HATE IN HEELS

THE WOMAN WHO NEVER BEGGED “Get out.” The room went silent. I didn’t raise my voice. I never needed to. There was something about speaking calmly when everyone else was expecting a scene that made people listen. Mr. Anderson stared at me from across the boardroom table as though he was waiting for me to laugh and tell him I was joking. I wasn’t. “You’re firing me?” he finally asked. I looked down at the documents between us, then back at him. “I’m not firing you because you made a mistake, Anderson. Everyone makes mistakes. I’m firing you because you looked me in the face and lied.” His confidence disappeared. Good. I pushed the folder across the table. “Page forty-three.” He opened it reluctantly, and I watched his eyes move across the figures. I had spent the previous night going through the company’s supplier accounts because something hadn’t felt right. Instinct had kept me awake until three in the morning, and experience had taught me never to ignore it. “Our Milan supplier increased their production costs by six percent,” I said. “You reported eighteen.” He said nothing. “You then created a company under your brother’s name and redirected the difference there.” His mouth opened, but no words came. I leaned back in my chair. “You stole from VELLORA.” “I can explain.” “I don’t want an explanation.” “Christa, please.” The word irritated me more than his crime. Please. People always said please when they had run out of excuses. I signed the termination letter and slid it toward him. “Security will escort you downstairs.” He stared at the paper as though it had personally betrayed him. “You can’t destroy my career over this.” I finally looked directly into his eyes. “You destroyed it yourself.” He left three minutes later. Nobody around the table dared speak until the door closed. I let the silence sit. There was a time when silence terrified me. Now, I used it as a weapon. “Next.” Elena, my chief financial officer, opened her tablet. “The Paris flagship is ahead of projections, Singapore is already exceeding its first-quarter target, and our New York campaign has increased international sales by twenty-three percent.” I nodded. VELLORA was growing faster than even I had predicted. Sometimes, when I looked at the numbers, I had to remind myself that all of this had started with me. No wealthy parents. No family business. No powerful surname opening doors. Just an idea, a borrowed workspace, and a girl who had decided she would rather fail trying than spend her life waiting for someone to rescue her. I built VELLORA one decision at a time. Every sleepless night. Every rejected proposal. Every investor who laughed when I told them a twenty-one-year-old woman could build a luxury brand that would compete internationally. They had laughed. I had remembered every single one of them. “There’s one problem,” Elena said. My attention returned to her. “The Manhattan property.” My fingers tightened around my pen. That property had been sitting in the back of my mind for months. “We’re still being rejected?” She nodded. “Blackwell Holdings refuses to sell.” Of course they did. The property was exactly what I needed for VELLORA’s next expansion: a luxury beauty headquarters, research facility, flagship store, and private showroom all in one. Fashion had made VELLORA famous. Beauty would make it untouchable. I wanted skincare, cosmetics, fragrance, and high-end beauty products under the VELLORA name. I wanted to build something so massive that the people who once dismissed me would have no choice but to acknowledge what I had created. And that property was the beginning. “Make another offer.” “We already offered forty percent above market value.” “Then offer more.” Elena hesitated. “They’ve refused every offer.” “Who owns the final decision?” “The Blackwell family.” Something about the name made an uncomfortable feeling move through me. I couldn’t explain it. Blackwell. I’d heard it before. Not recently. Not that I could remember. Still, the name lingered in my mind longer than it should have. “Who is the CEO?” “Grayson Cole Blackwell.” I looked at the name on the report. Twenty-seven. CEO of Blackwell Holdings. Real estate. Hotels. Commercial developments. Private properties. A man whose reputation apparently matched his wealth: ruthless, demanding, and impossible to negotiate with. Perfect. I had no intention of losing. “Arrange a meeting.” Elena shook her head. “He doesn’t usually meet potential buyers personally.” “Then he’ll make an exception.” She gave me a small smile. “You really don’t know how to take no for an answer, do you?” I closed the folder. “No.” Because no had never meant anything to me. Not when I was building VELLORA. Not when investors rejected me. Not when people told me I was too young. And certainly not when the world had already taken enough from me. My childhood was a locked room in my mind. I knew there had been a family. I knew there had been a home. I knew there had been a tragedy. But the details were broken. Scattered pieces I could never quite reach. There were nights when I woke with my heart racing and smoke in my lungs, even though there was no smoke in the room. Sometimes I dreamed of screaming for someone whose face I could never see. Doctors had called it trauma. I called it inconvenient. I had built an entire life around the things I could remember instead of the things I couldn’t. And I had learned not to ask too many questions. Questions had a way of opening doors. Some doors were better left closed. ⸻ That evening, I stood alone inside my penthouse, looking down at the city. Manhattan glittered beneath me, beautiful and merciless. My phone rang. Elena. I answered. “Tell me you got the property.” There was a pause. “No.” I closed my eyes. “Then what did you get?” “An appointment.” “When?” “Tomorrow morning.” “With who?” Another pause. “Grayson Blackwell.” My eyes opened. For some reason, my heart began beating faster. I hated that. I hated the strange feeling that had followed me all day, the sense that something was approaching me from a past I couldn’t remember. I looked toward the city again. “Fine,” I said. “Tomorrow.” I ended the call. Then my phone buzzed with a message. UNKNOWN NUMBER: Some graves are better left undisturbed, Christa. My blood ran cold. I read the message again. Nobody called me that way. Nobody who knew me well enough to threaten me was stupid enough to use an unknown number. My thumb hovered over the screen. I stopped breathing. For the first time in years, the locked room inside my head felt like it had opened. And somewhere in the darkness of my memory, I heard a little girl’s scream. My own. Then a boy’s laughter. I dropped the phone. And suddenly, I wasn’t standing in my penthouse anymore. I was a child again. Running. Smoke everywhere. Someone calling my name. And a voice behind me whispering “Christa, don’t look back.”