Under Contract

Chapter Four: Chaos in Code

Melody Pov

Day one of Anton Vespucci’s absurd daily check-ins, and I was already committed to being a problem.

If he wanted visibility, he could have it. If he wanted structure, oversight, polished updates, and calm little founder briefings delivered in a tone that suggested I appreciated his interference, he was about to be profoundly disappointed.

I pulled on my favorite oversized gray hoodie, the one with the frayed cuffs and ink stain near the pocket, because it looked exactly like what it was: comfortable, practical, and completely wrong for one of Anton’s glass-and-money environments. Ripped jeans. Sneakers. Hair twisted into a messy bun that would fall apart by noon. No makeup. No effort beyond usefulness.

Let him see the actual version of me.

Not the gala version.

Not the founder version people liked to parade in front of investors.

The real one. The developer who forgot meals, lived in tabs, and considered chaos a perfectly valid workflow if it got the product where it needed to go.

I shoved my laptop into my bag, then added my external keyboard, the loud mechanical one, the clicky monster that sounded like small-arms fire when I got moving. Then the mini fan. Then the chargers, adapters, notebook, water bottle, and one hoodie string I had somehow chewed half to death during debugging the night before.

By the time I was done, my bag looked less like work equipment and more like I was moving into his office out of spite.

Perfect.

On the ride over, I ordered pizza.

Extra garlic.

Because if Anton wanted me there every day, he was getting the full sensory experience.

The lobby of Vespucci Tower was as sleek and expensive as I remembered: polished stone, muted lighting, people who moved like they had never once spilled coffee on themselves in their lives. I crossed it in sneakers and irritation, rode the elevator up, and watched the numbers climb with the growing conviction that this daily arrangement was either going to end in murder or a hostile acquisition of my last nerve.

The elevator doors opened, and his assistant looked up.

She was elegant in that terrifying way some women are, all composed edges and expensive calm. “Good morning, Ms. Richardson.”

“Debatable,” I said.

Her mouth almost moved. “He’s waiting.”

Of course he was.

I stepped into Anton’s office and immediately hated how beautiful it was.

Floor-to-ceiling windows. Too much glass. Too much order. The skyline stretched behind him like the city itself had agreed to behave for his benefit. He sat behind that enormous desk in a dark suit that fit him offensively well, papers aligned with geometric precision, expression unreadable in the way rich, powerful men seemed to treat as a hobby.

Then he looked up.

Dark eyes. Calm face. That same steady attention that always felt a little too direct, like he wasn’t just looking at me but sorting me into categories I would resent on principle.

“You’re early,” he said.

His voice was low, even, controlled enough to sound like he’d never once raised it in his life.

“Try not to sound so disappointed.”

I dropped my bag onto the side desk I had decided was mine now, whether he liked it or not. The noise landed harder than necessary. I enjoyed that. I pulled out my laptop, keyboard, cords, and fan with the kind of determination usually associated with military deployment.

Anton watched in silence.

That was irritating already.

I plugged everything in. The keyboard hit the desk with a satisfying clack. The fan went on high immediately, humming like a tiny engine determined to die for the cause.

“Watch closely,” I said, opening my laptop. “This is what actual work looks like.”

Anton leaned back slightly in his chair. “I’m fascinated.”

“You should be.”

I opened my IDE, pulled up the latest work, and started typing.

The keyboard exploded into sound.

Click-clack-clack-clack.

Sharp, loud, relentless. Beautiful.

If normal offices had ambient piano music and the gentle tap of laptop keys, mine now had the acoustic energy of a tactical operation.

I didn’t look at him. “See this? Your requested refactor. I’m cleaning it up because I enjoy efficiency, unlike some people who only enjoy demanding it.”

“Mm.”

I paused just long enough to glare at him over my screen. “Was that a real response or a billionaire noise?”

“It was encouragement.”

“That is not what encouragement sounds like.”

His gaze moved briefly over the top of my laptop, then back to my face. “The hoodie suits you.”

I blinked.

That was not a sentence I had prepared for.

“I didn’t ask.”

“No,” he said. “You rarely do.”

Annoying.

Deeply, structurally annoying.

I looked back at the screen and typed harder.

The code, at least, made sense. Latency issues in a few endpoints, some cleanup around response handling, a couple architectural choices Anton had pushed for that were useful in theory but irritating in practice because they had clearly been designed by someone who valued visibility over developer sanity. I muttered through fixes, partly because it helped me think and partly because I knew he could hear me.

“This is why people hate investors,” I said. “They hear one technical phrase and suddenly think they’re spiritually involved in the build.”

“No one has ever accused me of being spiritual.”

“That is the least surprising thing I’ve heard all week.”

Twenty minutes in, there was a knock at the door.

Saved by carbs.

The delivery guy handed over the pizza box, and within seconds the office smelled gloriously like garlic, bread, and melted cheese. Not subtle. Not elegant. Not remotely compatible with Anton’s whole polished-empire aesthetic.

I tipped well, shut the door, and set the box on my borrowed desk space like I was consecrating new land.

Anton watched the entire thing unfold.

“Really?” he asked.

“You said daily. You did not specify odor restrictions.”

I opened the box, took a slice, and bit into it before the cheese had any intention of behaving. “Want some?”

“No.”

“Your loss.”

Grease hit the napkin. Garlic filled the air. My fan kept whirring. The keyboard resumed its attack the second I swallowed enough not to choke myself in front of him.

For several minutes, all I heard was typing, fan noise, the faint hum of the building, and Anton turning pages with the kind of patience that suggested he was either genuinely focused or plotting my assassination in a very expensive way.

