His rule my sin

Six

I didn't sleep.

I lay on my back in my small St. Louis apartment with the ceiling fan turning slow overhead and Dominic Russo's heartbeat still under my palm from memory, and I stared at nothing and replayed every moment of the last twelve hours like someone looking for the exact place where sensible Isabella Monroe had taken a wrong turn and ended up here tangled in a forbidden affair with her billionaire boss, her father's name buried in his archive, his ex-fiancée already sharpening knives in the dark.

The rational answer was somewhere around the elevator. That was where sensible Isabella had officially left the building.

The irrational part of me the part that had felt his mouth and his hands and the specific way he said my name like it cost him something that part was not even slightly sorry.

I rolled over, pressed my face into the pillow, and made a sound that was not dignified.

My phone lit up at 11:47 PM.

Unknown: Are you sleeping?

I stared at the message for ten seconds.

Me: No. Are you?

Unknown: I haven't slept properly since you walked into my building.

I sat up. The apartment was dark except for the pale glow of the screen in my hand, and I was sitting in bed at midnight texting my boss my boss who had kissed me in an elevator and pressed my hand to his chest and looked at me like I was the most complicated and necessary thing he had encountered in years, and my heart was doing something completely unreasonable.

Me: That's a very inconvenient thing to tell me at midnight.

Dominic: I'm aware. I told you anyway.

Me: Why?

A pause. Long enough that I was watching the screen with more attention than I'd given anything all day.

Dominic: Because I spent two weeks not telling you things and it didn't help either of us. I'm trying a different approach.

Me: Honesty.

Dominic: Something like that. Go to sleep, Isabella.

Me: You first.

Dominic: That's not how this works.

Me: How does it work?

Another pause. Longer.

Dominic: You close your eyes. I spend another hour sitting in my office convincing myself that everything I want to do is a terrible idea. Standard procedure.

I read that message three times. Then I put the phone face-down on the mattress and pressed both hands over my face and breathed very carefully, because Dominic Russo doing emotional honesty at midnight was significantly more dangerous than Dominic Russo being cold and controlled in the boardroom, and I had barely survived the second version.

When I picked the phone back up there was one more message.

Dominic: Goodnight.

I held the phone against my chest in the dark and told myself very firmly that I was not falling for this man.

I was already so far gone it wasn't funny.

He was at his desk when I arrived at eight the next morning composed, immaculate, every trace of midnight honesty locked behind boardroom glass. He gave me exactly the same professional nod he gave the other interns passing in the hallway and said nothing about Eleanor's message and nothing about the texts and nothing about any of the preceding twelve hours that had rearranged my internal landscape without asking permission.

I went to the archive room and catalogued acquisition files and tried to feel professional.

By 11 AM, Dana appeared in the doorway.

"Mr. Russo would like you to join him for the eleven-thirty briefing on the forty-fourth floor."

I looked up. "That's not on my assignment schedule."

"No," Dana agreed, in the tone of someone who had learned not to question the scheduling decisions of the forty-fourth floor. "It isn't."

The briefing room was all glass and sharp angles, a long table, four senior executives arranged along one side with the specific posture of people who had been powerful long enough that it had calcified into their spines. Dominic stood at the head of the table and didn't look up when I entered, gesturing to the empty chair at the far end with two fingers.

I sat. Opened my notebook. Performed competence.

For forty minutes he ran the briefing with the precision and authority of someone who had never once doubted that every person in the room would follow his exact train of thought. And they did. Even me even sitting at the far end of the table trying not to notice the way he moved, the way he used silence as punctuation, the way his eyes swept the room and paused, briefly, on my face every eight minutes with the regularity of something he wasn't doing consciously.

When the executives filed out, I stood to follow.

"Miss Monroe. A moment."

I stopped.

The room emptied. The door closed.

He crossed to where I stood with the same unhurried certainty he used for everything, stopping close enough that the professional performance of the last forty minutes became transparently thin.

"Eleanor won't move until she has something concrete," he said quietly. "As of this morning she has nothing."

"You handled it?"

"I'm handling it." His eyes moved over my face. "Are you alright?"

