Monday morning tasted like coffee and hope.
I’d barely slept. Not because I was anxious—though, yes, my stomach was twisting in knots—but because I kept replaying that interview over and over in my head.
Liam Duarte, standing at the door. That voice. That smirk. “I think I’ll enjoy watching you try not to.”
Was that flirting? Teasing? A test?
My mind had dissected it from a dozen angles, none of them helpful.
“Ava,” Isabella called from the kitchen, “if you don’t get out of that mirror and into your shoes, you’re going to be late for your first day as a corporate badass.”
I glanced away from my reflection and back at her—barefoot, coffee in hand, her curly hair in an effortless bun. She was the kind of friend who kept snacks labeled with your name and still threatened to fight anyone who wronged you.
“I can’t believe they hired me,” I muttered.
“I can,” she said, sipping. “You're smart, you're overqualified, and you survived the Callahan nightmare. After that, Duarte’s just another pretty tyrant in a suit.”
That made me smile. Barely.
I hadn’t seen Isabella in nearly a year before I showed up on her doorstep with nothing but my duffel and a fake name. I half-expected her to slam the door in my face.
She hugged me instead.
“I always knew Jeremy was a rotting banana in human form,” she’d told me, arms tight around me. “Took you long enough to peel yourself away.”
That girl had jokes and a heart of gold.
Now she had a roommate who could pay her half of the rent.
And I had a shot at something that felt like freedom.
I spent the subway ride mentally drafting proposals. Acquisition strategies. Potential restructures. New R&D teams. I knew I was new. I knew I was young. But I wasn’t going to tiptoe around this job. I had ideas, damn it. And I wanted to show him—Liam—that I wasn’t some temporary intern with big eyes and big dreams.
I wanted to prove I deserved to be in that room. In his orbit.
Unfortunately, his orbit was a frozen tundra.
“You’re not thinking like a strategist,” he said flatly, skimming the fourth slide of my presentation. “You’re thinking like a student.”
My cheeks flamed. “With all due respect—”
“You’re making assumptions based on ideal conditions,” he cut in. “This team doesn’t have those resources. That division doesn’t have that runway. And we don’t invest in hypothetical magic, no matter how good it sounds.”
Every meeting was the same.
Ava’s big idea → Liam’s big stomp → crushed feelings and a hollow echo in my chest as I left his office.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t yell.
He’d listen, then cut me down with surgical precision—pointing out the gaps, the flaws, the lack of real-world grounding. Then he’d turn back to his laptop like I was dismissed. Like I wasn’t even worth a second glance.
I wanted to cry. I did cry, quietly, in the bathroom after one especially brutal meeting on Thursday. But I wouldn’t let him see it.
I kept working. Kept drafting. Kept adjusting. But every time I walked out of his office, I felt smaller.
Today’s proposal was my boldest yet. Scalable infrastructure upgrades for the mid-tier development teams and a targeted AI integration to reduce long-term manpower. It was ambitious. A little messy. But it was visionary.
Liam Duarte hated it.
“Is this a joke?” he asked, flipping through the third page without looking up. “You want to cut two revenue streams, pivot internal strategy, and reassign half a division—based on a theory?”
My throat went tight. “Not a theory. It’s backed by—”
“By nothing that matters. No cost-benefit breakdown. No human capital modeling. You gave me a TED Talk with a budget hole the size of Texas.”
I stood straighter. “It’s a starting point—”
“No,” he said sharply. “It’s a fantasy. It sounds like something you scribbled in a notebook while sipping overpriced coffee and congratulating yourself on your ‘big ideas.’”
The words hit harder than I expected. Maybe because they weren’t wrong. Or maybe because I’d actually stayed up all night working on it and my coffee was overpriced.
I stared at him—at that clean-shaven jaw and emotionless mouth, and those eyes that somehow saw every insecurity in me and pointed to it like a fucking spotlight.
And worse?
A traitorous, maddening part of me still wanted to kiss him.
I wanted to slap him. And then kiss him. Or maybe both, hard enough to confuse us both.
Because under the brutal critiques and the clipped, elegant cruelty—he was magnetic. He radiated power and restraint, and I hated how my body responded to it.
I hated the way my pulse jumped when he leaned over my shoulder. Hated the way my eyes tracked the way his fingers curled around a pen. Hated how hot I felt when he said:
“I think I’ll enjoy watching you try not to.”
God, what was wrong with me?
Why did I want the man who shredded me with a sentence to touch me like he meant it?
I blinked fast, shoved the chair back, and grabbed my folder before I could throw it at him.
He didn’t look up.
“If you can’t handle the job,” he said coldly, “don’t come in tomorrow.”
I stood there for a second, frozen. Rage and humiliation knotted in my chest. My fingers itched. My throat burned. I wanted to scream, or cry, or crawl inside his lap and destroy my entire career in thirty seconds flat.
Instead, I forced my voice into a whisper-sharp calm.
“Duly noted.”