Chapter 003

Emily

After years of working for Thane Rivers I had learnt to read a room before I walked into it. That night, I misread his completely.

He had called me up to the penthouse after hours, which wasn't unusual. Half our real business happened after the office emptied out, contracts no lawyer would ever see, conversations that existed nowhere on paper. I expected numbers. A shipment, a negotiation, a problem that needed my particular kind of handling.

I didn't expect him standing by the window with two glasses of wine already poured, the buttons on his shirt half done, his usually perfectly slicked hair now falling on his face and no files in sight.

"Sir." I stayed by the door. "You said you needed the Calloway numbers reviewed tonight."

"I lied." He turned, unhurried, and held one of the glasses out toward me. "Sit down, Emily."

I didn't move. "I don't drink during work hours."

"There is no work." He set the glass down when I didn't take it, something flickering across his face I had learned to recognize as the early stage of a man not getting what he wanted. "I think it's time we stopped pretending this is only business."

My stomach went tight and cold. "I don't know what you mean."

"You do." He crossed the room toward me, slow, deliberate, the same way he closed every negotiation he had ever won. "I trained you, built you into the only person in this organization I trust completely, and you still think I don't notice the way you've been avoiding being alone with me for the last six months."

He wasn't wrong. I had noticed it too. The shift in his attention, small and deliberate, a held gaze lasting a beat too long, a hand at my back that lingered. I had told myself it meant nothing, because the alternative was something I couldn't afford to want.

"You're my employer," I said. "That's all this is supposed to be."

"It stopped being only that a long time ago." He stopped close enough that I had to move back to hold his eyes, close enough that I could smell the wine on his breath, and something in me went still in a way I hadn't felt since I was sixteen, standing still around something that bites. "I want you, Emily. I don't ask for things twice, and I have never once lost."

"I'm not something you win." My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt. "I work for you. That's the entirety of this arrangement, and it's the only version of it I'm willing to have."

Something shifted behind his eyes. Not hurt, because Thane didn't do hurt, but something colder, more dangerous, the look of a man recalculating a deal he had assumed was already closed.

"No," he said simply, like the word itself was a foreign concept he was turning over for the first time.

"No," I repeated.

He didn't wait for me to process it. Before I could step back, before I could raise a hand to stop him, he closed the remaining distance and crashed his mouth against mine. It wasn't an invitation. It was a hostile takeover, his lips hot and demanding, tasting of expensive red wine and absolute arrogance.

Shock paralyzed me for a single fraction of a second, but outrage snapped through my veins with the force of a live wire.

I reared back and swung my palm across his cheek with a crack that echoed off the glass walls of the penthouse.

The blow knocked his head to the side. For a terrifying, breathless moment, the air in the room turned entirely lethal. Thane stood frozen, his face turned away, a bright red handprint blooming across his sharp cheekbone. Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head back to face me. His dark eyes were burning with a terrifying, unhinged fire, utterly stripped of civilization.

"You hit me," he whispered, his voice dangerously low.

"You crossed a line," I spat, my chest heaving, my hand still stinging from the impact. "You do not touch me without my consent. Ever."

Instead of flying into a rage, a dark, twisted smile touched the corners of his mouth. It made my blood run cold.

"Eight years, Emily," he murmured, taking a slow step toward me while I held my ground. "I made you. I could unmake you just as easily, and you know it."

For one long second, something old and familiar rose up in me. The girl in the hallway, frozen, waiting for permission to move. I let it rise, and then I let it go, the way I had taught myself to do a long time ago.

"Try it," I said, low and even. "See how that goes for you."

He stared at me, something unreadable warring behind his expression, and for a moment I genuinely didn't know which way this would break.

Then he stepped back, lifting a hand to brush his burning cheek.

"Get out of my office," he said, turning back to the window. His voice was flat and controlled again, though I could see his reflection in the glass. His jaw was tight, and his hands were curled at his sides like he was fighting the urge to put them through something.

I didn't need to be told twice.

I made it to the elevator before my hands started shaking, the adrenaline finally catching up to me the way it always did once the danger had passed. The doors slid shut, and I caught my own reflection in the brushed steel. Composed, steady, nothing at all like the storm underneath.

I had survived worse men than Thane Rivers.

I just wasn't entirely sure, yet, whether that was still true.