Monday arrived, the office buzzing with brittle tension. Clara moved like a shadow, keeping her head down, doing her work with precision. Nicholas had made his presence felt again in small, sharp ways. One wrong move by a junior assistant—an invoice slightly misaligned, a memo filed under the wrong date—and the consequences were immediate.
Fear had become part of the fabric of Wolfe Enterprises.
The whispers in the fashion division spread like wildfire. By nine that morning, everyone already knew Nicholas had fired yet another secretary. The second in as many weeks. His perfectionism was brutal, unforgiving. Assistants were no longer human—they were pawns that could be swept off the board with a flick of his hand.
Clara kept her head bent over her tasks, her heart in her throat with eve
