THE SECRETARY HE UNDERESTIMATED

Too many eyes

My apartment smelled like garlic and burnt toast, which was how I knew Jenna had already let herself in with the spare key I probably shouldn't have given her.

"You're making a mess of my kitchen," I said, dropping my bag by the door.

"I'm making dinner. There's a difference." She didn't look up from the stove, wooden spoon waving like a conductor's baton. "Sit. Tell me why you sounded like you were being hunted on the phone earlier."

My apartment was small, two rooms and a kitchen that barely fit two people standing in it at once, nothing like the house I grew up in, with its wide marble hallways and rooms nobody used except for photographs. I'd picked this place specifically because it was the opposite of that. Mismatched mugs. A secondhand couch with a blanket Jenna had knitted badly on purpose as a joke gift. A window that looked out on a brick wall instead of a skyline. It was mine in a way nothing at Whitmore Holdings had ever been, and some nights that was the only thing that let me sleep.

I sat at the small table and told her everything. The board meeting. The shortlist. The conversation with Sterling behind a closed door.

Jenna set a plate in front of me and finally sat down across from me, arms crossed. "So he knows. About your dad."

"He knows."

"And he didn't fire you on the spot or report you to the board?"

"No." I pushed the pasta around my plate, not really hungry. "He said we had a problem. Then he told me to keep it between us."

"That's oddly decent of him."

"It's self preservation. If it comes out badly, it's his mess to clean up too." I said it like I believed it completely. I wasn't sure I did anymore.

Jenna studied me for a long moment, the kind of look she'd been giving me since college, the one that saw straight through whatever calm face I was trying to wear. "You like him."

"I do not."

"Mar."

"He called me furniture for eight months."

"And now he's covering for you instead of throwing you to the board. People don't do that for furniture." She took a bite, entirely too pleased with herself. "I'm just saying."

I threw a piece of bread at her, which she caught out of the air without even looking, because she'd been doing that since we were nineteen and it still annoyed me every single time.

We ate in comfortable silence after that, the kind that only happens with someone who's known you long enough to not need every silence filled. Afterward, she helped me drag out the old side table I'd been restoring in the corner of my living room, the one project that had nothing to do with Ashworth Group or Whitmore Holdings or anyone's expectations at all. Just sandpaper, a coat of stain, and something I could finish entirely on my own terms.

"You still doing this thing," Jenna said, running a hand along the half finished wood.

"It helps me think."

"You know most people take up yoga."

"Most people didn't grow up in a house where furniture was a status symbol." I picked up the sandpaper, worked a rough patch on the table leg. "I like fixing something ugly into something worth keeping. Feels like the opposite of everything I grew up around."

She didn't say anything else about it, just sat on the arm of the couch and watched me work for a while, which was its own kind of comfort.

---

Sophia noticed things. It was, unfortunately, one of her actual talents.

I noticed her noticing on Monday morning, the way her eyes tracked me walking out of Sterling's office two days in a row, the way she'd started timing her coffee breaks to line up suspiciously close to mine.

"Long meeting again," she said, leaning against the wall outside the break room, arms crossed, voice light in a way that wasn't light at all.

"Restructuring logistics." It wasn't a lie. It also wasn't the whole truth, which felt like its own kind of lie the longer I said it.

"Must be a lot of logistics. You've been in there four times this week."

"Would you like me to loop you into calendar invites, Sophia?"

She smiled, the kind that had never once reached her eyes in the eight months I'd known her. "Just curious. People talk, you know."

"People always talk. Doesn't mean there's anything to hear."

I walked away before she could answer, but the unease sat in my stomach the rest of the morning, a low, persistent hum. Sophia collecting information wasn't dangerous on its own. Sophia collecting information and deciding who to hand it to, that was the part that kept catching in my throat.

---

Halloway found me at my desk just after lunch, uninvited, the way he always was.

"Ms. Hale." He said my name like he was trying out a theory. "I hear you've had quite an eventful week."

"Just doing my job, sir."

"Of course." He leaned against the edge of my desk, too close, the way men like him always stood when they wanted you to feel small without technically doing anything you could report. "Interesting thing about board decisions. They tend to attract a lot of scrutiny. Backgrounds get looked into. Connections get traced." He paused, watching my face for something. "You'd be surprised what turns up."

My pulse spiked, but I kept my expression exactly where I wanted it. "I'm sure I would be."

"Daniel Whitmore's quite an impressive man," he said, like he was simply making conversation, like the words weren't landing exactly where he intended them to land. "Ambitious. Precise. I imagine anyone connected to him would share those qualities."

"I wouldn't know. I've never met the man."

It wasn't technically a lie. I hadn't met him in six years. That felt, in the moment, close enough to the truth to say out loud without my voice shaking.

Halloway smiled, unconvinced, and walked away without another word, which was somehow worse than if he'd said exactly what he suspected.

I sat very still at my desk for a long moment after he left, hands folded in my lap, thinking about Sophia's timed coffee breaks and Halloway's careful, pointed small talk, and the four days left before the board decided who ran this company.

Four days. And it felt, suddenly, like everyone around me was quietly counting down the same clock, for very different reasons.

I was still sitting there, trying to steady my breathing, when Priya appeared at the edge of my desk, coffee in hand, glancing over her shoulder the way she always did before she said anything worth actually hearing.

"Halloway was just here," she said. Not a question.

"You noticed."

"Everyone noticed. He doesn't exactly move quietly." She set her coffee down, lowered her voice further. "Mia, I mean, Marlowe, sorry, force of habit from the old memo, whatever he's digging for, he's not going to stop just because you gave him nothing today."

"I know."

"Do you want my honest opinion?"

"Not really. But you're going to give it to me anyway."

She almost smiled at that. "Get ahead of it. Whatever it is. People like Halloway don't collect information to sit on it quietly. He's going to use it the moment it benefits him most, and that's usually right when you're least prepared for it."

I appreciated the honesty more than I let on. Priya wasn't a friend exactly, we'd never had dinner outside this building, never texted about anything that wasn't work, but she'd always been decent to me in a place that didn't reward decency very often. That counted for something.

"I'll keep that in mind," I said.

"Good." She picked her coffee back up. "For what it's worth, whatever this is, you handled that board meeting better than half the executives in this building would have. Halloway included."

She walked off before I could figure out how to respond to that, which was probably for the best, because I wasn't sure my voice would have come out steady.

I looked down at my desk, at the stack of folders waiting for tomorrow's meetings, at the small dying succulent Jenna had gifted me on my first week here that I'd somehow, against all odds, managed to keep alive for eight months. Small, stubborn, easy to overlook.

I understood the appeal.