All Chapters of MY RUDE NEIGHBOUR IS MY BILLIONAIRE BOSS : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

"Explain to me," Adrian said, voice clipped in front of eleven board members, "why the Kessler timeline slipped by two weeks without anyone flagging it until this morning."I kept my expression neutral, though something hot and immediate flared under my ribs at the tone he'd chosen to use in front of a room full of people whose opinions of me he clearly cared more about than he'd admit. "The timeline slipped because Legal sat on the revised contract for three days before I caught the section twelve error myself. I flagged the change the same afternoon I found it.""You flagged it in a comment. Not in a formal memo to this board.""Because it wasn't your board's issue at the time. It was a drafting error between Legal and the client. I corrected it before it became your problem." I held his gaze, refusing to let the room's collective attention shrink me the way I suspected he half expected it to. "If you'd like a formal memo for every internal correction going forward, I'm happy to s

I buried myself in spreadsheets for the rest of the week, mostly because staring at columns of shipping data required less emotional energy than thinking about the photograph still folded in my desk drawer, or the man three doors down who apparently meant what he'd said about something happening between us, or the anonymous voice that seemed to know more about my life than I did most days.Numbers didn't lie. Numbers didn't apologize beautifully and then repeat the same mistake a week later. Numbers just sat there, patient, waiting to be understood, and right now that felt like the safest relationship available to me."You've been at this since six," Diane said, dropping a coffee on my desk on her way past. "Everything okay?""Fine. Just trying to reconcile the regional shipping logs before the quarterly review." I didn't look up from the screen, scrolling through a spreadsheet dense enough that most people would have handed it off to accounting without a second glance. "There's somet

"You didn't tell me someone threatened to kill you."Marcus said it quietly, standing at my new office door, arms crossed, none of his usual easy warmth visible anywhere in his expression. Word of the server room incident had apparently moved through the building faster than I'd managed to process it myself."It wasn't a direct threat. It was an implied one, buried in a wipe log, and I only found out about it four hours ago." I kept my voice level, though the exhaustion of the day was starting to fray the edges of my composure. "I was going to tell you. I needed to breathe first.""You should have called me immediately." He stepped inside, closing the door behind him, something protective and unfamiliar hardening his usual relaxed posture. "Ann, this is serious. Someone accessed the building's servers, cut power to cover it, and left a message with your name attached. That's not corporate espionage anymore. That's a person telling you they know exactly who you are and exactly how t

"How did you know where I was?"I said it the moment Marcus opened his apartment door, not bothering with a greeting, still holding my phone with his two texts glowing accusingly on the screen. He blinked, clearly not expecting me on his doorstep at nine at night, dressed in the same clothes I'd worn to meet Priya an hour ago."Ann. Are you okay?""Answer the question. You texted me that I'd left without security, and then, less than a minute later, you knew exactly who I was with. I never told you where I went or who I was meeting." I stayed in the doorway, arms crossed, refusing the instinct to soften just because his face had gone concerned and confused in a way that looked, infuriatingly, completely genuine. "How did you know that?""Security flagged that you left without your escort. That's the first text." He stepped back, gesturing me inside, though I didn't move. "The second one, I got a call. Someone from the front desk mentioned a woman matching Priya's description picked

I didn't go home. I didn't call Marcus, didn't call Jess, didn't do any of the things a reasonable person does when they need to cool down after watching a glamorous stranger imply their almost-something has a long history of making women feel disposable.I opened the shipping files instead.It felt productive, at least, channeling the specific, furious energy currently making my hands shake into something useful rather than letting it curdle into another sleepless night replaying Freya's smile. I pulled the Pacific Northwest archive back up, the same discrepancy I'd flagged weeks ago, the one Adrian had brushed off with a careful, noncommittal interesting before changing the subject entirely.This time, I didn't stop at the surface pattern. I went deeper, cross-referencing vendor codes against employee badge access logs, matching timestamps of data entry against who'd actually been in the building when each entry was made. It took hours. My coffee went cold twice. The office emptie