Losing Ground

The first month at Vantage taught me two things: Ryan Zee was every bit as demanding as he'd promised, and I was better at this job than I'd let myself believe in years.

We worked late most nights, not because he demanded it, but because the work demanded it, and something in me had woken up under the pressure, sharp and hungry in a way I hadn't felt since before I met Steph, before I'd learned to make myself smaller to fit inside someone else's life. I forgot, for hours at a stretch, that I was a woman rebuilding herself from wreckage, a woman carrying a secret that grew a little heavier every week. I was simply Camille Astrid, closing deals, outmaneuvering competitors twice my age, watching Ryan's rare approval land on me like sunlight after a long, grey winter.

I told myself it meant nothing. I told myself a lot of things, most nights, staring at my ceiling long after I should have been asleep.

"You flinched," he said one evening, three weeks in, watching me across the conference table after a client call had gone sideways, the client's raised voice still ringing faintly in the room.

"I didn't flinch."

"You did. Every time someone raises their voice, you go somewhere else for half a second." He wasn't looking at his laptop anymore. He was looking at me, that unhurried attention that made me feel simultaneously seen and exposed, like he was reading a document I'd never agreed to show him. "Who taught you to brace like that?"

I gathered my papers, needing something to do with my hands, needing anywhere else to look. "I don't know what you're talking about.”

"Camille Astrid." Just my name, quiet, and somehow it carried more weight than a full sentence would have, more weight than it had any right to. "I told you. I don't like surprises. If something from your past is going to affect your work, I need to know. Not because I'm entitled to your history. Because I need my head of strategy functioning at full capacity, and lately something keeps pulling you out of the room mid-sentence."

"It won't affect my work."

"It already has. Twice this week alone." He stood, came around the table, and the office suddenly felt smaller than its wide windows suggested, the space between us shrinking in a way that made my breath catch. "I'm not asking to pry. I'm asking because you're the best hire I've made in two years, and I refuse to watch you fall apart quietly in a corner office because you're too proud to say why."

I hadn't meant to say it. The words came anyway, brittle and quiet, spilling out before I could stop them. "My ex-husband left me for a woman he never stopped loving, in the middle of our living room, like he was cancelling a dinner reservation. He called me an embarrassment on his way out the door."

Ryan went very still, a stillness that felt different from his usual composed calm, sharper, colder, more contained.

"I'm handling it," I added quickly, hating the crack in my own voice.

"You're surviving it," he corrected gently. "There's a difference, and you already know that, you said as much on your first day, sitting right where you're sitting now." He was closer now than professional distance should have allowed, close enough that I could see the fine control it took him to keep his voice level, to keep whatever he was feeling locked behind that composed exterior. "Whoever he is, he lost the only intelligent decision he ever made in his life."

My breath itch. "You don't know anything about him."

"I know enough." Something dark moved behind his eyes, gone before I could name it, replaced almost instantly by something more careful. "I know his type. Men who think love is something owed to them instead of something earned, day after day. Men who mistake cruelty for strength, and softness for weakness."

"You sound like you're speaking from experience."

"I am." He didn't elaborate, and for the first time since I'd met him, I saw something in Ryan Zee that looked almost like restraint, like a door he was choosing not to open, standing guard in front of it with his jaw tight. "Finish your report. Go home. Rest. That's an order, not a suggestion, and I don't repeat myself often."

I should have been relieved to be dismissed, to escape the sudden closeness of the moment.

Instead, as I gathered my things, I felt the pull of him following me out of that office like gravity, an awareness I hadn't asked for and didn't know how to switch off, no matter how many times I told myself it was inappropriate, inconvenient, dangerous. I'd walked into Vantage determined to prove I needed no one, that I could build my empire alone and let Steph choke on what he'd thrown away without ever looking back.

I hadn't planned on a man like Ryan Zee noticing every crack in my armor and, instead of exploiting them the way Steph always had, quietly trying to shore them up like something worth protecting.

At the elevator, his voice stopped me. "Camille Astrid."

I turned, my hand still hovering near the call button.

"The father," he said carefully, choosing each word like it might cost him something. "Does he know you're" His eyes flicked, barely, to the place where I sometimes caught myself resting my hand without thinking, an unconscious habit I hadn't realized he'd noticed. "Does he know?"

The elevator doors opened behind me. I stepped inside before I answered, needing the distance, needing something solid between us.

"No," I said, as the doors began to close. "And he's not going to. Not until I'm ready."

Ryan's expression didn't change. But just before the doors sealed shut, he said one more thing, quiet, almost to himself, but I heard it anyway, and it followed me all the way down forty floors.

"Then I hope, for his sake, he never finds out the wrong way."

The doors closed. I stood alone in the descending elevator, my heart pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with fear of Steph anymore.

I was losing control of something. I just didn't

yet know if it was my secret, my heart, or both at once.