The thirtieth floor suite Lila had commandeered for her team was named "The War Room" less than an hour after the disastrous kickoff meeting. The glass walls of the office box were already covered in hastily drawn strategy maps, flow charts, and the furious scribble of code requirements.
Ethan's challenge was a masterpiece of control. He hadn't just asked for a presentation; he'd demanded a fully actionable prototype and a global media rollout strategy for a campaign budgeted for eighteen months—in seven days. It was a pressure cooker designed to test not just her firm's talent, but Lila's breaking point.
"He's not asking for genius," Lila told her team, standing over a whiteboard that resembled a ransom note. "He's asking for exhaustion. He wants us to make a mistake."
Her developer, Maya, looked up, her eyes wide with caffeine. "Lila, he's asking us to build half an operating system and sell it to three continents by Tuesday. That's beyond a mistake, that's a professional death wish."
Lila simply smiled, a thin, ruthless line. "Then we give him a miracle. No sleep, no sentimentality, just precision. We are Reed Global's contractors, not their partners. We deliver."
She repeated the word deliver like a mantra. She was no longer the girl who believed in passion over profit. She was the woman who built her entire career on the mantra that execution was the only currency that mattered.
Saturday Night, 1:47 AM
The tower was a ghost ship. Most of the corporate city had shut down for the weekend, but the thirtieth floor glowed with a desperate, pale light. Lila hadn't seen the sun since Thursday. The world had narrowed to the twin glow of her laptop screen and the headache pounding behind her eyes.
She finally hit a wall. She needed to move, needed air that wasn't recycled and smelling faintly of burnt popcorn.
She wandered away from her team, whose low murmur of code talk provided a strange, comforting background noise, and headed down the hall. She was looking for the stairs, needing the kinetic energy of the climb, but the executive kitchenette caught her eye first. It was dark, save for the blue light of a vending machine.
She had just poured a glass of cold water when the door hissed open behind her. She didn't need to turn around to know who it was. The air shifted, growing heavy and charged, the way a thunderstorm arrives without warning.
Ethan.
He was dressed in a dark t-shirt and sweats, clothes she hadn't seen him in since their loft days—a stark, dangerous contrast to the armored CEO from the boardroom. He was holding a stack of files bound with a rubber band, proof that he, too, was living on caffeine and four hours of sleep. The casualness of the attire, worn in the cold heart of his empire, felt like an intimate ambush.
"Still here, Torres?" he asked, his voice low, lacking the boardroom's cool formality.
Lila kept her back to him, focusing on the condensation tracking down her glass. "The deadline is Tuesday, Mr. Reed. Did you expect me to delegate this to my interns?"
"I expected you to delegate the entire campaign," he countered, stepping closer. She could feel the heat radiating off him, the way her body instinctively remembered the geography of his. "You never liked the all-nighters. You were always the first one to call it, the first one to say, 'It can wait until morning.'"
A single, painful memory flashed—not of quitting work, but of a night three years ago. The apartment was cold, and they were fighting over a contract detail, shouting over a single line of legalese.
"You're sacrificing the passion, Ethan! It can wait until morning!"
"No, Lila! Precision can't wait! That's how we fail! That's why you always—"
She cut off the memory with a violent mental shake. She finally turned, her gaze icy. "I learned the hard way that when you leave things until morning, someone else takes them. And they build an empire with them."
His expression darkened. "You think I took something from you?"
"We built something together," she corrected, her voice barely a whisper, the true tension finally breaking through the professional veneer. "And when I needed you to stand by it, you chose control over us. That's why I left. Don't pretend this impossible deadline is about my commitment to a campaign, Ethan. It's about you needing to prove that I still can't finish what I start."
He closed the remaining distance between them. He didn't touch her, but the air between them was suddenly thick with three years of pain and unresolved longing.
"And if I am?" he challenged, his eyes burning with an intensity she'd forgotten, or maybe, just tried to forget. "If this is the only way I can keep you here, under my roof, for five more days, would you quit?"
The question hung in the silence. It wasn't a threat; it was a desperate admission of his own crumbling control. He was using his empire to bait her, knowing her need to prove herself was stronger than her need for self-preservation.
Lila took a steadying breath, the professional mask back in place. "I told you, Mr. Reed. I finish things now. No matter the personal cost."
She sidestepped him, the brush of her sleeve against his arm a shocking, involuntary current. She walked back to the chaos of her office, the cold water forgotten, the memory of his raw honesty echoing in the quiet hallway. She had five days left, and the hardest part of the deadline wasn't the work—it was surviving him.