All Chapters of MY RUDE NEIGHBOUR IS MY BILLIONAIRE BOSS : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

THE ELEVATORThe elevator groaned, shuddered, and stopped dead between the third and fourth floors."You have got to be kidding me."I hit the door open button four times in a row, like repetition might change physics, and got nothing but a dull mechanical click for my effort. The overhead light flickered once, buzzed, and settled into a dim amber glow that made the whole tiny box feel smaller than it already was, closer, the kind of closeness that made me acutely aware of every inch separating us and every inch that wasn't."It does this," Arthur said from the corner, not even looking up from his phone. "Building's ancient. Give it ten minutes.""Ten minutes." I pressed my back against the wall opposite him, putting as much distance as a five-by-five metal box would allow. "I don't have ten minutes. I have a landlord meeting in fifteen and a life that's already falling apart without an elevator joining the conspiracy.""The landlord will wait.""You don't know my landlord.""I know la

"You start Monday," the recruiter said, sliding a folder across the desk like she was handing me a lifeline instead of a stack of paper. "Executive assistant to the CEO. Full benefits. Salary's listed on the last page."I opened it, and my eyes went straight to the number, and for a second I forgot how to breathe properly."Is this a typo?""It's not." She smiled, the polished, professional kind that told me she'd delivered good news like this a hundred times and still enjoyed watching it land."The position opened suddenly. Previous assistant left without notice. They need someone who can start immediately and handle high-pressure environments.""I can handle pressure." I could have laughed at how true that sentence had become in the last six weeks. Pressure had been a job description of its own — dodging shattered glass in a stairwell, learning to lie convincingly to strangers, watching a man I barely knew disappear overnight without so much as a real goodbye. Corporate stress sounde

"Mr. Vance would like the Kessler contract revised by the end of day."I didn't look up from my screen. "It already is."The junior associate, Todd, according to the badge clipped crooked on his blazer, blinked at me like I'd answered in a language he didn't speak. "It's not even noon.""I'm aware of the time, Todd. I finished it at nine forty." I turned my monitor toward him, the revised contract already formatted, clause-numbered, and cross-referenced against the three amendments Adrian had scrawled in the margins of the original draft.The margins he'd apparently expected his new assistant to somehow read through his handwriting, which looked less like English and more like an EKG having a bad day. "I also caught an inconsistency in section twelve. The termination clause contradicted itself. I fixed it and flagged the change in a comment so he can approve or override it."Todd stared at the screen for a long moment, then at me, then back at the screen. "You caught that? Legal's bee

I didn't reply to the email. I read it four times, deleted it, then immediately regretted deleting it, because now I had no proof it had ever existed except the specific, cold unease sitting low in my stomach.Ask him about his last two assistants.I told myself it was nothing. Every office had someone bitter enough to send anonymous nonsense to the new hire, hoping to unsettle her before she found her footing. I told myself that twice, actually, which by now I recognized as the universal signal that I didn't believe it once. By Thursday, I'd almost managed to shake it off. Almost."You're staring at that spreadsheet like it personally wronged you," Marcus said, dropping into the chair across from my desk with his usual easy grace, coffee in hand, tie loosened like he'd already survived one crisis before ten a.m."It did. It's the Kessler numbers again. Someone entered the shipping costs in the wrong currency and nobody caught it for two fiscal quarters.""Ah. The gift that keeps giv

"Priya Malhotra," I said, "is asking about me. At my job. Which she found how, exactly?"Marcus twirled noodles around his chopsticks, unbothered by the question in a way that should have reassured me and somehow did the opposite. "HR fields requests like that more than you'd think. Corporate rivals do background digging on competitors' staff all the time. It's usually nothing.""It's not usually nothing when the person doing the digging once photographed my apartment building at two in the morning."That got his attention. He set his chopsticks down slowly. "I'm sorry — what?"I hesitated, weighing how much of the last six weeks I actually wanted to hand a man I'd known for four days, however easy his company felt. "It's a long story. The short version is "I have a history with Cole Dynamics that predates this job, and I'd very much like to know why their assistant is suddenly interested in my HR file.""That's genuinely unsettling." He studied me for a moment, something more serio