Chapter 2
“Is it a bad plan?”
“It’s an excellent plan.”
“Then why are you nervous?”
Her fingers drummed once against the table before she forced them still. “Because James Chen circulated a memo calling it impulsive and emotionally driven.”
“Is it?”
“No.”
“Then destroy him.”
Vivien looked up.
Wyatt shrugged. “Politely. With charts.”
A reluctant smile touched her face.
“They think because I’m young, I don’t understand risk,” she said. “They forget I learned risk from men who gambled away half this company before my father died.”
“Then remind them.”
“It’s exhausting.”
“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “Being underestimated usually is.”
He told her about Ivy’s teacher, who assumed he didn’t care because he could never make the PTA meetings at three on Thursdays. He told Vivien how he showed up early to every conference instead, helped with homework after twelve-hour shifts, and packed lunches shaped like smiley faces because Ivy ate more when her sandwich looked like it had opinions.
“People will believe what they want,” he said. “Your job is not to convince every fool in a suit. Your job is to know the truth and act like it.”
Vivien closed her laptop.
“You’re very direct for someone who could be fired by me.”
“Occupational hazard of being too tired to lie.”
She stood. The armor slid back onto her piece by piece. Shoulders straight. Chin up. Eyes sharp.
“Wyatt?”
“Yeah?”
“When it’s just us, call me Vivien.”
He tested the name carefully. “Vivien.”
Something passed between them. Brief, quiet, dangerous in a way neither of them wanted to name.
Then he stepped aside.
“Go ruin James Chen’s afternoon.”
“I intend to.”
The second request came four days later.
Temperature control issue. Executive suite bathroom.
This time Wyatt found her pacing her office, heels striking the hardwood like a countdown.
“Temperature’s fine?” he guessed.
“Perfect.”
“What happened?”
“I fired Martin Hayes.”
Wyatt knew the name. Vice president of operations. Fifteen years at Blackwell Technologies. Loyal to Vivien’s father.
“He was leaking confidential information to a competitor,” she said, voice tight. “Contracts. Expansion plans. Internal projections. Security confirmed it.”
“Then firing him was the right call.”
“He cried.”
Wyatt set his toolkit down.
“He sat right there and cried,” Vivien said, pointing at the chair across from her desk. “He said he had kids. A mortgage. A wife who just had surgery. He begged me to reconsider.”
“What did you do?”
“I told security to escort him out.”
“And then?”
She swallowed. “Then I threw up.”
The room went quiet.
“I’m supposed to be ruthless,” she said. “That’s what they call me anyway. The Iron Heiress. The Ice Queen. The woman who doesn’t blink.” She pressed a hand against her stomach. “But I keep seeing his face.”
Wyatt walked closer, stopping on the other side of the desk.
“You want the comfortable answer or the honest one?”
“Honest. Always.”
“You don’t live clean after hard choices. You carry them. They stack up. Every bill you can’t pay. Every hour you miss with your kid. Every person you have to disappoint because the alternative is worse. You carry all of it.”
Vivien’s eyes shone.
“But that guilt?” he said. “That means you’re still human. The day you stop feeling it is the day they’re right about you.”
She turned toward the window.
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
“Yes, you do.”
“How?”
“Because you called me instead of shutting down.”
Her reflection stared back at him in the glass.
“You’re paying me to fix things that aren’t broken,” he said.
“I know.”
“That’s insane.”
“I know that too.”
He smiled faintly. “Just checking.”
Over the next two weeks, Wyatt became the secret nobody in Blackwell Tower understood.
He was still third-class maintenance. Still unclogged drains. Still changed filters. Still ate vending-machine pretzels in the basement because the cafeteria charged nine dollars for a sandwich.
But sometimes, a message appeared on his phone.
Do you have ten minutes?
And he would find Vivien in some conference room, rooftop garden, or empty hallway where the cameras didn’t quite catch the whole truth.
They talked about impossible things.
Her father. Ivy’s mother. Money. Loneliness. Fear.
Vivien confessed she hated coffee but drank it because everyone expected CEOs to survive on it. Wyatt admitted he sometimes sat in his car outside the apartment for five minutes before going in, just to gather enough energy to be cheerful for Ivy.
One night, Vivien showed him the violin she kept behind a bookshelf.
“You play?” Wyatt asked.
“Badly.”
“Can’t be that bad.”
She proved him wrong with twelve passionate seconds of violence against classical music.
Wyatt laughed so hard he had to sit down.
Vivien tried to glare, but she was laughing too.
It should have stayed strange and harmless.
It didn’t.
Because on a Friday night, close to midnight, Wyatt’s phone lit up.
