All Chapters of The Billionaire's Forbidden Weakness (where the ice breaks): Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The company event was on a Friday evening. Cole Industries held them quarterly. Not parties, exactly, though they had the structure of parties. The specific category of corporate social event that existed in the space between obligation and genuine occasion, that people attended because attending was part of the culture and that were, when they worked, actually enjoyable in the specific way of being in a room full of people you spent forty hours a week with and seeing them be slightly more human than the workday allowed. Nathalia had been to one before. Six weeks ago, when she had been new enough that the event had felt more like an extension of the interview process than a social occasion. She had navigated it with the careful competence of someone performing normality while also performing being new and had come away from it with the beginning of a working knowledge of the floor's social geography. This one felt different. Not because the event was different. It was the same fo

Nathalia did not sleep well. This was becoming a pattern she was going to have to address at some point. The specific insomnia of someone who was carrying too many things that could not yet be put anywhere and whose brain had decided, without consultation, that the appropriate response to this was to keep running at full capacity until approximately two in the morning and then offer a few hours of something that was technically sleep but felt more like a brief administrative pause before the next day started. She woke at 5:41. She lay in the dark for eleven minutes. She got up. She made tea at her table. She sat with it and looked at the gala invitation that was still where she had left it last night when she had sat here thinking about Richard Cole's voice on her personal phone and the specific warmth of it that she had learned to distrust and the words we will speak again Ms. Bennett. I am quite sure of it. She looked at the invitation. She thought about Nathan saying do not

She thought about it on the subway. This was not a surprise. She had thought about it in the elevator, which was where she had noticed she was going to think about it, and she had thought about it on the walk to the subway in the rain, which was where she had confirmed that not thinking about it was not going to be an option tonight, and she thought about it on the subway itself with the specific focused quality of someone who has decided that if they are going to think about something they are going to think about it properly rather than in the managed partial way that was just thinking about it with extra steps. She thought about forty minutes. She thought about a twelve-year-old boy who liked the problems that had no solution. She thought about a thesis read the evening before her first day. She thought about whoever wrote it was going to be very good at this job said in the voice that was actually his voice in the specific quiet of a kitchen alcove at seven forty in the even

Three days felt both long and insufficient simultaneously. Nathalia had been aware of this since Monday morning when she had written three days in her journal and stared at it and understood that three days was not very much time and also more time than she knew what to do with, which was the specific quality of waiting for something when the waiting itself had become a thing you were living in rather than moving through. She prepared the way she prepared for everything. Thoroughly. Methodically. With the specific focused attention of someone who understood that the visible preparation was only half of it and the invisible preparation was where the real work happened. The visible preparation was logistical. She confirmed the gala venue arrangements on Wednesday morning, working through the event coordinator's checklist with the efficient fluency she had developed for this category of task. She confirmed the transportation. She confirmed the guest list against the Brightside Centr

Nathan looked at her. "Legally the vote can be called. Whether it succeeds depends on the remaining board members and on how the situation is managed in the next forty-eight hours." He paused. "The coalition is three members including Whitmore. Damien has five who are solidly in support. There are four who are undecided. If Whitmore can move two of the undecided four in the next forty-eight hours the vote becomes genuinely threatening." She sat with this. Four undecided board members. Forty-eight hours. A speech that was supposed to be an act of courage being positioned as evidence of instability. She thought about Richard Cole. She thought about Richard and Whitmore and the alliance that had been building for months, two men who wanted different pieces of the same thing finding each other and deciding to be useful to each other. She thought about timing. Two days before the gala. "He wants Damien to cancel the speech," she said. Nathan looked at her. "He wants him to either c