Lina's POV
Tessa met me at the reception as I had bounced down the hallway like it was made of something bouncy and not recycled carpet. She had that ridiculous grin she used when she knew she was about to have fun at someone else's expense.
"You look smoking hawt girl," she said, handing me a paper cup of something that probably passed for coffee.
"Deliberately charming," I corrected, tucking my badge into my blouse like it was a prize ribbon. "And caffeinated." I let the cup warm my hands. Getting this job felt like getting a small, practical miracle: a paycheck that would stop my bank account from sending me passive-aggressive low-balance emails, and a place to be more than the woman who answered job rejections with silence.
Tessa nudged my elbow. "We have a plan. Snacks raid at three, fake-professionalism at nine, and mutual emotional support for when Kael Wu decides to be a walking thundercloud."
I laughed because I believed it. For the morning I existed in a kind little bubble of competence: logging into systems, nodding through HR's motivational slides, andputting faces to names that had been mere email headers for months. People were smaller in person and more real and less intimidating than their LinkedIn profiles suggested. I made a joke about someone's tie and it landed; a genuinely surprised part of me felt pleased.
Then the calendar pinged. Big, bright, unavoidable.
STAFF MEETING; 11:00 AM. CEO PRESENT
My throat went dry. I had minutes to prepare to look professional in a room full of people whose opinions of me would matter in ways that would shape my whole future in this company, remember my bestie had said he was smoking hawt and if I maybe did one or two with him I'd climb this business ladder really fast and high. I could do that. I had been doing "I am competent" a lot lately. I straightened my skirt, smoothed my hair, and sat down.
The doors opened. He walked in.
Not dramatically? Is what you'd expect me to say but no. It was very dramatic. He managed to rearrange the air in the room. He moved like he expected everyone to circle around whatever scent trailed him. At once I was the only person in a crowded room. My palms slicked against the pen I'd been holding like a lifeline and I froze.
"Tessa, girl…"
"I know… your high school bully, I'm sorry I didn't tell you, if I could, would you take the job?"
" No bitch shut the fuck up! That's not the worst part." I tried whispering.
"He's my one night stand what the hell is wrong with you?"
"One night stand, okay. Wait what?! One night stand…. Girl…"
Then she leaned across the table and whispered, "Act like you don't know him. Maybe he won't."
"You want me to pretend I don't know the man I threw two hundred dollars at?" I mouthed back, horrified I could hear the memory like a buzzing insect in my skull. It was doubtless the single most humiliating, practical decision of my adult life: hurling cash as an exit strategy. It had worked. I'd fled. But it left a hangover bigger than the club's lights.
She shrugged. "It's theater. You're an actress today, act like it."
If I were an actress, this was the poor person's version: low-budget, zero rehearsal time, improv only. So I nodded along. I took notes I would never read and laughed in the right places.
He watched me. He always did when he looked at anyone. Not so much curiosity as appraisal, like he was inventorying assets or flaws. I could feel the attention as sure as if someone had switched on a spotlight. The company slideshow did its thing: graphs, numbers, bulleted goals that meant nothing to me beyond the fact that they were now part of my daily life. Somewhere between "increase synergy" and "optimize deliverables," I realized my jaw hurt from clenching.
By noon my inbox resembled a small, hostile country. Tasks arrived with the urgency of ominous telegrams. "Revise the projection deck. Draft client memo. Audit previous quarter's invoices." The times were impossibly tight. Each new request felt less like work and more like a test: how far could someone be pushed before they cracked?
***
After being pushed and punished so hard, fast forward to the present day.
At 1:47 PM I received a short calendar invite that read like a verdict.
MEET ME , MY OFFICE , 2:00 PM
If my heart had pockets, they would have been empty. I walked over under the white noise of the open-plan floor and tried to taste the air for courage. I rehearsed an adult response: clear, direct, assertive. I have a spine. I will use it. I rolled the words in my mouth like mint candy.
I knocked. The knock echoed. He didn't look up from the paper.
"Come in," he said.
I stepped inside. He set the paper down. He set his jaw, then he set his look on me like a label you couldn't peel off.
"I want to let you know that you're to finish every work I sent before tomorrow noon."
It has gotten to me too much, this thing had pissed me off enough. I couldn't take it anymore. I had to talk back. This should be your sign to always talk back.
"I can't keep doing three major projects in a single day, sir you have other workers for crying out loud" I said, planting my palms on the desk because they were shaking.
