YOU’RE MINE, Miss Intern.

Chapter three

By the third day, Ann had learned the shape of the floor.

Who laughed only when Rhea left, who stole credit with a smile, who looked at her badge and decided she would not last the week.

She kept working anyway. At noon her phone lit up with the pharmacy again. Second notice; payment needed today. Ann turned the screen face down and sighed the panic before it reached her face.

“Cole.” Rhea did not look up from her tablet. “Conference Room B. Water, copies, clicker. The quarterly preview starts in twenty minutes. If anything is missing, it is your fault.”

Ann moved. The room was already half full when she finished setting it. Men in suits. Women who spoke in short, expensive sentences. Ann stood near the wall with the extra copies pressed to her chest and tried to become furniture.

Then Mikel walked in, and everything shifted. The chatter quieted down, and people straightened in their seats without a word. The room felt different like something important had just arrived.

He took the seat at the head of the table and opened a folder like the room belonged to him because it did. His eyes passed over the faces, then stopped on Ann for half a second.

Rhea arrived late and snapped her fingers toward the back. Ann handed out the packets and stepped away.

The meeting started clean. Numbers, projections, a junior manager talking too fast about a client Ann had seen in yesterday’s files. Halfway through, the screen stopped. The clicker died in the man’s hand.

“I tested this an hour ago,” he said, voice climbing.

No one offered help, they watched him fail instead. Ann saw the problem from where she stood. Wrong input, simple, she could fix it in under a minute.

She also remembered the rule, do not get noticed.

The silence stretched, Mikel’s eyes locked onto the frozen screen, then shifted sharply to the man beside it, whose face was flushing red with tension.

Ann stepped forward before she could talk herself out of it. “May I?”

The junior manager looked ready to say no. Mikel spoke first. “Let her.”

Ann took the clicker, switched the cable, and brought the slide back. The room exhaled as if she had done a trick.

She returned to the wall feeling tense. Mikel didn’t say thank you. He didn’t even glance her way again. He just kept going with the meeting, as if her interruption was nothing more than a minor annoyance he had already pushed aside.

When it ended, people filed out in a rush of perfume and relief. Ann started gathering glasses.

“You.” She turned.

Mikel stood at the table, one hand on the folder she had saved. “Who told you to touch the presentation?”

Ann kept her voice even. “No one. It was going to cost you the room.”

Rhea appeared in the doorway, already braced for damage. “Mr. Damaris, I can—”

He lifted two fingers. Rhea stopped talking. Mikel’s eyes stayed on Ann. “You like stepping into things that are not yours.”

“I like not watching people waste time.” The words came out before she could pull them back. For a moment Ann thought she had ended the internship with her own mouth.

Mikel studied her the way he had in his office. “Next time, wait to be asked,” he said. “Competence is not the same as permission.”

Then he looked at Rhea. “She stays on your desk. If she is going to be in rooms like this, teach her the difference.” He left.

Rhea waited until the door shut before she let out a breath. “Do you have a death wish?”

Ann stacked the last cups. “My mother needs her medicine today, death will have to wait.”

Rhea stared at her. Something almost human passed through her face, then vanished. “Go downstairs and eat,” she said. “You have twelve minutes. After that, you belong to this floor again.”

Ann took the stairs because the elevator felt too small. On the landing she checked her phone, the pharmacy total had not changed neither had her bank account.

She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. She had told herself she would stay invisible instead she had walked into Mikel Damaris’s meeting, fixed his screen, and spoken back to him.

And he had not fired her, that should have felt like luck but it felt like standing too close to a drop.