MasukThe office door closes behind me and the noise of the floor disappears like someone cut a wire.Just us. Just the hum of the building and the last gold light pressing through the windows and Liam, already moving toward his desk with that unhurried ease that makes even the most chaotic situations feel like they were always under control.I stay by the door."That wasn't right," I say.He glances back. "Which part?""Firing Ava." I push off the door and cross toward him, because if I'm going to say this I'm going to say it to his face. "She was provocative and she staged the whole thing, and I'm not saying she didn't deserve consequences — but firing her on the spot? The moment I showed up? Liam, her family has connections all over this city. That's going to land on you."Liam looks at me for a long moment.Then he asks — completely calm, like it's a genuine inquiry and not a trap — "Was it satisfying? When I did it?"
Liam sees me before he sees anything else.That's the thing I notice first — the way his gaze moves across the floor and finds me with the immediate, locked-in precision of a man whose attention has exactly one priority in this room. Then he clocks the rest of it: the shattered mug, the soaked documents fanning out across the floor, the coffee still dripping off the desk edge in slow, deliberate arcs.His expression doesn't change. It never does. But his stillness shifts quality — becomes the specific, contained stillness of someone deciding something very quickly and very quietly."What happened here?"His voice carries without effort — low, level, the kind of tone that doesn't need volume because the room already belongs to it completely. Every keyboard stops. Every pretense of busyness evaporates.Ava moves first.She steps forward before I can draw a breath, and the performance she delivers is seamless &md
"Stop it, Jess." I feel the heat climbing up my neck before she's even finished the sentence.Jess grins wider. She has always had the specific gift of finding the exact pressure point and pressing it with absolute precision and zero remorse. "I'm just saying — the CEO's wife, using the staff elevator, no announcement, no entourage — very mysterious. Very romantic." She sighs theatrically. "He's in a meeting, by the way. Probably another hour.""I'll wait in his office.""Of course you will."I move through the open floor plan — the long rows of desks, the familiar hum of keyboards, the particular concentrated energy of a floor full of people who are extremely good at pretending they aren't looking at me while looking directly at me. I've walked this space before. Spent a month navigating it as an intern, invisible and unremarkable, learning the rhythms of this building from the bottom.I am not invisible anymore.Every hea
Felicity stares at Adam like he just spoke in a language she doesn't have the capacity to process."What did you say?" Her voice comes out cracked at the edges, all that carefully reconstructed composure fracturing in real time.Adam doesn't repeat himself. He doesn't need to. He turns to Director Harmon with the clean, unhurried certainty of someone who made this decision before he walked through the door and has no interest in being argued out of it."I'll take the role," he says. "Give us the two weeks."Director Harmon looks between us — me, Adam, Felicity, the wreckage of whatever just happened in this office — and makes the calculation that a woman in her position makes when the most magnetic student on campus hands her exactly the outcome that's best for the school's centennial event."Done," she says. "Rehearsals start tomorrow. Don't waste the time."We file out.The hallway outside the administrative offices is w
Felicity lunges.Not at me. At Chloe — hand raised, fury past the point of calculation, moving with the blind momentum of someone who has stopped caring what happens next as long as something breaks.She doesn't get there.My hand closes around her wrist in the same half-second her arm swings, and muscle memory — ten years of Taekwondo, ten years of early mornings and bruised knuckles and my body learning to move before my brain catches up — takes over completely.One pivot. One pull. One clean, practiced throw.Felicity hits the auditorium floor on her back with a sound that echoes off every wall.The room goes absolutely silent.Even I'm briefly surprised at myself.Felicity lies there for three full seconds — stunned, winded, staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone whose brain hasn't caught up with what just happened to their body. Around her, everyone has gone perfectly, identically sti
I grab Julian's hand and we run.Through the wings, past the lighting rig, into the backstage corridor where the noise from the auditorium chases us like something alive — four hundred voices compressed into a single desperate frequency, crashing against the walls and the ceiling and every surface between us and escape.I snatch a coat off the rack as we pass — props department, dark wool, anonymous — and shove it at him without slowing down. "Hood up. Now."Julian pulls it on without argument. For a man who has probably never worn anything under three thousand dollars in his adult life, he does not complain about the costume rack coat. This is why I genuinely like him.We hit the back door at full speed and burst out into the daylight.Behind us — nothing. No one. The back exit of Aldridge opens onto a service path that runs behind the science buildings, and it's empty, and for one full second we both just stand there breat
The room fell silent, all eyes on Allie.Cher’s smile was razor-sharp. “Allie and Mr. Hart... well, they have a special connection.”Her words hung in the air like a trap. Whispers started, suspicion spreading like wildfire.Kane raised an eyebrow. “Allie, you know Liam Hart?”Allie hesitated, then
“You’re cooking?” she asked, her voice betraying her surprise.Liam didn’t even look up. “It’s breakfast, not rocket science. Sit.”Allie hesitated. “I really need to get going—”“I said, sit.” His tone was calm but firm, leaving no room for argument.Reluctantly, she sat at the table. The aroma of
Allie crossed her arms, her voice icy. “I told you this was a bad idea. We can’t get in.”Cher’s lips twisted in frustration. She wasn’t about to let things end here. Her forged invitation had been exposed too easily, and she wasn’t ready to walk away defeated.“I’m not leaving,” Cher hissed. “I ca
Liam’s eyes narrowed, a dark expression crossing his face. He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. "What did you just say?" His tone was ice cold.Allie blinked, her vision still foggy, and mumbled, "Nick... I thought you were him... I thought... Lawson..." Her words were barely more than a whisp







