Chapter 1

"On the phone, I was told the annual salary would be a million dollars."

I slid my phone across the table. The screen showed the offer email HR had sent me, official letterhead, company seal and all.

Sandra Biggs glanced down at it and slid the phone back.

"That was just a preliminary figure." She took a sip of her tea. "You just got back from overseas, and you don't have any domestic work experience. Company policy is that new hires start on probation. Mr. Pyatt's orders. Ease into it first, and we'll talk about a raise once you're off probation."

"How long is probation?"

"Depends on your performance." She set her pen down on the contract. "Are you signing or not? If you're not, that's fine too. There's a line of people waiting behind you."

I picked up the pen.

"Ms. Biggs, did Mr. Pyatt personally approve this?"

"Of course." She tapped the signature in the corner of the contract. "Company seal, his signature, all of it's real."

I signed my name at the bottom. My hand didn't shake.

"Where do I sit?"

Sandra was a little stunned, like she hadn't expected me to sign so readily.

She pointed down the hallway. "Over there, the temporary desk. You'll be helping out the acquisitions team for now. They're short-staffed."

I picked up my bag and walked the length of the office floor. Every head on that floor turned to size me up.

Someone lowered their voice. "That's the one who came back from Wall Street?"

"Wall Street? More like the three-thousand-dollar Wall Street guy."

Laughter trailed after me.

The desk in the corner turned out to be an old table dragged out from beside the conference room, missing a leg and propped up on a stack of scrap paper.

I set my laptop down and turned it on.

I didn't go back to my rented apartment that night. There was something I needed to do first.

I exported every call recording and every email exchange from before my hiring and archived them.

Then I opened my old overseas email account and sent a message to a former colleague still working at a hedge fund.

[I need you to pull some records for me. The overseas asset Pyatt Energy is about to acquire, financial statements for the past three years; the more detailed the better.]

The reply came back fast. [I thought you went home to live the easy life. Why are you still doing this?]

I looked at that line for a while before answering.

My father was lying in a hospital bed back home. The ventilator alone cost half a month's pay every single day.

I needed this job.

But more than that, I wanted to know one thing.

What gave anyone the right to say "ease into it" and knock a person's worth down from a million dollars to three thousand, just like that.

I tucked the offer letter into the innermost pocket of my bag, against my back.

It weighed almost nothing.

And yet, it burned like a hot iron, the kind that keeps you up at night.

I wasn't angry.

I was counting my ammunition.