Chapter 5: The "Golden Boy" Gets Shoved
1398 Words
- ELISE (ALEX)
Monday morning felt like a funeral for my new face.
I stood in the lobby elevator and caught my reflection in the polished metal. The mustache was gone. I looked about twelve years old, or maybe like a very tired college student who had just lost his scholarship.
I’d traded the trashed sneakers for a pair of black boots without holes. They were stiff, they pinched my toes, and I hated them.
"Nice face, Alex. You look cute," a voice drawled.
I didn't turn around. That smell of expensive soap and "I own the sidewalk" followed Liam Kane everywhere. He stepped into the elevator, looking entirely too sharp for 8:00 AM.
"Screw you, Kane. I feel like a naked mole rat," I muttered, rubbing my smooth upper lip. "Where’s my office? Please tell me it’s not a closet."
Liam smirked, just a tiny, annoying twitch of his mouth. "It’s next to mine. Glass walls. Try not to draw on them."
"No promises."
The doors opened on the executive floor, and the first thing I saw was a guy in a tailored navy suit standing by the reception desk. He looked like he’d been carved out of generic corporate marble. Square jaw, perfect hair, and a forced, empty grin, but his eyes were still glaring.
"Liam! Good morning," the guy said, stepping forward. He ignored me like I was a piece of gum on his shoe. "I’ve got the preliminary stats for the Apex launch. We’ve got a bit of a situation with the server migrations."
"Mark," Liam nodded, his voice going back to that cold CEO tone. "This is Alex. He’s the new associate lead on the Vertex project."
Mark’s smile faltered for exactly half a second before widening into something predatory. "Oh! The... intern. Right. Welcome to the big leagues, kid. I’ve actually already set up your workstation with the migration logs. Thought I’d give you a head start."
"Gee, thanks, Mark," I said, leaning against a desk. "So helpful. You’re like a Boy Scout, but with better hair gel."
Mark’s eye twitched. "Just doing my job."
My "new office" was nice, but Mark’s "head start" was a digital landmine.
I sat down at the terminal and opened the migration files. Within five minutes, I realized what the bastard had done. He’d given me the "dirty" logs with corrupted metadata that hadn't been cleaned in years. If I ran the script he’d left on my desktop, it would crash the entire Apex staging environment, making it look like I’d pulled the plug.
"Real subtle, Mark," I whispered, cracking my knuckles.
I looked through the glass wall. Across the hall, Mark was leaning over a desk, chatting with a group of devs and glancing toward my office every few seconds. He was waiting for the sirens to go off.
I didn't run the script. Instead, I opened a terminal and started writing a scraper to bypass the corrupted headers. My fingers flew. This wasn't work; it was a puzzle. A stupid, petty, corporate puzzle.
The door clicked open. It was Liam. He didn't say anything, just stood there watching my screen.
"Your boy Mark is a prick," I said, not looking up.
"He's the Senior Architect," Liam replied.
"He's a Senior Architect who tried to delete the staging server using my login credentials," I countered. I hit Enter, and a waterfall of green text started scrolling down. "Look at the script path. He pointed it at a recursive loop. If I’d clicked 'Run,' we’d be spending the next twelve hours restoring from backups."
Liam leaned over, his hand resting on the back of my chair. I could feel the heat coming off him. "You caught it."
"Of course, I caught it. It was about as clever as a brick to the face." I pointed at the screen. "I’m not just skipping the corruption. I’m using the broken data to map the source of the leak you guys have been having in the legacy system. Two birds, one stone. Now get out of my light, you're distracting me."
I felt him freeze. Nobody talked to Liam Kane like that. I expected a lecture, or maybe for him to flip my desk.
Instead, I heard a low, huffing sound. A chuckle?
"Fix it, Alex," he said, his voice unusually soft. "And when you’re done, come to the boardroom. Mark is giving a presentation on the 'failed' migration."
"Oh, this is going to be fun," I grinned.
The boardroom was packed. Mark was at the front, looking very somber and very fake.
"Unfortunately," Mark said, clicking a slide that showed a big red 'Error' sign, "it seems the junior staff wasn't quite ready for the complexity of the Apex migration. We’ve hit a catastrophic sync error. I’m currently heading up the recovery effort, but—"
I pushed the door open, swinging my laptop bag onto the table. "But nothing. The migration is done."
The room went silent. Mark turned red. "Excuse me? Jones, I saw your terminal. It was a mess."
"Yeah, because you left trash in the driveway, Mark," I said, walking to the front and plugging my laptop into the HDMI port. "I cleaned it up. Not only is the migration finished, but I found out why the database was lagging."
I clicked a button. A map of the network appeared, glowing bright blue. No red. No errors.
"I rerouted the sync through a temporary buffer and wiped the corrupted metadata Mark 'accidentally' left in the folder," I said, looking Mark right in the eyes. "Check your phone, buddy. The staging site is live. 100% uptime."
Mark scrambled for his tablet. His face went from red to a ghostly, sickly white. "I... I must have misread the logs. I thought—"
"You thought you’d set me up," I chirped. "It’s okay. We all make mistakes. Some of us just make them in public during meetings."
A few of the devs started whispering. Marcus, the guy from the other day, actually gave me a thumbs-up.
Liam was sitting at the head of the table, his fingers laced together under his chin. He wasn't looking at the screen. He was looking at me. Not with that annoyed "I’m going to fire you" look, but with something... different. It was like he was seeing a person instead of a problem.
"Mark," Liam said, his voice like a glacier. "My office. Now."
Mark didn't even try to argue. He gathered his things and slunk out like a dog that had been caught eating the Thanksgiving turkey.
The meeting broke up quickly after that. I stayed behind to unhook my laptop. I felt a weird buzz of adrenaline in my chest. Or maybe it was just the fact that I’d actually done a good job. b
"You're a show-off," Liam said, walking over once the room was empty.
"I'm a genius," I corrected, closing my laptop with a snap. "There’s a difference."
"You handled him well. Most people would have just complained to HR."
"HR is for people who don't know how to code," I shrugged. "Besides, seeing his face turn that shade of gray was way more satisfying."
Liam stepped closer. The boardroom felt smaller all of a sudden. He reached out, and for a second, I thought he was going to touch my face, maybe check if the mustache was really gone. He stopped just short, his hand hovering near my shoulder.
"You’re talented, Alex. Annoying, loud, and you dress like a squatter, but you’re talented."
"Is that a compliment, Kane? Careful, you might break a rib."
He actually smiled then. A real one. "Don't let it go to your head. You still owe me those reports by five."
"Yeah, yeah. Whatever."
As he walked out, I realized I was holding my breath. I let it out in a long hiss. My wolf, Lulu, was pacing in the back of my mind, wagging its tail like an i***t.
Shut up, I told it. He’s just the boss. A hot, scary, slightly-less-robotic boss.
I looked down at my new boots. They still pinched, but maybe they weren't as bad as they seemed.
I headed back to my office, passing Mark’s desk on the way. I grabbed a handful of his "premium" chocolates from his candy jar and winked at him before walking away.
It was a good Monday.
- Writer
