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CHAPTER 11

last update Data de publicação: 2026-08-28 06:06:25

The 40th-floor finance suite was usually a temple of quiet calculation. At ten o'clock on Monday morning, it sounded like a minor war.

"Absolutely not." Carter Cross didn't look up from his tablet, his voice clipped and precise. "You cannot reallocate thirty thousand dollars to custom video rendering without a three-tier sign-off. That's not me being difficult, Miss Bennett. That's the actual policy."

Across the table, Chloe Bennett — Elena's creative lead, all bright lipstick and barely contained energy — threw her hands up. "The policy was written for a department that still thought stock footage was cutting-edge, Carter. I'm trying to make something people actually want to watch."

"And I'm trying to make sure this company doesn't get audited into the ground." Carter finally looked up, rimless glasses catching the light. "You submitted this request forty minutes before the deadline. Did you think urgency would make me skip the review?"

"I thought urgency might make you human for once," Chloe shot back, leaning over the table, close enough that Carter's carefully neutral expression flickered, just for a second, into something less composed.

He recovered quickly. "My formulas keep this department from collapsing under your creative impulses."

"And my creative impulses are the reason anyone remembers your campaigns a year later," Chloe said, straightening up and sliding a signed budget note across the table. "This is approved by Elena. Sign the release."

Carter looked at the paper, then at her, a slow and entirely reluctant smirk tugging at one corner of his mouth. "You're going to be a problem, aren't you."

"I'm going to be your favorite problem," Chloe said, flashing a grin as she gathered her folders and marched out, heels clicking a triumphant beat against the marble.

Carter stared after her for a beat longer than strictly necessary before signing the release himself.

---

Elena caught the tail end of the story from Chloe that afternoon, delivered with the kind of relish reserved for a genuinely satisfying win.

"You should've seen his face," Chloe said, dropping into the chair across from Elena's desk. "Like I'd personally offended his entire worldview by asking for forty thousand dollars in under an hour."

"Did you actually need it in under an hour?"

"No," Chloe admitted. "But it's more fun when he's flustered."

Elena laughed — a real one, the first in a few days that hadn't been braced against something. It was good, she thought, to be reminded that not every relationship in this building had to be a chess match. Some of them could just be Chloe baiting the CFO's protégé into blushing over budget forms.

"Speaking of fun," Chloe added, her tone shifting, quieter now, "I actually came by for something real. You know Mark's dog?"

Elena's smile faded slightly. "Barnaby."

"My contact over at his building says he's been leaving him with a sitter who barely shows up. Locking him out on the balcony for hours. Petty, spiteful stuff — the kind of thing a man does when he's losing and wants something to control."

Elena felt an old, protective ache settle in her chest. She'd all but raised that dog during her years with Mark — walked him every morning before work, fed him when Mark forgot, more times than she could count.

"That's not okay," Elena said quietly.

"No," Chloe agreed. "It's not."

Neither of them said the next part out loud yet — that a rescue mission was forming somewhere just beneath the surface of the conversation, half joke and half genuine plan. But Elena filed it away, next to everything else she was quietly gathering. Mark's contracts. Serena's signature. The hang-up call. Leo's fear on the sidewalk.

One more thread, tangled somewhere in with all the others.

---

That evening, walking to the elevator, Elena passed the finance suite and glimpsed Carter still at his desk, reviewing what looked suspiciously like Chloe's original video-rendering request — not to reject it this time, but to see if there was a version of it he could actually approve without breaking policy.

She didn't say anything. She just smiled to herself and kept walking, filing that observation away too, in the small, quiet corner of her mind reserved for things that were good, and simple, and worth holding onto while everything else grew more complicated by the day.

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  • A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH MY EX'S UNCLE    CHAPTER 20

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  • A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH MY EX'S UNCLE    CHAPTER 18

    Friday arrived with the particular tension of a day everyone involved had been quietly dreading and looking forward to in equal measure. By six o'clock, the group thread had gone almost entirely silent — the calm before what Gavin had, unhelpfully, taken to calling "H-hour," a term Viktor had immediately banned him from using out loud in the building.Elena had spent most of the afternoon unable to focus on anything else, checking her phone under her desk between meetings like a teenager waiting for a text back. She'd told herself, more than once, that it was ridiculous to be this invested in the logistics of moving one dog three floors down and out a service elevator. It didn't stop her from checking again five minutes later.Viktor positioned himself in the security office, monitors arrayed in front of him, a direct line to Marco's radio open on the desk. Gavin sat two floors up in an empty conference room, laptop open to Mark's calendar and the building's badge-access logs, ready t

  • A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH MY EX'S UNCLE    CHAPTER 17

    Chloe walked the route on Wednesday evening exactly as instructed, a lanyard borrowed from a temp badge Viktor had quietly authorized clipped to her blazer, a takeout bag in one hand as cover in case anyone questioned why a member of the creative team was loitering near the executive elevator bank after hours.Nobody questioned her. That was, she reflected, either a good sign for the plan or a genuinely alarming commentary on the building's security — though given that Viktor himself had approved the route, she suspected it was more the former.She timed the elevator ride to the penthouse floor — ninety seconds, longer than she expected, the express car apparently slower than the ones serving the lower floors. She timed the walk from the elevator to Mark's door — thirty seconds at a normal pace, less if you didn't stop to admire the absurd modern art he'd hung in the hallway, which Chloe did anyway, on principle, because it was truly baffling. She noted the housekeeper's car still in

  • A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH MY EX'S UNCLE    CHAPTER 16

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  • A ONE-NIGHT STAND WITH MY EX'S UNCLE    CHAPTER 15

    Carter found Elena in the middle of restacking a pile of vendor contracts that had somehow multiplied overnight, the particular chaos of a desk belonging to someone who had too many active problems and not enough hours to solve any of them properly."You have a minute?" he asked, already closing the door behind him without waiting for permission — a habit Elena had learned meant whatever he wanted to say wasn't for the open floor."Depends what kind of minute.""The kind where I tell you something that's going to make you angry at Mark, which I realize is not exactly breaking news at this point."Elena set down the contract she was holding. "Go on."Carter told her about Barnaby — the missed feedings, the two days alone in the penthouse, the housekeeper quietly absorbing a responsibility that wasn't hers because nobody else would. He watched Elena's expression shift as he spoke, the careful professional mask cracking just slightly at the edges."That's not neglect," Elena said finally

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