Moving In

Phoenix

A man who keeps condoms in his office obviously keeps a fuck toy close. And I didn’t need a seer to tell me who Victor Crowe fucks in his office.

Octavia Willow is going to be a problem.

I knew it the moment she walked into Victor’s office this morning and looked at me like something she needed to scrape off her shoe. I knew it when Victor handed me to her team like a file he needed off his desk. And I know it now, standing in the middle of the creative floor while she addresses the team with me positioned slightly apart from everyone else, like a visual reminder that I don’t belong here.

She sees me as a threat.

One she believes might come between her and whatever she has going on with Victor. He invited me to his office, something he’s never done with any other female intern.

“This is Phoenix Veyl,” Octavia says to the room. Not introducing me. Presenting me. The way you present evidence. “She’ll be joining the team as an intern. But unlike some of you who worked really hard to be here… she didn’t have to do much. She only had to use her body.”

Every person in the room hears exactly what she means.

“I deserve to be here just like everyone else.” I fire back before I can stop myself. I was not going to stand here and have this woman lie about me. “Mr. Crowe can confirm that.”

She lets out a humorless laugh. “Mr. Crowe? Were you not just in his office seducing him?” She asks, walking toward me.

I hear the room gasp, some taking out phones to record like it’s a show they need to save and entertain themselves with later.

“Phoenix here is a slut.” She says, standing in front of me. “And girls like her who sleep their way to the top do not deserve a place in this company.”

“Stop making things up because you feel threatened.”

“Threatened? By who? You?” She picks up a coffee from a desk beside us, bringing it to her lips.

I almost think she’ll drink it but instead she empties it over my head. I gasp as the heat makes contact with my skin, soaking through my dress, leaving me stained and drenched.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” I ask, balling my fist, really controlling myself from connecting my knuckles to her nose.

“Just showing you that you are garbage. And I can’t be threatened by filth.” She says, wearing a smug smile.

“What are you doing?”

Victor’s voice cuts through the chaos.

The room goes so still I can hear the coffee dripping from the ends of my hair onto the floor. Everyone turns. Nobody breathes.

Victor stands at the entrance of the creative floor, taking in every detail with that slow, quiet precision that is somehow more frightening than shouting. His eyes sweep the room, land on me, soaking wet and burning, and something closes in his expression. Quiet. Cold. Decided.

Octavia doesn’t miss a beat.

“I’m glad you’re here, Victor.” Her voice is smooth, composed, like she didn’t just pour scalding coffee on someone thirty seconds ago. “Phoenix was being disrespectful. Challenging me in front of the entire team, undermining my authority on her first day. I was simply disciplining her.”

The lie is so clean it almost impresses me.

Victor says nothing. Just crosses the room toward me, shrugs off his jacket, and settles it over my shoulders himself, his hands briefly warm against my arms.

That’s when I hear it.

A sharp, barely contained breath from Octavia’s direction. I don’t need to look at her directly to feel what’s radiating off her body right now. It isn’t just anger. It’s the particular kind of burning that comes from watching a man do something tender for someone else, something he has never done for you. Her jaw is tight enough to crack. Her hands are at her sides and very still, the way hands get when you are using every available resource to stop them from shaking.

She is consumed.

And she wants me to know it.

Victor steps back and faces her, and whatever is in his expression makes her swallow hard.

“I told you when I put you in this position,” he says, his voice so quiet the room strains to hear it, “that there is no place for a bully in this company.”

“Victor, I—”

“Keep this behavior up and it won’t be a suspension. It will be a termination.” His eyes move across the room, touching every person holding a phone, every person who stood and watched and said nothing. “Anyone who recorded this will delete it now. Anyone who participated will be hearing from HR before end of day.”

Phones disappear. Eyes drop.

One last look at Octavia. Then his hand settles lightly at my back and he steers me toward the door.

Nobody says a word as we leave.

In the corridor he drops his hand and we walk in silence to the elevator. I keep his jacket pulled tight around my shoulders. My dress is ruined. My hair is soaked. The sting on my scalp hasn’t faded and I refuse to cry about it, not here, not now.

The elevator arrives. We step in.

“Thank you,” I say when the doors close. “You could have believed her. Most people would have walked in and believed her.”

“I know you.” He says it to the elevator doors, simple and certain, not even turning to deliver it.

Three words. But the certainty behind them, no hesitation, no qualification, settles somewhere in my chest that I wasn’t expecting. He walked into that room and saw the truth without asking for it. Just looked at me and knew.

The doors open on the ground floor.

“Go home,” he says. “Change. Take the rest of the day.”

I almost laugh. “That’s the thing. I don’t exactly have a home to go to right now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been in a hotel since the weekend. The friend I was supposed to stay with had a family emergency and left the state before I arrived. I haven’t sorted anything permanent yet.”

He is quiet for a moment, that stillness he gets when he is thinking working through his jaw.

“You’ll stay at my place,” he says.

“Victor—”

“Until your friend comes back or you find somewhere permanent. I have more space than I use. It doesn’t make sense to have you sitting in a hotel.” Even, decided, no room for debate.

Standing here in the lobby with his jacket warm on my shoulders I think about the plan. Everything I mapped out before I walked through those doors this morning. I told myself getting this close to him would take weeks of careful, patient work.

But surprisingly, it took one day.

“Are you sure?” I ask, because I want to hear him say it again.

“My driver will take you to collect your things from the hotel. Jenna will send you the address.”

“Okay,” I say softly. “Thank you.”

Something shifts almost invisibly in his face, there and gone, the way his control sometimes costs him something he won’t name. Then it’s back in place and he is composed and unreachable again.

“Go,” he says.

I go.

I make it through the lobby and out through the glass doors and into the open air before I let myself smile. Wide and private and entirely my own.

One day.

I got inside his walls, inside his home, inside the life he keeps locked and managed and perfectly controlled, in one single day.

He thinks he is being responsible. Doing the right thing by his best friend’s daughter.

He has absolutely no idea what he just invited in.

I pull his jacket tighter around my shoulders, tilt my face up to the sky, and think:

One down. Everything else to go.