The alarm blared through the quiet room. Lara hadn’t slept at all in twenty-four hours, reliving the whole weekend over and over every time she closed her eyes: the gala, Sophia, Paul, the headquarters, Ansel standing beneath the steel skeletons of her grandfather's building looking at her with those unreadable eyes, calmly taking apart every assumption that she'd believed for three years. By the time the sun began filtering through the blinds of her bedroom, she felt even more exhausted than she had a night ago.Her alarm had blared at six. For several minutes she stared at the ceiling before swinging herself out of bed. Work. It was the only constant. Even though her entire personal life was crumbling apart, work didn't crumble with it. Work was reliable, it did what it was supposed to do. Numbers made sense, the business operated on principles of logic. People did not.The drive to King's Corporation seemed to fly by. The city had already begun its week-day frenzy of commuters in p

"Lara??" Paul's voice called interrupting their locked gaze, he had been two steps away from Lara when she finally tripped, her body colliding with the marble floor. It sounded incredibly loud, given how quiet and calculated the corridor was, yet the sound cut through King's Corporation as it seemed nothing before it ever had before-so brazen and intrusive into the polished silence. It seemed the whole building itself came to a halt, and for a second it was so quiet you could hear shoes in their tracks. A hushed murmur had spread from where Lara had fallen all the way up the corridor, and though a few heads had turned around, eyes glued to her on the floor, people had carried on quickly. But there were so many that it had made a difference, and they looked away almost grudgingly as they had a sense that what they were seeing was not an accident, but something they would remember. Lara remained on the floor for a second, stunned at what she’d just done, then she clasped her wrist t

Lara examined the piece of paper for longer than necessary, her grip on it tightening almost instinctively, as if it might change its meaning if she simply held on longer." A dinner with the Taiwanese investors attendance is mandatory, for observation and alignment of presentations." Lara read out "A corporate dinner like that is a negotiation wrapped up in something else," Paul explained quietly. "So don't be surprised if business isn't all they're interested in." Lara nodded, but she wasn't sure what exactly she was meant to be prepared for, yet she agreed because denying it would mean turning away from something that remained ineffable. That night as Lara stood in front of her mirror and adjusted her dress, she did so with slow, hesitant movements. Her reflection was staring back with a confused uncertainty she couldn't name. Deep down, Lara knew this dinner was more than an additional corporate engagement; it felt like a pivotal moment, though whether good or bad, she didn't

Ansel's office was a controlled emptiness, a space that seemed to expect subdued responses from the air within it. Outside the city had fallen to dusk, a gradient of gold into indigo; inside everything remained crisp and monochrome. Documents were neatly stacked and arranged on the desktop. Despite the stern authority and ordered calm that resided in the room, Ansel's attention kept straying from the file on Taiwan investors that lay before him and, toward nothing he would name.He stared at the folder with the company data, re-reading the same sentence over and over, taking in nothing. These kinds of deals were no new territory for him: negotiation, leverage, control-these were just shifting variables in any number of games he'd already played. But tonight a low, persistent buzz, just beyond him, refused to leave him be. Including Lara in the dinner plans seems okay at first but now it felt like a slap to his face. He pushed the file across the table, opening it and then slamming

Ansel stayed by the window for the rest of the evening, his cell phone in hand, as if willing the storm to cease as quickly as he had ceased to want to run away from it all. It didn't and with a slight sigh he turned away again." We're not leaving tonight."Lara looked up from where she had been sitting all this time, serene in the glow of her exhaustion of the day. Her hair was a little messy, her wrist still bandaged, her entire being slumped in an uncooperative posture. She just gave him a tiny nod. "'Okay.'" It was a simple sentence, and Ansel held his gaze on her face for another moment, as if afraid it might change her mind, or the entire course of their evening. Lara then picked up her cell phone as if acting on a half-remembered reflex, and the glowing screen met her eyes in the dim light. She looked at the screen, saw the name flashing before her, Paul, and answered the call.His voice cut through, muffled slightly by the drumming of rain against the windowpanes. "I can