I turned on my low-fi playlist just loud enough to be impossible to ignore.

Bass slid into the room.

Not overwhelming. Just present.

Anton looked up from a document. “Is that necessary?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because this,” I said, gesturing around me with my pizza slice, “is a development environment.”

“This is my office.”

“Today it’s both.”

His gaze dropped to the pizza slice, then to my keyboard, then to the fan currently pushing one corner of a document stack into mild instability.

I braced for the lecture.

It never came.

That was almost worse.

He stood instead, circled the desk, and walked over.

I went still before I meant to.

Not visibly, I hoped. Just enough that I became sharply aware of him crossing the space between us.

Anton stopped on the other side of my temporary workstation and looked down at the screen. Close enough that I caught the clean, expensive scent of his cologne under the garlic and electronics heat. Close enough that the office suddenly felt warmer, which was ridiculous given that my tiny fan was fighting for its life at full speed.

“You really do work like this,” he said.

I looked up. “What did you expect?”

“Less noise.”

“From coding?”

“From civilization.”

I snorted before I could stop myself. “You say that like I kicked over a server rack and started a bonfire.”

His mouth almost curved.

Almost.

I didn’t trust that nearly-smile. It had the energy of something rare and therefore dangerous.

“This is chaos,” he said.

I grinned before deciding not to. Too late. “Annoying chaos.”

“That part was implied.”

I leaned back in the chair, crossed one leg under the other, and took another bite of pizza just to prove I could. “Can’t focus with me here, right?”

He looked at the screen again rather than answering immediately. “Your code is clean.”

That threw me off harder than the hoodie comment.

I narrowed my eyes. “Was that a compliment?”

“It was an observation.”

“From you, that’s basically poetry.”

His gaze shifted back to mine, level and unreadable. “Don’t get used to it.”

There it was. Much better. I understood irritation. Irritation was safe.

I set the pizza down and turned back to the laptop, forcing my attention into the work even though I could still feel him standing there. Which was stupid. He was just a man. An aggravating, controlling, unfairly attractive man in a suit, yes, but still just a man.

Not a threat to my concentration.

Probably.

I typed another block of code, tested the endpoint, frowned, fixed a parameter, re-ran it, and muttered, “There.”

Anton stayed beside the desk. “Explain it.”

I glanced at him. “You want the simplified version or the version that punishes you for making me come here?”

“The useful one.”

“Boring.” I turned the screen slightly. “The change you asked for increased visibility, but it also created unnecessary friction in the request flow. I’m keeping the reporting logic and reducing the drag. That way the users don’t suffer because you like control.”

“I like information.”

“You like power arranged as data.”

“That sounds efficient.”

“That sounds like a diagnosis.”

This time his mouth did move, just barely.

And that was somehow more distracting than if he’d laughed outright.

I hated that.

Really, sincerely hated that my brain had enough bandwidth left over from coding to notice the line of his jaw when he looked down, or the way his hands flexed once before going still again, or that he seemed entirely at ease standing in my mess without trying to shut it down.

That last part, especially, was annoying.

Because I had come here ready to win through aggravation.

The keyboard was loud. The fan was whining. The pizza box was open. His office smelled like garlic and rebellion. A playlist he almost certainly hated was humming through the room. Papers on the edge of his desk had started shifting whenever the fan caught them just right.

And Anton had not complained once.

Not once.

He was either more patient than I’d given him credit for or more entertained than was acceptable.

Neither option improved my mood.

By late morning, my side of the office looked like a startup had exploded inside a luxury magazine spread. Cables across the desk. Pizza box half open. Notebook splayed. Keyboard still firing. Fan still going. My water bottle balanced precariously on a legal pad I was pretty sure cost more than my monthly coffee budget.

Anton had returned to his side of the room, but I could feel his attention flick over now and then.

Not constantly.

Just enough to be noticeable.

I kept working, because working was easier than thinking too hard about why his silence no longer felt dismissive and more like... observation. Assessment. Maybe even respect, though I refused to label it that without stronger evidence and preferably a signed confession.

At one point the fan caught the top sheet of a paper stack and sent it skidding across his desk.

I looked up.

Anton looked at the paper.

Then at the fan.

Then at me.

I waited for judgment.

He picked up the page, set it back down, and said, “Does that machine do anything besides declare war?”

“It builds character.”

“In whom?”

“Yes.”

He exhaled through his nose, which was the closest I had ever seen him come to laughing.

And just like that, I made a terrible discovery.

I might have underestimated Anton Vespucci.

Not because he was kinder than I thought.

He wasn’t.

Not because he was easier than I thought.

Definitely not.

But because I had assumed he would crack under the mess, the noise, the deliberate refusal to package myself into something more digestible for him.

Instead he had stayed.

Watched.

Adapted.

Which meant one of two things.

Either he had a stronger tolerance for disorder than I’d expected.

Or—and this option bothered me far more—some part of him liked that I brought it with me.

I stared back at my screen, fingers hovering over the keys.

No. Absolutely not.

That man did not like mess.

He liked systems and leverage and expensive silence and probably matching pens.

Still, when I started typing again, I was more aware of him than I wanted to be, and the office felt warmer than it had that morning.

Annoying.

Very, very annoying.

And for the first time since walking into Vespucci Tower, I had the uneasy suspicion that this daily check-in arrangement might not break him nearly as fast as I’d hoped.

Which was unfortunate.

Because now I had to come back tomorrow and escalate.