The doors of kings corporation slide open, and efore anyone had even spoken the words, Sophia had a feeling. The information hadn't all come to her at once but as disparate pieces. Half-finished sentences cut short the second she walked into a room, whispered conversations falling silent the second she turned around, the subtle shift of eyes looking away as soon as her name had been mentioned in relation to the investor dinner.By the time she reached the main floor of King's Corporation, there was already a definite slant in the air. It wasn't aggressive or obvious, merely...off, like a room where all the furniture has been rearranged without a word. She stood still, just by the reception desk. The secretary's eyes met hers and a quick flash lit up in them, too immediate for a casual glance. Sophia knew that she didn't have to say anything immediately. Rarely did she in these situations where everything required more than a simple response. Before she could even make a sound though

Lara gave him no answer at first. Her silence was a full one, not a hollow one, brimming with everything Lara’s life contained which she had desperately kept from her lips until now. When Lara did speak, the tone was significantly deeper. "We hit a bit of legal trouble," she stated blandly. Ansel did not move at her answer but his eyes widened nearly to the breaking point and his jaw tensed the one minute, almost imperceptible tell that for the few people who knew him well enough, he already understood what she implied. "Legal problems," he whispered, his own voice barely audible. Lara nodded. "After all of that... After the restructuring... There wasn't much left of the company to operate, it became bankrupt, people came knocking down the doors, internal claims... The whole nine yards," she said and stopped. "It wasn't just business failing. It was everything failing." Ansel looked away from her as if to control the tide of his emotions by denying them full contact with h

Lara entered her office, they were immediately there on her desk, the transfer papers stacked with an unnervingly perfect precision that stopped her cold in her tracks and made the entire air in the room seem to shift the moment she had walked in the door. She stood there, holding the cooling mug of coffee in her hand, and allowed her gaze to fall upon the neatly formed pile of documents in the center of her desk, designed to consume her morning before she’d had a chance to get a single sip of coffee. Outside her office continued its languid dance around her employees drifting in, bleary and slow-eyed, armed with a mug and the faintest of yawns. They would pass in and out through the glass panels separating the departments, a subdued murmur of conversations punctuated by the occasional ping of an email notification and the steady, relentless clicking of keyboards, punctuated with the whirring of the printers. She could hear all of it faintly, as if she was on the other side of a sh

The morning arrived a little quiet at King’s Corporation, as if even the sun knew to bow in the face of the tangible tension. Lara was already slumped behind her desk when she’d need to be, fingers around the grip of a pen that had seen no action for a solid several minutes and her gaze locked somewhere beyond the edge of the report that had ceased to occupy her desk, but not her thoughts. “Leave it open.” The words had followed her through the night, a disembodied echo of trespass that wouldn’t quite leave her, slinking into the margins of her thoughts whenever she’d try to fix them elsewhere, appearing between breaths like something Ansel had inadvertently lodged in her very being. She inhaled deeply and managed to coax her focus back to the screen in front of her, but the reports bled together, numbers blurring to gibberish as her thoughts kept returning to the same unanswered question.Was the transfer as straightforward as it appeared? A straightforward business decision to s

Sophia returned home, the imposing doors of Blake estate swung shut behind her, heavy with the finality that shut out a world she hadn’t yet mastered. Her heels click-clacked a slow, irregular beat on the polished marble as she traversed the vast foyer, her expression as tight as it could be-too tight. Her controlled composure was cracking in ways she couldn’t afford to see just yet. The house shimmered with an almost eager warmth, ready to embrace and coddle. The crystal in the chandeliers splattered broken light across surfaces; art, portraits of the ancestors, hung stoic and expectant on the walls. Tonight none of it seemed to matter to her. She swept past the servants-a hurried hello, a muttered thank you, their practiced polite greeting ignored as she made her way toward the living room, where her father was seated. Mr. Blake sat beside a floor-to-ceiling glass window, the newspaper open, but half-read, lying loosely in his lap. He looked up as she entered, his languid gaze s