CHAPTER 2
"Isabelle" Adrain called.
My name, delivered in that voice. You know the voice. The one that makes you feel like you've been summoned to the principal's office, a courtroom, and your own funeral simultaneously. I closed my
eyes, took a breath that did absolutely nothing for my nervous system, and pivoted with what I hoped was a professional smile.
Judging by the way my cheek twitched, it was probably more of a hostage grimace.
"Adrian! Good morning! I was just..." I pointed vaguely toward the general direction of my desk. My finger wavered. "Going to my... area. To do... finance things. Money stuff. Spreadsheets. You know how it is."
He was standing by his desk. His glass desk. The one that probably cost more than my annual salary and always made me terrified I'd smudge it. Tall, unfairly well-tailored, cheekbones that could cut diamonds or possibly sever an artery. His expression was unreadable. So, you know, his only expression.
"You're late."
"Am I?" I made a theatrical show of looking at my wrist. My bare wrist. Because my watch was on my nightstand. Where I'd left it. Along with my dignity and my will to live. "Huh. Would you look at that. Time. It's a concept. Very fluid. Subjective, really."
"Seventeen minutes." He said it like I'd personally insulted his ancestors. "This is the fourth occurrence this month."
"Fourth?" I squinted, genuinely surprised. "Really? I thought it was the third. I've been keeping a mental tally. There's a little chalkboard in my brain. In my defense, the chalkboard is very small and the handwriting is terrible because it's my brain handwriting."
His jaw tightened. Just slightly. A tiny muscle near his left ear did something that, on a normal human, might eventually become a facial expression. On Adrian, it was practically a primal scream.
"You look," he said, his grey eyes doing that scanning thing that always made me feel like a spreadsheet he was auditing, "like you fought sleep and lost. Decisively."
"That's because I did." The words came out before my brain could tackle them and shove them back down my throat. "I was working on the Morrison projections. The ones you said were 'urgent but not critical.' Which I've learned, through three years of careful study and emotional trauma, is your secret code for 'drop everything and do this immediately or I'll be disappointed in a very quiet and devastating way that will haunt your dreams.'"
Something flickered in his eyes. Irritation, probably. Or indigestion. Hard to tell with him.
"You stayed late."
"I stayed until 'late' gave up, went home, and 'early' clocked in for its shift. I watched the cleaning crew arrive, do their entire routine, and leave. I bonded with a security guard named Gerald. He showed me pictures of his cat, Professor Snuggles. I know things about Professor Snuggles now. Things I can never unknow."
I gestured vaguely at my entire situation. The mismatched earrings, the misbuttoned blouse, the haunted look in my eyes. "Hence the... everything. It's a theme. My theme is chaos. It's an aesthetic choice."
Adrian didn't crack a smile. He didn't even glance at the taco earring, which was frankly hurtful because it was a very good taco. Detailed. Artisanal. Instead, he simply walked back behind his desk with that infuriating grace—how did a man that tall move so quietly? was he part cat?—and sat down. Then he pulled a folder from his drawer. The drawer. The one that seemed to contain an endless supply of pain and suffering and probably several damned souls.
"The Kelman audit," he said, placing it on the desk. The sound it made was soft but final. Like a coffin lid closing. "Complete forensic review. All flagged transactions from the last five years."
I blinked. Blinked again. My brain, running on two hours of sleep and a granola bar of questionable age, took a moment to process this information.
"The Kelman audit? That's..."
"Three thousand pages of cross-referenced expenditure anomalies."
"A month's worth of work. Easily. Possibly two. If we're being realistic. Which we should be. Realism is important."
"You have until Thursday."
The word "Thursday" entered my ears, traveled to my brain, and detonated.
"Thursday?" My voice did something I'd never heard it do before. It cracked, soared, and landed somewhere in the vocal range of a startled seagull. "That's—Thursday is—today is Tuesday. So that's barely three days. That's not even—" I started counting on my fingers. "Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Three days. One of which is already seventeen minutes shorter because I was late. Which you pointed out. Multiple times. Math isn't mathing, Adrian."
He looked at me with that infuriating calm. The calm of a man who had never been late to anything in his entire life. Who probably emerged from the womb precisely on his due date, wearing a tiny suit, and apologized to his mother for the inconvenience.
"Perhaps if you'd arrived on time, you'd have an extra seventeen minutes."
A laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep in my chest. It wasn't a happy laugh. It was the laugh of a woman who had transcended stress and entered an entirely new plane of existence. Stress Level: Ascended.
"Seventeen minutes isn't going to dent a five-year forensic audit! What's next, Adrian? You want me to reorganize the entire client database by star sign? Alphabetize the paperclips by emotional significance? Recite the company handbook backward while balancing a coffee cup on my head?"
"The paperclips are already alphabetized."
"Of course they are. Of course they are." I picked up the folder. It weighed approximately as much as my emotional baggage, which was really saying something. I hugged it to my chest like a very unfulfilling teddy bear. "Can I ask you a question? A genuine, potentially career-ending question?"
"I imagine you'll ask it regardless."
"Correct. Great. Here it is." I took a breath. My filter, long since dissolved by exhaustion, had completely abandoned me. It was probably napping somewhere. Lucky filter. "Why do you only do this to me? Hm? Morrison stays late once and gets a thank-you note and a fruit basket. A fruit basket, Adrian. It had kiwis. Davis once crashed the entire server, like the whole thing, blue screen of death on every computer in the building, and you gave him a high five. An actual palm-to-palm high five. I saw it happen. But I—" I gestured at myself again, nearly dropping the folder. "I forget to set my third alarm because I was up until 3 AM doing YOUR projections, and suddenly I'm personally responsible for auditing the Kelman account into the underworld?"
Adrian went very still. It was the kind of stillness that made me remember, suddenly and viscerally, that this man could fire me. Could probably destroy my entire career with a single email. An email that would be perfectly formatted with zero egregious semicolons.
But I was too tired to stop.
"Last month," I continued, my mouth operating entirely independently of my survival instincts, "when I spilled coffee on the quarterly report, you made me redo the entire formatting. By hand. Remember? No copy-paste allowed. 'To ensure attention to detail,' you said. But when Henderson spilled coffee on your actual shoes—your very expensive, probably cost-more-than-my-rent shoes—you told him accidents happen and asked me to grab you a latte. As part of my punishment. For the first coffee incident. Which made it two coffee incidents. Neither of which were my fault. I don't even like coffee. The smell gives me a headache."
Adrian's mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again.
Reader, I swear to you, his ears turned pink.
"Your work," he said, and his voice was slightly rougher than usual, like he'd swallowed sandpaper, "is held to a higher standard."
"Than Henderson's?" I was laughing again, but it was the incredulous laugh of someone who'd seen too much. "Henderson makes six figures and I watched him eat a crayon once. He thought it was a protein stick. He chewed it for a full minute before he realized his mistake. A full minute, Adrian."
"Because—"
He stood up so abruptly that his chair rolled backward and hit the window with a thud. I may have flinched. I may have also made a small squeaking noise. I'll deny both under oath.
"Because you're..."
He came around the desk. One step. Two steps. Three. Close enough that I could see the subtle pattern in his tie—a deep navy with thin silver stripes, very CEO, very boring—and the way his throat moved as he swallowed. His Adam's apple bobbed. I'd never noticed he had an Adam's apple before. It was a very nice Adam's apple. Why was I noticing his Adam's apple?
"You're..."
My heart, which had been doing a lazy Tuesday shuffle, suddenly remembered it was an organ with responsibilities. It started pounding against my ribs like it was trying to escape. I couldn't blame it. I wanted to escape too. Probably.
"I'm late," I whispered, clutching the Kelman folder to my chest like a shield. "I know that part. We've covered it. Extensively."
"No." His voice dropped. It was quieter now, rougher, and it did something deeply unfair to my nervous system. "You're... infuriating."
"That's not better."
"You stay late when no one asks you to." He was listing things now, ticking them off like criminal charges at an arraignment. "You bring coffee for the interns. Even the ones whose names you can't remember. You fixed the printer that one time with a paperclip and—what did you call it?"
"Sheer willpower," I whispered.
"Sheer willpower. Correct." He stepped closer. I stepped back. My shoulder blades met the wall. When did I get so close to the wall? Was the wall always there? "You wear taco earrings to a board meeting—"
"It was an ACCIDENT, I grabbed the wrong—"
"And I can't—" He stopped. Right there. Inches away. Close enough that I could smell his cologne, something expensive and woodsy and entirely too distracting for a Tuesday morning. "I don't know how to—"
The door burst open.