YOU’RE MINE, Miss Intern.

Chapter ten

Ann arrived with a box that was mostly pens, a spare shirt, and the pride she could still carry. The desk outside Mikel’s office was smaller than the one downstairs and twice as visible. A hallway that existed so people could look busy while they looked at her.

Rhea set the box down like it weighed more than it did. “This is a mistake.”

Ann kept her voice even. “He didn’t ask me.”

“Of course he didn’t.” Rhea glanced at the closed door. “Downstairs you were a problem I could hide. Up here you are a notice on a wall. If you need the bathroom, you take your badge. If Evan appears with a smile, you send him back to his uncle. If Mikel leaves that door open, you do not treat it like an invitation.”

“I know.”

Rhea looked at her for a long second. “Your mother. If the clinic calls, you tell me first, not the hallway.”

Ann acknowledged it. The morning was a performance, assistants slowed when they passed. A board aide asked for Mikel and stared at Ann while she said he was on a call. Evan came up with a folder he could have sent through the system.

“Promotion already,” he said, pleasant as glass. “Must be nice to be necessary.”

Ann took the folder. “If this needs a signature, leave it. If it needs an audience, take it back downstairs.”

Evan’s smile widened a fraction. “Careful. People up here lose their sense of humor.”

He left. The folder was blank inside except for a single printed line: watch your drawer.

Ann put it in the shred bin without touching the words twice.

Mikel came out at ten and stopped at her desk as if the placement had always been his idea. “You sit here until the vendor matter is closed, do not discuss why. If anyone asks, you are on temporary executive support.”

“That’s a thin story.”

“It only has to last longer than theirs.” He set a smaller stack beside her keyboard. “These stay on this floor and nothing leaves in your bag unless I say so.”

Ann looked at the pages. “So I found the file and now I am not allowed to see it.”

“You found enough to make yourself a target. That is the part I am correcting.”

He went back in, the door stayed half open. Ann hated that more than if it had shut. At twelve her phone lit with the clinic name.

Ann stood, then sat, then stood again. Rhea’s warning was still in her ear. The hallway was worse, she took the phone to the small copy alcove and answered.

“Miss Cole, we need your mother to come in this afternoon, her results require a consultation today. She’s already here, and she asked us not to scare you.”

Ann’s hand went cold around the phone. “I’m on my way.”

She hung up. When she turned around, Mikel was standing at the entrance to the alcove…he hadn’t been there when she walked in.

“How much did you hear?” she asked.

“Enough.”

“I have to go.”

“I know.”

Ann waited for a speech about hours and contracts and disappearing from his floor. He was already on his phone. “Bring the car around. The clinic list I sent last week, she is going now.”

Ann stared at him. “You have a clinic list.”

“I have the name you used when you were late,” he said, as if that explained the invasion and the usefulness in one line. “Go take your bag. Come back when you can tell me she is not alone in a hallway.”

“I don’t need…”

“Cole.” Not loud. “This is not a discussion about pride, the car is already downstairs.”

Rhea showed up as Ann reached the elevator, took one look at her face, and did not ask.

The clinic smelled like medicines. Ann’s mother was in a chair too big for her, annoyed to be seen, trying to make the whole thing small with a joke that did not come out well. The consultation wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t nothing, either. There would be another test, another appointment, and another number, one that would have broken them the week before the extra hours began.

Ann sat with her until her mother got herself again. “You should go back,” her mother said. “That look on your face is work.”

“That look is you.”

“Then fix your face before you take it into a building that eats girls who look worried.”

Ann almost told her about the desk, the glass, the man who had a car waiting like care was just another system he could run. But she decided not to because some truths did not belong under clinic lights.

She got her mother home, set the pills out, waited until the neighbor agreed to check in, and stood in the doorway longer than she had time for.

“I’ll be late,” Ann said.

Her mother watched her with the kind of seeing that needed no file. “Don’t confuse a man who sends a car with a man who stays.”

“I’m not.”

On the train back, Ann was not sure that was true. The building at eight was a different country. Security waved her through like her badge had learned a new language. The forty eighth floor was dim except for his office.

Ann stopped at the empty desk that was now hers and set her bag down. She could have gone home, the contract did not say she had to return tonight.

She knocked, and Mikel opened the door himself. His jacket was off, his tie gone. He looked at her the way he'd looked at the missing pages, checking what was still there.

“She’s home,” Ann said. “Not admitted, another test will be carried out next week.”

He nodded once. “Sit.”

“I can stand.”

“That was not the part I was offering as a choice.”

Ann sat on the edge of the chair. “You arranged a car before I asked.”

“Yes.”

“You had the clinic name.”

“Yes.”

“That is a lot of knowledge for a man who said he does not run a rescue.”

Mikel rested both hands on the back of his own chair, as if he needed the furniture to stay on the right side of the line. “I run a company. People vanish inside companies when they become inconvenient. You became inconvenient the moment that file left your drawer. I prefer inconvenient things where I can see them.”

Ann let the words sit, they were also the most honest thing he had given her. “The floor will say you moved me because I am yours.”

“The floor will say that if I leave you downstairs to be picked apart.” His eyes held hers. “I can survive talk. I will not survive another missing page with your name near it.”

Ann’s voice came out quieter. “And my mother?”

A pause. “Is not my business,” Mikel said. “Until her name makes you run out of my building without telling me whether you are coming back.”

It was there…not tenderness, not a speech, but need, disguised as control. Ann stood. She should have left on that, instead she stayed in the space between the chair and the door. “I came back,” she said.

“I know.”

“I won’t always be able to.”

Mikel came around the desk and stopped short of her, close enough that she had to lift her face. “From now on,” he said, “you do not disappear. If the clinic calls, if your desk is touched, if Evan smiles at you with a piece of paper in his hand, I hear it from you first.”

Ann searched his face for softness and found only the decision already made. “That is not a work rule.”

“It is now.”

She could have argued the contract language, or told him her life wasn't some executive matter. But the day had drained the fight right out of her. “All right,” Ann said.

Mikel looked at her a moment longer, like agreement was its own kind of trouble. “Go home, Cole. The desk will still be here in the morning, so will the talk.”

Ann picked up her bag. At the door she stopped, because leaving him in that lit office felt like leaving a wire live. “Mikel.”

He waited.

“I didn’t come back because you told me to.”

His reply was barely anything, yet somehow it said everything. “I know,” he said. “That is the part I am going to have a problem with.