Bound By Revenge

Getting Close

The office had emptied hours ago, and the city outside had turned to a maze of lights and shadows. From the 25th floor, the skyline looked almost unreal, too perfect, too calm. Inside, the soft hum of the air conditioner and the faint tapping of a keyboard were the only sounds left.

I should have gone home. But revenge didn't rest, and neither did I.

Spreadsheets glowed on my screen, numbers blurring into meaningless patterns. My mind kept circling back to Phil, to the way he'd looked at me earlier, the thoughtful pause before he said I reminded him of someone.

He couldn't know.

Still, the thought crawled beneath my skin.

"Still here?"

I startled slightly at the voice. He stood a few feet away, one hand resting against the glass partition, a half-empty coffee cup in the other. His tie was gone now, sleeves rolled up again, the faint stubble on his jaw catching the low light.

"I could ask you the same thing," I said, closing the file.

He smiled faintly. "Touché. But I own this place. You, on the other hand, look like you've been staring at that screen for hours."

"I wanted to finish the projections before tomorrow's meeting."

"Dedicated," he said, stepping closer. "That's rare."

The way he said it wasn't flirtatious, not exactly. It was quieter, more observant, like he was trying to figure me out piece by piece.

He leaned on the edge of my desk, scanning the reports I'd been working on. His cologne was clean, woodsy, and expensive drifted between us, pulling me into memories I didn't want.

"You're good," he said after a moment. "Fast learner. It's like you've done this before."

"Something like it," I said.

He turned his gaze to me, curious. "Finance?"

I hesitated. "I've been around numbers most of my life."

"Family business?"

The words hit harder than they should have. I forced a casual shrug. "Something like that. It didn't last."

He nodded slowly, studying me as if he could sense the weight behind my tone. For a moment, the air between us shifted, less boss and employee, more two people carrying ghosts they didn't talk about.

"I know how that feels," he said quietly.

I looked up, surprised.

He smiled, but there was something sad in it. "Family business. Expectations. Trying to prove yourself in a house that's already built on someone else's name."

He wasn't talking about me anymore.

He was talking about Matthew.

The infamous older brother who had turned the Morrell name into an empire, the same man who destroyed mine.

I wanted to hate Phil for being part of that world. But the ache in his voice made it harder than I expected.

"You don't seem like someone who needs to prove anything," I said carefully.

He laughed softly, but it didn't reach his eyes. "That's because I learned to hide it well."

For a long moment, we didn't speak. The silence wasn't awkward; it was heavy, stretched thin by the things neither of us dared to say.

Outside, the city lights flickered across the glass, painting faint reflections over his face. I caught myself studying the curve of his jaw, the quiet intensity in his expression and hated that part of me cared.

I had come here to destroy him. Not to understand him.

"I should go," I said finally, pushing back my chair.

He straightened. "Right. Of course."

But he didn't move.

When I reached for my bag, his hand brushed mine just a brief touch, accidental, but enough to send a jolt through me. He froze, eyes flicking to mine, and for a second, the world outside the office disappeared.

Something sharp and unspoken passed between us, the pull neither of us wanted to name.

He cleared his throat and stepped back, his voice lower now. "Goodnight, Nicole."

"Goodnight," I managed, though my heart was anything but calm.

I walked out before I could betray the tremor in my voice. But as I reached the elevator, I saw our reflections in the glass, his still standing there, watching me go.

The doors closed, sealing the moment away.

Inside the quiet hum of the elevator, I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

This was dangerous.

Getting close to him meant risking everything, my plan, my name, my reason for coming back.

But the worst part wasn't that he made me feel something.

It was that, deep down, a small, treacherous part of me didn't want to stop him.

I kept walking, forcing my heartbeat to steady.

Revenge had no room for hesitation.

Every step reminded me why I came back, not for closure, not for forgiveness, but to make him pay.

He ruined everything my family built, smiled while he did it, and walked away untouched.

Not this time.

The plan was already in motion. His empire will rot from the inside, I'd made sure of it.

He wouldn't know it was me until it was too late. I will have to bury it, along with everything else he took from me.

Because revenge isn't about anger. It's about control, the slow, surgical taking back of what was stolen by turning every certainty he relied on into doubt, every ally into a liability, every comfort into a witness. I would learn the rhythm of his days, the names he trusted, the safeties he forgot to bolt, I would place questions where there had only been answers, and watch his confidence become a liability.

I would make him spend sleepless nights parsing innocuous emails, watching for knocks that would never come, listening for conspiracies he could not name. I would let rumors do the dirty work of fear while I held the proof in my hands, patient as a predator.

And when small fractures widened and his empire splintered into scandal and quiet betrayals, it would be clinical, inevitable, the consequence of choices he thought were clever.

He would stand where I had stood, stripped, small, and forced to count what mattered.

And by the time I was done, he'd lose everything just the way I did.