"Oh you poor little girl…you can," he said. His voice had no fat on it. "And you will. That's how it works."
"I'm done," I said. "I've been done. This is ridiculous."
He folded his hands. "Oh? And what will you do? Quit?"
"Fine. I will," I said. I'd rehearsed that line for weeks in the shower, kitchen, bus. It felt smaller in his office.
He smiled in a way that might have been called amusement if you didn't know how easily he could sharpen amusement into something colder. "Good. I'll make sure you never get a job anywhere else."
I think I forgot how to breathe. The words were not noise. They were a real fucking threat. He said them like a fact, like a promise that could be fulfilled if he simply decided to. The air left my chest in a long exhale of slow panic.
Heat flared under my skin. If he thought he could scare me with a casual threat, he had miscalculated. That anger that had been growing all morning erupted into a red, hot ball.
"I'm not scared of empty threats," I said, stepping toward him. My pulse rang in my ears. "You can't control my life."
He stood, and the room seemed to tilt. He was taller up close, sure and composed, and I could feel my heartbeat answering to something older than spreadsheets and HR policies. He didn't move as if he feared me. He moved as if he measured me.
"Try me," he said.
"Don't patronize me," I said. "I'm not the person who you can humiliate and then.. " I tasted the admission before I spat it out. "... and then I'm supposed to take your microaggressions and your calendar invites and smile like I'm grateful."
He let out a short sound that might have been a laugh. A flat exhale. "You're my junior and the woman from that night," he said. "You remember right?"
My mouth felt like it had been dipped in sand. "Of course I remember," I blurted. "Everything about it was memorable. I…look. I threw money at you because I needed you to leave me alone. I didn't..." I stopped. No one needed the catalog of my shame. Why was I explaining myself when his perfectly timed threats had brought me here?
"So you remember," he repeated, like a verdict.
"Yes," I said. The word scraped. "I remember because I had to get out. I had to get out without givingyouyou any more of my dignit, and dony, and don't make me look like the villain. You did worse to me back in secondary school."
We volleyed words. He with his predatory calm, me with my brittle, angry wit. I accused him of piling work on me like a weapon, and he accused me of being dramatic. We both had good points.
I don't know how long I ranted. Long enough that my throat seared and my hands trembled. I said a lot of things I felt and a few I didn't need to. It felt good and stupid and necessary, unreasonable and true. When I finally said, with more heat than wisdom, "Fine! I'll quit," it was because I couldn't stand being toyed with in a place I was trying to build something decent.
He didn't blink. "Fine," he said. " And like I said, you don't seem to understand the power I carry now. I'll make sure you never work anywhere else."
It's one thing for a stranger to say you're replaceable. It's another when someone who knows the lattice of an industry who has sway and connections says they will make doors close for you. Rage lashed my face and hands. I walked toward him across his office, because proximity felt like defiance. He didn't move. He just watched me. Still, steady, like a statue.
We were a breath apart when I turned to leave. My foot caught the corner of a side table. Time dropped into slow motion. I felt my balance give and then I reached for him because I am not graceful and because I had to catch myself.
On my way out the ring on my fingers hooked the lapel of his jacket, an anchor in a room that suddenly rocked. In the scramble I tipped forward and, in a motion that felt both accidental and preordained, my body collided with his. And he fell with me on him. We were chest to chest. My cheek pressed against his tie and then it happened.
Our lips touched.
There's a pressure in a kiss that makes everything else vanish and I stubbornly, foolishly let that happen for a beat. Then my brain rushed back with a thud of horror and a punch of absurdity. Of all the people, all the disastrous timelines, of all the stupid conclusions my life had made, this was the one that made no sense and all sense at once.
I pulled back, mind sputtering. He lay there, steadier than me, like he had been expecting this possibility as casually.
I stood up and he did. His face was bright red for some reason.
Then something moved behind him, subtle and impossible: a thick, furred shape cutting the air in a lazy arc. A tail, long and muscular, flicked once and melted into the space behind his chair like it belonged to the room.
For a second my brain tried search-and-rescue: maybe a coat on a stand? A weird office decoration? No. The tail had weight. It had a light ripple of muscle under fur. It had a small, sophisticated twitch of irritation.
I made a sound that was half laugh, half animal screech. It was not one of my more dignified moments.
"Fox?" I said, stupid and sharp. "Werewolf? What are you?"