but we’ll talk later.”

The guard at her side waited until the lift doors had closed behind them and the light had flickered down two levels before speaking to her.

“Are you really going?—”

Charlotte interrupted him. “Not a fucking chance. Now, where is the damn conference room?”

A smile lit his face, before he chuckled, bright white teeth gleaming against his ebony skin. She liked a man with good teeth, especially if he knew how to use them in the bedroom. He inhaled deeply, likely scenting her interest, his eyes becoming heavy lidded, and his smile a little darker.

“If you’ll come this way, I’ll see you get everything you need,” he said huskily.

The double entendre wasn’t lost on her, and she smiled back. Maybe living and working at The Seat was going to be better than she thought. Then she remembered exactly why she was there, and that hope deflated faster than a man’s interest when he realised she was smart.

Still, she’d take the perks where she found them, and this guard might very well turn out to be one of them. Her owl protested at that, flooding her mind with images of the president. That was more than she could take right then. The one thing she wasn’t going to do, couldn’t do, shouldn’t do, was think of her boss — her boss’s boss to be fair — in any other way than as a boss.

Although she’d bet he was bossy in the bedroom too.

Dammit!

Charlotte had only been to the public areas of The Seat before, and even then she’d only visited a handful of times, so to see this side, the back end of the power corridors, so to speak, was both a novelty and a privilege she knew would never get old. She was glad the guard — Zeke according to his nametag — was with her. She would never have found her way through this rabbit’s warren on her own.

“What do you know of the assistants and interns that work here,” Charlotte asked her guide.

His stride faltered for a moment, before he gently took her elbow and steered her down another side corridor.

“How bad is it?” he asked her quietly, which was when she realised he’d taken advantage of her trust and pulled her aside.

“About as bad as you can think. We’re talking about civil unrest, riots, and possibly civil war, and if it comes to that, we won’t win.”

Zeke blinked at her in shock, then smirked. She knew what he was thinking, they could easily overpower the humans in this country, but he wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. The global picture.

Charlotte sighed. “And after we defeat the humans, how long do you think it will be before the other nations, those less friendly to shifters, will start launching the nukes?”

It hurt to see the confidence wiped from his face. The concept that they were truly stuck in the system they’d adopted, finally hammering home for him.

“If we were ever to gain control of this country, it would have to be peacefully, and in full concordance with its human citizens. Even then, we’d still be fighting off those who think we should cease to exist. We’d never be safe, and they would think nothing of sacrificing the humans who had turned their back on their own kind, their own species, to throw their lot in with us.” She shook her head. “As much as we hate it, we have to play the long game, which means making changes here, making them stick, and then waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.”

“So, you need someone with a big picture mentality, but able to fade into the background and do their job. Confident enough to stand up to the idiots, but sensible enough to know when to keep their head down.”

She nodded. “They need to be fast on their feet, both mentally and physically, able to hold their own in hand to hand without relying on partial shifting, and smart enough to anticipate what I need before I even know I need it.”

“I know the perfect guy,” Zeke said with a grin. “They won’t see him coming, you won’t see him coming. He looks and acts like a submissive little bitch, but he’s anything but. He’s just slow to anger, and not a fan of violence. I’ve seen him talk circles around those trying to bully him, take down a pair of wolves larger than him, and all without getting a single hair out of place.”

“And the downside?” Charlotte asked. “Because I can think of fifty different jobs where he’d be snapped up and given a chance. There has to be a reason nobody has done it before.”

The sad look he gave her warned her the reason would be a doozy.

“It’s his eyes,” Zeke said simply. “They’re unusual enough that they freak people out. He has a wall-eye that points completely off to the side. There’s no wondering which one to look at, the damn thing never points forward.”

That was unusual, but not reason enough to ignore the guy. She frowned at him. There had to be more to it than that.

“Plus he has heterochromia. So, the freaky eye is blue, like it’s blind, but he’s totally not, and the normal eye is brown. The thing is, his binocular vision is weak, because the eyes operate independently. Like a fish or something he said. He can see equally well with both, so while he’s looking at you, he can be reading a poster on his left, and his brain just processes it all.”

“But his binocular vision isn’t good?” What the fuck did that mean?

“Yeah, like his depth perception. When he goes to grab a door handle, sometimes he’ll miss, or he tries to pick up his coffee mug and knocks it over instead. His computer has larger font and shit, and so does his phone. He often gets them both to read his emails to him and stuff, so he’ll always have an earbud in one ear.”

“And what, because he looks a little different, people ignore his other talents?” She was finding this harder and harder to believe.

Zeke huffed a sigh. “You know what people are like. You’re a shifter. You’ve experienced prejudice and discrimination because you’re different. Roly? He’s a freak amongst freaks. People are superstitious, especially shifters, people say he’s cursed or evil or fucking anything they can think to throw at him, but he’s just a really cool, really smart guy.”

“You know him well then?” Charlotte surmised.

Rather than denying it, Zeke shrugged. “He came up to me one day, told me one of the guys I was playing cards with was cheating, totally swindling us all. We could never catch him at it, but Roly told me what to watch for, and sure enough, the fucker was. He begged me not to tell the others where I’d gotten the information from, because he knew they’d all turn on him, blame him for not warning them earlier or something. Or worse, they’d tell the guy he’d figured it out, and the guy would get revenge.”

Yeah, that sounded exactly like how it would play out. Zeke was one of the guys, with enough plausible deniability he’d be able to get away with something like that. This guy, Roly, if that was even his name, would be singled out for what was truly an altruistic act of kindness.

“And his name is Roly?”

“Roland,” Zeke told her, hope in his gaze. “Roland Fitzgerald.”

“What kind of shifter is he?”

“Lynx,” he replied, holding up a hand to forestall the protest he could see coming. “One, he’s straight, like not even sharing a girl with a buddy straight. Two, he’s not a big cat. Yeah, they’re bigger, but not the big cat type. The president has no effect on him whatsoever. So that thing you just had with the lioness? Not gonna to happen,”

Well, that removed her last concern. “Fine, get me a meeting with him as soon as you can. Where’s he currently working?”

“He’s an intern in finance. They’ve got him running the fucking copying machine, like he doesn’t have a degree in politics and a masters in communication.”

“On paper he sounds perfect,” Charlotte told him. “I’m still going to need to meet him. I don’t give a fuck what his eyes are like, or if he occasionally knocks stuff over. If he can do the job and make things easier for me, then I’m happy. That’s all I’m asking for.”

Zeke beamed at her. “Man did me a solid, you know? I just wanna pay him back. Not the job,” he hastened to add, when she frowned at him. “Just putting his name forward, getting him noticed by the right people.”

“And you think I’m the right person?” Charlotte asked drily.

The man looked her up and down twice, licking his lips before answering. “Yes, Ma’am. I think you’re exactly the right kind of person.”