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Chapter Fifty-Six: The Review
Huling Na-update:
2025-07-15 08:00:14The plan wasn’t complicated.
That was the point.If Callie had learned anything from working at BuyMore, it was that people rarely saw a storm coming when it was disguised as company procedure.Performance reviews were a standard part of any quarter-end cycle. No one blinked when the clipboard came out. No one asked questions when she booked the office for an hour.And no one—especially not Eli—would suspect that today’s review wasn’t about inventory accuracy or task completion stats.It was about leverage.And carefully constructed truth-fishing.She looped Marcus and Brenda in early that morning, pulling them aside in the breakroom during opening prep.“I need your help,” Callie said, lowering her voice.Marcus took a sip from his coffee and raised an eyebrow. “We breaking into a bank? Because I’ve got ideas.”Brenda ignored him. “This about Eli?”Callie nodded. “I want to set up a p
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The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Sixty-One: Brenda’s Dilemma
For all the wild stories Brenda Liao had collected in her years working retail—Black Friday brawls, toddler tornadoes, microwave explosions—nothing compared to the bombshell Marcus dropped on her in the breakroom the day before. Eli. The awkwardly charming, quietly observant, always-helpful Eli... Was Elijah Dane Whitaker. CEO of BuyMore. The man whose name floated above every corporate memo, whose signature was digitally stamped on every bonus payout, whose identity remained a mystery to nearly every employee nationwide. And he was here. Stocking printers. Managing returns. Getting tangled in ribbon aisle disasters. Brenda didn’t know whether to scream, laugh, or faint. But mostly—she was just... confused. At first, she’d tried to brush it off. People had secrets. She got that. Eli hadn’t hurt anyone. He wasn’t misusing pow
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Sixty: The Slip
BuyMore on a Tuesday morning was usually Marcus’s favorite kind of quiet.It was that sweet spot between the chaos of Monday restocks and the oncoming storm of mid-week shipments. He could grab his favorite mug before Brenda swiped it, sneak a jelly donut from the breakroom before Naomi declared a store-wide sugar ban, and actually enjoy the silence of a store that hadn’t quite woken up.But today, the quiet wasn’t peaceful.It was heavy.Because Callie and Eli were still walking on eggshells around each other. And while things had softened—no more icy stares, no more deadpan exchanges—they weren’t them again.And Marcus had grown used to them being… well, them.He sighed, tossing his hoodie over the breakroom chair and sipping lukewarm coffee from a chipped BuyMore mug as Brenda walked in.“You feel it too, huh?” she asked, reaching for the shared creamers.“The awkward cloud of romantic repression? Yep.”
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Fifty-Nine: Second Glances
Callie didn’t usually linger after a shift.She was a woman of routines—close the registers, check final reports, lock the stockroom, secure the back office. Out by 9:15. Maybe 9:30 if Eli had done something inexplicably chaotic with the barcode system again.But that night, she sat in the breakroom long after the last staff member had clocked out, her cup of vending machine hot chocolate cooling slowly in her hands.The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The clock on the wall ticked, relentless and even.Still, she sat.Because something had shifted.And she didn’t know what to do with it.The inventory check had gone off without a hitch—numbers aligned, seasonal displays prepped, and not one misplaced console unit. Eli had worked silently, efficiently. No jokes. No smirks.Just… presence.He had stood beside her like the Eli she used to know—the one who gave her sarcastic nicknames and grinned like a
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Fifty-Eight: The Intervention Initiative
BuyMore was humming with a rhythm only seasoned employees could recognize—the soft chaos of mid-week retail, with its irregular customer traffic, carts squeaking slightly off-track, and the faint smell of microwaved chili wafting from the breakroom. But the real tension wasn’t in the aisles. It was hovering silently between Callie and Eli. And Brenda noticed it immediately. “You feel that?” she murmured to Marcus as they refilled the clearance bin near the checkout line. Marcus glanced toward the electronics section, where Callie was training a new cashier and Eli stood just a few yards away, restocking game controllers with the intensity of a man handling live wires. “They’re orbiting each other,” he muttered. “No eye contact, no banter. Not even the usual snarky flirt-compliments.” “Exactly,” Brenda said. “It’s like someone put up a ‘do not disturb’ sign between them.”
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Fifty-Seven: Dodging Bullets
Eli Whitaker had faced board meetings in London, regulatory panels in Geneva, and once, a hostile investor who tried to sabotage the European acquisition deal with a single doctored spreadsheet.But nothing—absolutely nothing—rattled him quite like the quiet precision in Callie King’s voice when she said, “Let’s talk about your goals.”He should have seen it coming.The entire setup had been too clean. The clipboard. The official review template. The presence of not just one, but two supervisors. And Callie’s posture—straight-backed, perfectly neutral, as if she weren’t secretly dissecting every answer he gave under a microscope.Eli knew the trap when he saw it.The difference was—he walked into it anyway.The moment he stepped out of that office, Eli kept his face neutral as he returned to the floor.He passed Naomi in aisle five, who looked up from a half-stocked toy display and grinned. “Survive your review?”
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Fifty-Six: The Review
The plan wasn’t complicated.That was the point.If Callie had learned anything from working at BuyMore, it was that people rarely saw a storm coming when it was disguised as company procedure.Performance reviews were a standard part of any quarter-end cycle. No one blinked when the clipboard came out. No one asked questions when she booked the office for an hour.And no one—especially not Eli—would suspect that today’s review wasn’t about inventory accuracy or task completion stats.It was about leverage.And carefully constructed truth-fishing.She looped Marcus and Brenda in early that morning, pulling them aside in the breakroom during opening prep.“I need your help,” Callie said, lowering her voice.Marcus took a sip from his coffee and raised an eyebrow. “We breaking into a bank? Because I’ve got ideas.”Brenda ignored him. “This about Eli?”Callie nodded. “I want to set up a p
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