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19 - Regret
Firmly caught between Atlas Grayson and a hard place, Jia had nowhere to run. She couldn’t even muster up the courage to glance around for an escape route, for fear of breaking the stare that he had entangled her with like a sea turtle in a fishing net. Instinct told her that the moment she looked away, he would make her regret it.
“I thought you had something to say, Ms. Moon.”
Jia swallowed hard past the growing lump in her throat. “I - I did, sir” she squeaked, failing miserably in her attempt to stand her ground and hide her panic. Her voice completely broke on the last syllable.
“Ms. Moon?”
“Y-yes? Sir?”
Atlas relaxed his arms that remained braced against the closed elevator doors on either side of Jia. He slowly leaned in, forcing her to press herself back harder into the metal. Maybe if she exerted herself, she thought, she could melt into the doors and become one with the buildi
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In the Shadow of the CEO 21 - Reservations
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In the Shadow of the CEO 22 - Dolores Munson
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In the Shadow of the CEO 23 - Wretched
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In the Shadow of the CEO 24 - Sober
“Thanks, Mark. We’ll take care of her from here. And, um, good work.” Jia carefully patted the man on the single dry patch of his suit jacket. He reeked of rich wine even now despite having spent the last ten minutes airing himself out while Jia wrestled the half-comatose Dolly into the cramped backseat of Atlas’s car.Why had he brought a sports car knowing he would be carrying three passengers? It had just enough room to seat two; the backseat shouldn’t even qualify as anything other than maybe an oversized cup holder. There were talents roaming around Pandora’s lobby right now carrying purses that were bigger.“I…”“It’s fine, Mark,” she assured him before he could finish his stumbling sentence. “Mr. Grayson and I are on a bit of a schedule, so we’ll go ahead and leave, okay?”He made a vaguely assenting but also reluctant sound that Jia suspected she shouldn’t unpack. She wanted to get out of here.
In the Shadow of the CEO 25 - Normal
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In the Shadow of the CEO 26 - Iconic
“In one hundred feet. Turn. Left.”There was something about the sultry woman’s voice slithering from the car’s speakers that made Jia highly uncomfortable. Crammed into the backseat like this (the semi-sober Dolly was riding shotgun now), Jia could feel the reverberations of the GPS directions fluttering around her ears. Thankfully, they were in a slightly less packed (and less popular) part of the city, and she could see an empty spot by the curb where they could park on the street. Soon, she’d be rid of the artificial female voice for at least a little while -“What is this place, Ms. Moon.”Atlas’s voice cut through the vehicle’s tiny interior like a frozen scythe, and she turned her head slightly to look at him instead of the street ahead through the windshield. While she wasn’t an expert on the man’s habits yet, she was certain that that definitely wasn’t an impressed inflection to his words she was hearing. He only had about three typic
In the Shadow of the CEO 27 - Missing
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