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Chapter Twenty-Five: Shifted Shelves and Shifting Feelings
Terakhir Diperbarui:
2025-06-28 08:08:27Monday morning came with its usual chaos—receipt paper jamming, a leak in the mop closet, and the overhead announcement system deciding to cut out in the middle of a BuyMore promo. Business as usual.
Except… not quite.Brenda stood at register two, tapping her nails on the scanner pad while watching Marcus from across the floor. He was stacking coffee makers in the Home Essentials display, and for once, he wasn’t making jokes or humming off-key classic rock. He was quiet. Focused. And if she was being honest, a little distracted.They hadn’t talked much since Halloween night.Not really.Sure, there had been the usual banter—the sarcastic digs, the shared smirks—but underneath it all, something had shifted.Something neither of them had the guts to name yet.Especially not Brenda.Especially after that pizza night.It had started out fun. Easy. The way things always were with Marcus—his jokes, the way h
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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
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Fifty-Five: The Edge of Something
The problem with suspicion was that it never let you rest.Even when you tried to move on, it whispered in the back of your mind, tapping at your conscience like a leak in the ceiling—slow, persistent, impossible to ignore.Callie had been trying for days to shut that voice down. She told herself to focus on inventory reports, team scheduling, and the logistics of the upcoming promotional event Corporate had dumped in their laps.But even as she counted floor decals and coached Naomi through display assembly, her mind circled back to Eli.More specifically, what he wasn’t saying.It had been four days since she cornered him in the office. Four days since he stood there, silent, when she’d laid everything bare.And still, he hadn’t told her anything.But he didn’t deny it either.That was the part that stuck with her.No lies. No excuses. Just quiet guilt that looked a lot like confirmation.Cal
The Secret Billionaire in Aisle 9 Chapter Fifty-Four: The Trap
The plan wasn’t perfect.Callie knew that.She hadn’t slept much the night before—too busy drawing mental maps of security access, digital breadcrumbs, and the quiet tension Eli carried behind his easy grin. She wasn’t setting out to embarrass him. She wasn’t out to punish him.She just wanted the truth.And if Eli couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give it to her voluntarily, then she’d create the kind of situation where avoiding it would be impossible.It started with a message.To: BuyMore Corporate LiaisonSubject: System Access ConcernHi, this is Callie King, Supervisor at the Midtown Branch. I noticed an unusual override code (E.L.D_0101) being used to approve recent software patches. Can someone from the internal tech team confirm who this belongs to? I’m flagging it for data integrity protocol.She didn’t expect a reply immediately.But she did expect Eli to see the report on the backend—because she sent it f
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