Chapter 2 The Collision

The silence after Vance's words felt suffocating.

Jovi didn’t shrink. She flinched, as if he’d flicked water at her. Her eyes jumped from his face to mine, and the panic in them was pure and real. She was used to being the crisis, not having one thrown in her face.

"Vance" she whispered. It sounded like a question.

Zane made a sound, his gaze locking on me with an accusation that made my stomach twist. As if I was the one who’d shattered everything. He shifted, not quite stepping in front of her, but his shoulder moved to block Vance’s line of sight. An old reflex. My breath hitched, stupidly. That reflex had never been for me. It made my chest tighten.

“Nerissa, what is this?” he demanded, his voice too loud for the hallway. He was looking only at me, as if Vance was invisible now.

Vance let out a short, quiet breath that wasn’t a sigh. It was the sound of impatience.

“The more relevant question Sullivan,” he said, his voice low and dangerously bored, “is what you and my wife are doing in a hotel service corridor at seven a.m. Did her marital bed become too conceptually challenging?”

Zane’s face flushed. “You don’t get to—”

“I get to ask whatever I like,” Vance cut in, his gaze finally slicing to Zane. “You are a background character in a problem between me and Jovienne. Your opinion isn’t relevant.”

Jovi made a small, wounded sound.

“Stop it. Just stop. We were just talking, and we fell asleep because we were exhausted from all this tension! Nothing happened! ” Her voice climbed, believing it as she said it. “Why are you making it into something ugly? And why are you here with her?”

Her finger pointed at me, the accusation so perfectly hypocritical.

A sound escaped me—not a laugh, a choked exhale of pure disbelief. Vance’s eyes flicked to me, and for a second, I saw it: a flicker of intense irritation. At her, at me, at the whole sloppy scene. My visible fall was mirroring his own internal one, and he hated it.

“You’re a terrible liar. She is my employee. We had business” he stated, no heat, just fact. He looked past them, down the hall, his jaw tight. He was calculating—the security camera by the elevators, the one at the far end. Optics. A CEO, his disheveled employee, his wife, and another man. A tableau of failure.

"Business? At this time and place?" Zane declined the idea of the professional facade we wore.

Vance didn't give him an answer. He held out a hand, not toward Jovi, but a gesture of command. “We’re leaving. Now.”

Jovi looked at Zane. A whole conversation passed in their locked gaze—fear, desperation, a sickening intimacy. Zane’s hand twitched at his side, but he didn’t move. The shield was useless.

With a shudder, she stepped away. She walked past Vance’s ignored hand, arms wrapped around herself, and stopped at the elevator, head bowed.

Vance didn’t look at me. Not once. But as he turned to follow her, his shoulder brushed mine. It wasn’t an accident. It was a signal. Don’t crumble here. Not in the shot.

Then they were gone, the elevator doors swallowing them whole.

Leaving me with my husband and the smell of Jovi’s perfume, still hanging in the air like a ghost.

The fight seemed to leave Zane the moment the elevator did. His shoulders slumped. He ran a hand over his face, and when he looked at me, the anger was gone, replaced by a hollow confusion.

“Nerissa…” he began, his voice rough.

I held up a hand. I couldn’t hear it. Not the excuses, not the apologies. The image of him standing as Jovi’s protector was burned into my mind, erasing so many other memories.

“Don’t,” I said, my own voice surprisingly steady. “Just don’t.”

I turned and walked toward the stairwell door. I needed air that wasn’t here. I needed to be anywhere else, not with him.

“Nerissa, wait!” His footsteps hurried after me.

I got one flight down before my knees gave. I stumbled to the wall, my forehead hitting the rough, cold concrete. The heave came from deep in my gut, painful and empty. I tasted gin and bile.

And then, stupidly, a memory: Zane, on the tiles of our bathroom, holding my hair back from my face as I threw up. His other hand, warm and steady, rubbing circles on my back.

“I’ve got you,” he’d mumbled, sleepy and tender. “Just let it go.”

Another dry, wrenching heave shook me. Let it go. I was letting it all go, alone, in a stairwell that smelled of bleach and old cigarettes. The man from that memory was the one who put me here.

The door above banged open.

“Nerissa! God, please!”

I pushed off the wall, wiping my mouth on the sleeve of my wrinkled blouse. I didn’t look back. I just went down, my heels clicking a frantic, uneven rhythm on the metal stairs.

He caught me in the lobby, his hand grabbing my elbow.

“Please. Let me drive you. We have to talk.”

I wrenched my arm free. The motion was too violent, drawing a look from the bored clerk at the desk.

“I’m going to work.”

“Work?” His face paled. “You can’t go there. Not after… him. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I have a job and I don’t have a home,” I spat. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

It was the truth, and it landed. His eyes went bright with unshed tears.

“Please. Just the drive.”

I was so tired. Tired of fighting over the drama and heartbreak. I nodded, a mechanical jerk.

The car was a tomb. And it smelled like her—vanilla and peony, soaked into the passenger seat. She’d been here. Recently. I rolled down the window, letting the frigid air scream in.

He flinched but said nothing. Clicked the radio on. A traffic report blared. “…major backup…” He slapped it off. The silence was worse.

A block passed. Then another.

“So he’s… your new boss?” he asked,.

“Yes.”

“You never said it was… him.”

“I only found out just yesterday.”

