Can Low Emotional Intelligence Ruin Leadership Effectiveness?

Two individuals with different stories, different emotions and different problems... They meet in a high school, one as a student, the other as an intern... How can they balance their views?

My twin sister, Ruby Stone, and I split up after our parents' divorce. She stays with Mom, while I went with Dad. Since the divorce, he's sunk into a deep depression, gambling away every penny we have. We move into a dark, damp apartment, and life becomes an endless struggle. Every day, I go to school and quietly work a part-time job to keep us afloat. Then, out of nowhere, Ruby—whom I haven't heard from in forever—sends me a link to a live stream. "Check this out, Aria. There's a surprise waiting for you." I click it, and my jaw drops. I'm the one topping the trending live streams. The screen splits in two. On one side, I sit in my dingy apartment, hunched over homework under the dim light. On the other side, Mom and Dad cuddle with Ruby on the fancy couch of their sprawling villa. The comments came pouring in. "Let's see what happens when twins are raised on opposite sides of fortune all the way to 18." "Aria still doesn't know, right? Her parents never divorced. They're loaded and perfectly happy. Ruby's life has been like a dream too." "Poor Aria. She's always starving and never has anything decent to wear. Isn't that basically abuse?" "She's the more sensible one, so her parents decided to raise her poorly."

On the day of the wedding, Galen Shaw forces me to crack walnuts with my bare hands for his so-called female buddy. My expression goes cold, and I refuse outright. "My hands are for holding a scalpel, not cracking walnuts for her!" He only chuckles and orders someone to hold me down. Then, he glues the walnuts to my palms himself. One by one, he slams them against the ground. "You cheated while studying medicine. Now that you've married me, forget about ever being a doctor again!" I grit my teeth through the pain. My fingers are aching, but I try to explain. "I went abroad to study medicine for you!" His so-called female buddy sneers in a shrill voice. "All that talk about the Shaw family's hereditary disease is nonsense! Galen has been perfectly healthy for over 20 years. Don't tell me you just want another excuse to cozy up with your precious senior?" The moment those words leave her lips, the faint thought of having someone bandage my hand disappears. A shadow crosses Galen's face. "Looks like you haven't learned your lesson!" He throws me into the basement and locks me there for three days. By the time I crawl out, my hands are completely ruined. Later, when Galen's hereditary disease finally surfaces, the doctor tries to comfort him. "This disease may be terminal, but there is still a way. Dr. Robinson has just returned from overseas. She's the only one in the world who can perform this surgery. "I hear that she's your wife."

After the breakup, my ex mocked me and called me a coward scavenging for scraps, then lured me to her new lover's winery just to humiliate me in front of everyone. Later, she accidentally shattered a bottle of priceless red wine and tried to pin the blame on me. What she didn't know was… the winery belonged to my family.

Kai writes the truth no one wants to hear. Especially not about Jax—the untouchable alpha captain who owns the rink and everyone’s attention. Kai’s articles tear Jax apart, call out the ego, the dirty hits, the way he plays like the world owes him. Jax should hate him. Instead, he watches. Remember. Because four years ago, one drunken night at a party locked them in a room, and Kai walked away pretending it never happened. Jax never forgot. Now the pull is back—violent, quiet, impossible to shake. Jax corners him, crowds him, makes him feel it all over again. But Milo’s there too—the steady defenseman who’s loved Kai silently since freshman year, who knows exactly what happened that night and did nothing. One secret could burn the team down. One choice could burn Kai down. In a world where the ice is thin and loyalty fractures, love isn’t clean—it’s a blade. And someone’s going to bleed. ***************** Trigger Warning: ‘Dark romance for mature readers only. Contains dubious consent, captivity, degradation, choking, knife play, violence, blackmail, and heavy emotional trauma. All characters are adults. Purely fictional.”

"I'm a mess, trying to fix what I became and for your own good maybe you should walk away." — Zayn Cole Santiago. On the surface Zayn Santiago has everything. A powerful name, a prestigious law degree within reach and a father who runs the country's most influential firm. But beneath the surface is a man held together by anger and adrenaline, spending his nights in underground fighting rings and illegal street races, chasing the only feeling that drowns out the silence his mother left behind when she took her life. By day he's the son of the prospective president. By night he's a completely different kind of dangerous. He bleeds for fun and calls it living. Aliya Martinez is a 21-year-old pre-law student with an ambition to become one of the best lawyers in the world. She’s the calm to his storm, The light to his darkness, The peace he never knew he needed, And the perfection in his ruin. Like fire and gasoline, they were never supposed to cross paths, but one night was all it took to turn everything upside down. When Zayn saves a drunk girl from a club, he thinks that’s the end of it—until a photograph surfaces of him carrying an unconscious girl into his penthouse at 2 a.m. With his father, Eduardo Santiago, running for the presidency, the scandal threatens everything. The solution is simple. An arranged engagement between Zayn and the girl. For two years. What starts as a fake relationship turns into something far more complicated as real feelings surface and buried secrets threaten to destroy everything they’ve built. Some secrets don't stay buried. Some feelings don't stay fake. Some pasts should never collide. But some ruins are far too beautiful to walk away from.