Under His Authority

Maren's POV "Girl, you were literally eye-f*****g your boss at the company dinner last week. Don't lie to me." I switched the phone to my other ear and kept wiping down the kitchen counter. "I was not eye-f*****g anyone, Bex. I was making professional eye contact. There is a difference." "Professional eye contact." She repeated it back to me slowly, like she was tasting how stupid it sounded. "Maren. The man walked into the room and you stopped breathing. I was standing right there." "It was warm in that hall." "He's your boyfriend's father." "I am aware of that, thank you." "And he was looking back." I dropped the cloth into the sink. "Bex." "I'm just saying what I saw." "What you saw was nothing," I said. "Dorian Voss looks at everyone like that. Like they're something on the bottom of his shoe. It means nothing. I have to finish cleaning before Rafe wakes up. I'll call you later." She made a sound that meant she wasn't done with this conversation. I ended the call anyway. I stood at the sink for a second longer than I needed to. Bex wasn't entirely wrong and that was the part I hated. Dorian Voss had a way of standing in a room that made everyone else feel like they were borrowing space from him. He was tall, silver at the temples, and he looked at you like he could already see every decision you were about to make and had decided it was beneath him. The kind of man who didn't raise his voice because he didn't need to. I had worked as his secretary for three years. Three years of taking his calls, organizing his schedule, sitting across from him in morning briefings while he reviewed documents without looking up. Three years of being very professional about it. I picked up the mop and moved down the hall. Rafe's study was the last room. He always left it looking like a controlled disaster, papers on every surface, the smell of old coffee and something stronger underneath. I pushed the door open with my shoulder and started from the corner. His laptop was open on the desk, screen still glowing. I almost left it. I almost just walked past it and kept mopping. Instead I went over to close it because if I left it, he would complain that it overheated and somehow that would become my fault too. I reached across the desk to tap the close button and my hand slipped on the edge of the trackpad. The screen filled. A video started playing. At first, my brain refused to process it. The angle was slightly tilted, like someone had propped the phone against a pillow. The lighting was dim but not dim enough. A girl on all fours on a bed I recognized, and Rafe behind her, both hands gripping her waist, going at her from behind in a way that made the headboard knock against the wall. The girl's face was turned away but her hair was loose and dark and cut just below her shoulders the way Jade had cut hers last semester when she came home for mid-term break. My hand stopped moving. The girl turned her face toward the phone and laughed at something Rafe said, and the laugh sat in my chest like a piece of broken glass. Jade. My little sister. Twenty-two years old. I had paid her school fees every semester without being asked. I had sent textbooks and care packages and stayed up past midnight on the phone when she cried about difficult professors. I had used my own connections to get her into Cravenmore University because it was the best school in the city and I wanted the best for her. I closed the video. My hands were moving on their own now. I clicked on the file folder the video had come from. There wasn't one video. There wasn't even five. There were folders inside folders, all of them named with dates. Going back fourteen months. Different locations. The bedroom. A hotel room I didn't recognize. One that I recognized as Jade's dormitory at Cravenmore, the same room I had helped her move into last September, carrying boxes up three flights of stairs while Rafe waited in the parking lot saying his knees hurt. His knees hurt. "Maren." I turned around. Rafe was standing in the doorway in last night's shirt, hair undone, holding a mug of coffee like this was a completely normal morning. I watched his face go through three different expressions in two seconds. Surprise. Calculation. And then something that looked almost like relief, which was the one I understood least. "Maren, okay, just listen to me for a second—" "How long?" My voice came out steady. I was surprised by that. "It wasn't, it's not what—" "How long, Rafe." He set the mug down on the shelf beside the door. Ran a hand through his hair. "It wasn't serious. I want you to know that first. It was never serious, it was just—" "Fourteen months of folders is not just anything." "You're making it bigger than it is." "She came to our house," I said. "She slept in our guest room. She sat at our table. I cooked for her. And you were—" I stopped. My throat was doing something I refused to let happen. "While I was asleep in the next room, you were—" "See, this is the problem." His voice shifted. The guilt dropped off it like a coat he'd decided was too heavy to carry. "This right here. You want to make a whole thing out of everything. You always have to analyze it and process it and have a conversation about it." "You slept with my sister." "Because you're boring, Maren!" He said it like it had been waiting behind his teeth for years. "You are boring. In bed, out of bed, everywhere. You treat everything like a project. You schedule things. You have a routine for everything, including s*x, and God forbid anything goes slightly off your little plan." He laughed, short and mean. "Jade actually lives. She's not in her head every second. She doesn't need a five step plan to enjoy herself. She just—" "Stop." "You asked." "I asked how long. I didn't ask you to—" I pressed my mouth shut. Something was happening behind my eyes that I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing. "Seven years, Rafe." "Yeah, and half of those years I spent begging you to loosen up." He shrugged. Actually shrugged. "I'm sorry you saw it this way. But don't stand there like I'm the only one who failed this relationship." I walked out of the study. I didn't have a response for that. Nothing I said would mean anything to a man who had just described his year-long affair with my sister as my fault. So I said nothing. I walked down the hall, and my only goal was the front door. She was standing just outside the study door. Jade had her arms folded and her shoulder against the wall, wearing the same clothes she had on when she arrived last night. She had heard every single word of that and her face said she had been listening from the moment it started. And on that face was a smile I had never seen on her before. Small and slow and warm with satisfaction, like she had been saving it for this exact morning. "Jade." Her name came out of me like something cracking. She tilted her head. "You always thought you were better than me. You know that? You and Mum both. Maren is so brilliant, Maren works so hard, why can't you be more like your sister." She said it in a voice that was almost pleasant. "You're the one who chose my school. You're the one who told Mum it would be good for me to go to Cravenmore. And those professors spent four years reminding me every chance they got that you once sat in those same lecture halls and you were better. In everything." "Jade, I never asked them to—" "And now look." She spread her hands like she was presenting something. "All that brain. All that responsibility. Seven years of being the perfect girlfriend." She leaned slightly forward. "And you still couldn't keep your man." The room went quiet. Not silent. I could still hear Rafe moving around in the study. Could still hear the building settling, the distant sound of the city outside. But something in me went very quiet and very still, the way things do just before they break completely. I picked up my bag from the hook by the door. There was nothing left in me to say to either of them. Nothing that would undo the last fourteen months. Nothing that would make Jade feel even a fraction of what she had just put on my chest. And nothing, absolutely nothing, that Rafe deserved to hear from me ever again. I opened the front door and walked out into the morning. I was four blocks away before I realized my hands were still shaking. I stopped walking just long enough to breathe. My phone buzzed. I almost didn't look. I thought it was Rafe. Or worse, Jade. But it was neither of them. It was a message from an unsaved contact, but I recognized the area code. Voss Industries. Internal line. The message was five words. Get to the office. Now. I stopped breathing. I knew exactly who it was. I checked the time. 8:07 a.m. My stomach dropped. I was meant to be at the office by 7:30. Set his meetings, made sure his daily schedule was already printed and on his desk by eight. His coffee in his hand by eight-twenty. I was already late. Worse than late. He had messaged first. Dorian Voss never messaged first. I stared at the screen as my pulse began to race. Another message came through before I could think. Do not keep me waiting, Maren.