The question was quiet and genuine and completely unguarded, and the combination of it this man who ran boardrooms like weather systems, asking if I was alright in a voice that suggested the answer genuinely mattered to him did something to my chest I was wholly unprepared for.

"I'm fine," I said. "I didn't sleep."

"Neither did I." The corner of his mouth moved. "I'm aware that's my fault."

"Partially," I conceded.

He reached out and adjusted the collar of my blazer slowly, deliberately, his fingers just barely grazing the side of my neck in the process, and I felt that contact in a direct line from my throat to my stomach. He was watching his own hands as he did it, and then he looked up and our eyes met at close range and the air between us was doing that thing again, that pressurized, breathless thing that had been building since the elevator.

"Tonight," he said quietly. "My office. I want to talk properly about Monroe-Keller, about Eleanor, about all of it." A pause. "And I want to see you without seventeen floors of professional architecture between us."

"That's a lot to want."

"I'm aware." His fingers brushed my collarbone once barely, like a question before dropping away. "Eight o'clock. Come when the building is quiet."

He stepped back.

Picked up his folder.

Was already at the door before I remembered how to move.

"Dominic."

He stopped. Turned.

"The texts last night," I said. "The honesty. Keep doing that."

He looked at me across the length of the empty briefing room for a long moment, something warm and carefully controlled moving through his expression.

"Go catalogue my sins, Miss Monroe," he said softly.

He left.

I stood alone in the glass room with the city spread in every direction around me and my heart making absolutely no attempt to behave itself, and I thought that the most dangerous thing about Dominic Russo was not his power or his past or the empire built on other people's ruins.

It was the way he looked at me like I was worth the cost of all of it.

I was back in the archive by noon, but concentration had officially abandoned me.

The 2014 files sat in their neat stack to my right and I worked around them the way you work around a bruise aware of exactly where it was, careful not to press. Monroe-Keller Industrial. My father's name in Dominic's acquisition records. The timeline I had reconstructed in my head without meaning to: the takeover, the restructuring, the collapse four months later, my mother selling jewelry to cover school fees, my father sitting at the kitchen table in Phoenix with the particular stillness of a man whose self-worth had been filed and catalogued and absorbed by someone else's corporation.

I knew now who had signed that acquisition authorization.

I also knew the way that same man's voice went soft at midnight when he stopped performing and just spoke. I knew his heartbeat. I knew the precise quality of his restraint when he wanted to close distance and made himself hold still.

Both things were true simultaneously. That was the problem.

I was still sitting with that when Veronica appeared in the archive room doorway at 2 PM wearing a smile that had never once involved warmth.

"Didn't know you were on the private archive project," she said, leaning against the frame with the ease of someone who wanted me to know she wasn't intimidated by closed doors.

"Now you do."

She came into the room, trailing one finger along the filing cabinet like she was conducting an inspection. "Special assignment from Russo himself. That's unusual for a first-week intern." Her eyes cut to mine. "What did you do to earn that?"

I kept my voice pleasant. "Exceptional academic record. You should try it."

Her smile sharpened. "I'm just saying people notice things. Executives talk. Rumors travel faster than you'd think in a building like this." She tilted her head. "Be careful, Isabella. You have a scholarship to protect."

She left.

The archive room felt colder after she did.

I sat very still for a moment, then I opened my laptop, navigated to the intern file-sharing system, and began doing something I had been putting off since I first noticed the pattern in the internal communications three days ago quietly, carefully, building a record of every NDA-protected evaluation document that had been accessed by Veronica Sinclair's login and forwarded to an external address I didn't recognize yet but intended to.

She wanted to play.

I had grown up learning to protect what little we had left.

She had no idea who she was dealing with.

By the time I locked the archive room at seven and handed in my badge, I had everything I needed.

Tonight, I would tell Dominic.

And after that after the professional conversation, after the Monroe-Keller reckoning, after all the things that needed to be said in the light before anything else happened in the dark I was going to stop fighting what every part of me already knew.

I wanted him. Complications and ruins and dangerous history and all.

The elevator doors opened.

I stepped in.

The forty-fourth floor button glowed under my finger.

Eight o'clock, he had said.

I pressed the button.

I was forty minutes early and I didn't care even a little bit.