Another block. The tension in my chest pulled tighter.

“Neri, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” The words tumbled out. “This is all my fault. Please… Jovi, she’s… she’s not strong like you. She was scared. You saw how he is with her.”

I stared straight ahead. A part of me, a sick, familiar part, wanted to soothe him. To say it’s okay. I dug my nails into my palm.

“It always comes back to her, doesn’t it?” My voice was flat. “Her fragility. Her needs. Her fears.”

“She’s our friend, You don’t understand the pressure she’s under—Vance is a monster!” he said, helpless.

“Were you being a friend?” I asked, turning to look at him. “In our bed? Was that friendship?”

He winced, his hands tightening on the wheel. “Don’t. Don’t make it sound so cheap.”

“What should it sound like, Zane? Poetic? It was cheap.”

“What about you and him? What was that?”

The memory of the drunken kiss I had with him—desperate, clumsy—flashed. His tone, that forced normalcy, made me furious.

“It was nothing like your special reunion,” I said, my voice cold.

“That’s not true! “I love you, you know I do. This doesn’t change that. What we have is real.” He was pleading now, trying to hold two impossible truths.

It made me snort, a cold ice poured into my heart.

 “I can’t just turn it off for her, Ner! I’ve never been able to! With Jovi… it’s just… it’s always been there. It doesn’t mean what we have isn’t—”

It’s still her.

“It means I'm your second,” I said. The words didn’t feel dramatic. They just felt heavy, and final. “I was always the second choice. I just didn’t know I was the understudy in my own life.”

He opened his mouth, closed it. No denial came. Just a choked silence that said everything. The wire in my chest snapped. A cold numbness flooded in.

“Stop the car.”

“We need to work this out—”

I reached for the door handle.

“Okay! Okay!”

The car swerved as he jerked the wheel, cursing, pulling over. I was out before it fully stopped, slamming the door so hard the whole vehicle rocked. I didn’t look back. I stepped into the street, arm raised, and a taxi screeched to a halt.

“Where to?” the driver asked, eyeing my rumpled clothes.

“The Astera Spire.” My voice was someone else’s.

The next thing I knew I was in the elevator of Astera Spire.

The elevator at Astera was a silent, mirrored tube. My reflection was a stranger: puffy eyes, a streak of dirt or mascara on my temple, lips pale. The fight replayed. It’s always been there. A hot, silent tear rolled down. Then another. I hated them.

The doors chimed open.

Vance was standing right there in the lobby, talking low and fast to his assistant, Claudia. He saw me and stopped.

Claudia’s sharp eyes found me, took in the wreckage, and her professional mask didn’t flicker. She just went very still.

I turned away, frantically swiping at my cheek, staring at the elevator buttons, praying for the doors to close.

“Claudia, the ten o’clock figures. My desk in five,” Vance said, his voice clipped. She vanished.

He stepped into the elevator. The doors closed. We were alone. The silence was thick, humiliating. I stared at the numbers, breathing in shaky hiccups I couldn’t control. I could feel his gaze on my profile, not sympathetic, but assessing, annoyed.

I saw him hesitate in the reflection. He saw the tear on my cheek. Something in his own expression changed—a reminder of the hotel, the shared disaster. His jaw tightened. He looked like my tears were a problem he didn’t know how to fix.

“Are you capable of working today?”

The question was blunt, clinical. It wasn’t Are you okay? It was an inventory of functionality.

I shook my head, a tiny, desperate motion, but then whispered, “Yes.”

A contradiction.

He didn’t speak. His reflection was rigid. He was looking at me, but also past me, at the security camera’s tiny red eye in the corner. A liability. A messy, crying employee in a closed space with the CEO. His jaw tightened.

With a swift, decisive move, he reached out and pressed the ‘STOP’ button.

The hum died. The lights stayed on. We were suspended.

“Get it together,” he said, not looking at me, staring ahead at the doors. “Harrington is in the boardroom in twelve minutes. He’s ready to panic over the Scandinavia cost analysis.”

I swallowed, trying to force my throat to work.

“The… the raw data shows a thirty percent efficiency gain they’re ignoring. The cost model is flawed.”

“Good.” He paused. “You’ll present it to him and his team.”

That jolted me. I looked at his reflection.

“I’m a data analyst. He’ll want the CFO. Or you.”

Finally, he turned his head. His grey eyes were cold, clear, and focused. There was no challenge, no inspiration. It was a demand.

“I don’t have time to hold your hand or translate your work. You know the data. You either present it, or we lose the argument because someone else will get it wrong.” He glanced at his watch, a sharp, impatient tick. “ The Scandinavia data. You ran it. Harrington’s panicking over cost. I need you to tell him why he’s wrong. Can you do that without crying?”

It was harsh. It was what I needed. The tears stopped, frozen by a spike of defensive pride. He wasn’t offering me a rope to climb up; he was pointing at a wall I had to scale or be left behind.

“Yes"

He held my gaze, gave a single nod. Hit the button. The elevator lurched to life.

As the doors opened, he stepped out without a glance.

“Boardroom. Ten minutes, Ms. Sullivan.”

He walked away. I took a shuddering breath. My reflection was still a mess, but the eyes were different. Scared, but focused on a single point: a set of data. A thing to prove that wasn’t about love.

It was a flimsy shield. But it was all I had. I headed for my desk.