His rule my sin

The city didn't care that I was terrified. St. Louis moved around me like it had somewhere better to be taxis cutting lanes, perfume and exhaust mixing in the August heat, men in thousand-dollar suits walking like they owned the pavement itself. I stood at the corner of Fifth and Commerce with my folder pressed against my chest and my heart doing something embarrassing in my ribcage, and I told myself what I'd been telling myself since the Greyhound pulled out of Phoenix. You didn't survive everything you survived to fall apart on a sidewalk. Russo Enterprises occupied the top fourteen floors of a building designed specifically to make people feel small. Black glass and steel, cold and ruthless and beautiful. I tilted my head back, looked all the way up, and felt my stomach drop the way it always did when something mattered too much. I went in anyway. The lobby smelled like power fresh flowers, chilled air, the quiet that only exists in spaces where ordinary problems aren't allowed. I crossed marble floors that reflected my heels back at me and reminded myself I belonged here just as much as anyone. I had earned this. Three years of near-poverty, two jobs, one full academic scholarship. I had earned this. The receptionist checked my name, handed me a badge, and sent me up to thirty-eight. Eleven other interns were already in the conference room polished, confident, the kind of people who had grown up assuming rooms like this were built for them. I took the seat nearest the door. Old habit. I had learned young that knowing your exit was never paranoia. Veronica Sinclair slid into the seat beside me before I'd finished settling. She was stunning in the specific way of someone who knew exactly how stunning she was and had built an entire strategy around it. Honey-blonde, sharp-eyed, wearing a blazer that probably cost more than my rent. She looked me over once with the swift assessment of someone sorting competition from furniture. She filed me under competition. I watched her decide. "First time?" she asked. "Is it obvious?" Her smile didn't reach her eyes. "You're sitting near the door. New people always do." She extended a hand. "Veronica Sinclair. My uncle sits on the board." "Isabella Monroe." I shook it. "I earned my seat." The smile flickered barely, briefly. Then the door behind us opened, and every thought I had turned to smoke. I felt him before I saw him. A shift in the atmosphere. The way every voice in the room dropped half a register without anyone deciding to be quieter. The particular stillness of people straightening in their chairs without being asked. Then I turned and my heart stopped doing anything sensible at all. Dominic Russo. Thirty-six years old, and every single one of those years was written in the way he moved unhurried, certain, filling a room the way weather fills a room, not loudly but completely. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of bone structure that made it difficult to look away and nearly impossible to look directly. He wore a charcoal suit that had been constructed specifically for his body, and his body was I made myself stop cataloguing. I made myself breathe. His eyes swept the room. Grey. Deep. Precise. They found mine. Three seconds. Three full seconds of eye contact in which he gave me absolutely nothing no recognition, no reaction, just that steady grey gaze holding mine with a weight I felt from my sternum to my knees. Then he looked away. And I sat there with my pulse in my throat and my carefully constructed composure in pieces, because I knew that jaw. I knew the particular quality of that silence the way it pressed against a room and made people lean toward it. I knew those hands, currently clasped behind his back as his assistant introduced him, and I knew what it felt like to have them in my hair. I had spent one night with this man in Arizona. In a private club where no one used real names and I had surrendered things I had never surrendered before, and walked away at dawn telling myself it was a one-time madness I would never repeat. The one-time madness was standing twelve feet away from me. And he was my boss. "Welcome to Russo Enterprises." His voice was low, even, and went through me like a current I hadn't braced for. "We don't tolerate mediocrity or distraction. Perform at the level this company demands and you'll leave here with a future. Fail to, and you'll simply leave." He looked across the room one final time. I could have sworn his gaze paused on my mouth for half a second before he turned to go. At the door, without turning back, perfectly casual: "Miss Monroe. My office. Four o'clock." The door clicked shut. Veronica turned to look at me with something sharp and alive behind her beautiful, calculating eyes. I didn't move. Didn't breathe. Across the room, his assistant was already gathering her things, expression neutral, professional, revealing nothing. But I was twenty-two years old and I had spent nine months trying to forget the way that man smelled up close, the specific timbre of his voice when it dropped to a register meant only for me, the way he had looked at me in the dark like I was the only lit thing in the room. And he had just called my name like he owned the syllables.