YOU’RE MINE, Miss Intern.

Chapter seven

Ann was at her desk before eight, with the dinner notes stacked the way Mikel liked things: clean, in order, with no smudge where her hand had shaken on the train.

But it did not matter, the floor already knew. She felt it in the way conversations dipped when she passed. In the way two assistants looked at her dress from last night even though she was back in the same black slacks as everyone else. In the way nobody asked how the Hartwell dinner went, because they had already decided they knew.

Rhea dropped a box of copy work on Ann’s desk hard enough to make the pens jump.

“You will not leave this floor today,” Rhea said. “You will not take his elevator. You will not be seen carrying anything to the forty-eighth unless I put it in your hands myself.”

Ann kept her voice low. “I only went because you sent me.”

“And now the building thinks I sent you for another reason.” Rhea leaned in. “Hartwell’s driver talks, someone in hospitality talks, someone saw you get into his car in that dress and they did not see me. That is all a place like this needs.”

Ann’s stomach turned. “Nothing happened.”

“I did not ask if something happened. I asked you to become boring, starting now.”

Ann opened the box. It was punishment disguised as work: duplicate packets, old slides, and files she didn’t need.

By ten, a boy with a nice haircut and a badge that looked new on purpose stopped at her desk. “You’re Ann, right? From last night.”

She looked up. “Can I help you?”

He smiled like they were already friends. “Evan. Strategy track, my uncle sits on a committee that loves this building. I just wanted to say you handled Hartwell better than most people would. That table eats quiet girls.”

It sounded kind, it did not feel kind. “I was there to take notes.”

“Sure.” Evan tapped her desk once, light, claiming the space. “Still, if the gossip gets loud, find me. I can make it sound like you were doing me a favor, not him.”

Ann stared at him. “I don’t need a story.”

“Everyone here needs a story.” His smile did not move. “Especially the ones who get noticed by accident.”

He left, but the air around him remained sour.

Ann worked through lunch, she ate a dry sandwich over the copy box and tried not to check the time. At two, her phone beeped with a photo from the clinic portal: a reminder, a date and a balance she did not have. She turned the phone face down and kept stapling.

At three, Mikel walked onto the forty-second floor, he almost never did that.

The room’s atmosphere changed. Keyboards got louder and people sat up like posture could save them.

He stopped at Rhea’s desk first, though Ann heard her name anyway. “Cole, bring me the Hartwell notes. Now.”

Rhea’s lips pressed into a hard line. “I can bring them up.”

“I said Cole!”

Ann stood. Every face on the floor found something else to look at and failed.

She walked the notes over and held them out. Mikel took the folder without touching her fingers. His eyes moved over her face, catching the tension gathered around her mouth, the strain she’d been trying to hide all morning.

“You look tired,” he said, too quiet for the room and still not quiet enough.

“I’m working.”

“Good.” He turned the folder in his hand. “These will do. Stay on this floor unless I send for you.” Then he was gone, the silence he left behind had teeth.

Rhea did not look at Ann for a full minute. When she did, it was worse than shouting.

“He asked for you by name in front of twenty people. Do you understand what that costs?”

Ann sat down. “I understand I don’t get to choose how he says my name.”

“Then choose how you answer it.”

The rest of the afternoon dragged on. Evan passed her desk twice and did not stop.

At four forty, Ann’s phone rang. The word home lit up the screen.

She stepped into the stairwell because the floor had already taken enough of her.

Her mother’s voice sounded faint. “I fell, but I’m okay. The neighbor helped me up. I didn’t want to go to the clinic.”

Ann pressed her forehead to the painted wall. “Did you hit your head?”

“No, I'm on the couch. I just… I got dizzy. Don’t leave work.”

“I’m coming home.”

“Ann.”

“I’m coming home.”

She went back for her bag. Rhea saw her face and, for once, did not make it a lesson.

“Go,” Rhea said. “If anyone asks, you were sent to records.”

Ann nodded and left before the kindness could turn back into rules.

The train was slow. The apartment smelled like fear, her mother was sitting up, pale, embarrassed to be seen like that. Ann checked her eyes, her hands, the bruise starting on her elbow.

She heated soup she did not taste and sat on the floor until her mother’s breathing evened.

“You’ll be late tomorrow if you stay fussing,” her mother murmured.

“I’ll be late anyway,” she said, meaning it as a joke, but it came out true by morning, everything was worse

Ann missed her usual train by six minutes and walked onto the forty-second floor with her badge still in her fist. Rhea looked at the clock, then at Ann, and said nothing. That silence traveled.

Evan said it for her. “Rough night?” he asked, loud enough. “Or a long one upstairs?”

Ann did not answer. She sat and opened her screen like work could make the heat in her face disappear.

A folded note lay on her keyboard. There was no envelope or signature, only a line in handwriting she recognized from contracts and corrections. “Come to my office after five.”

Ann read it twice. Around her, the office carried on as usual. Phones rang, printers hummed, and people pretended not to notice that she had arrived late after being called out in front of everyone the day before.

Rhea appeared at her shoulder, saw the note, and shut her eyes for a second. “Do not be stupid,” she said under her breath. “If he is going to burn the rumor, let him do it with the door open.”

Ann folded the paper and put it in her pocket.

She moved through the day one task at a time: copying documents, answering calls, and trying not to think about what waited after five.

A packet Evan somehow needed her to reprint after he “lost” the first one. At four fifty she stood, smoothed her shirt, and took the elevator she had been told not to use.

The forty-eighth floor was quiet in the way expensive places were quiet. Mikel’s assistant was gone and his door was shut.

Ann stood outside it with the note in her pocket and last night still on her mother’s bruise.

She did not know whether she was there to be punished or kept.

She knocked once. From the other side, his voice came calm and assured. “Come in, Cole.”