His Contract: Billionaire Boss, Fake Fiancée

The rejection email arrived at 7:43 a.m., while I was still in my coat. I hadn't even made it to the kitchen. I was standing in the narrow hallway of my apartment, the one where the radiator knocked every twelve minutes like a drunk neighbor, reading the words "We regret to inform you" on a screen so cracked the letters split down the middle. Pearson & Associates. My third rejection this month. I locked my phone and shoved it into my coat pocket. Then I stood there for a second, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that had been slowly spreading since October. It looked like Ohio now. Last month it had been more of an Idaho. Don't spiral. I had exactly forty-two minutes to catch the 6 train, and I was not going to spend them feeling sorry for myself in a hallway that smelled like my neighbor's reheated curry. I grabbed my tote bag, the one with the broken left strap I kept meaning to replace, and walked out the door. The subway was a wall of bodies and recycled air. I found a pole near the door, gripped it with one hand, and used the other to pull up my budget spreadsheet. It wasn't a fun spreadsheet. No one has a fun budget spreadsheet at twenty-four, but mine was particularly brutal: $1,847 in checking, $0 in savings, and $67,200 in student loans sitting at the top like a phone number I couldn't stop seeing. I'd graduated from NYU eight months ago. Finance and Economics, magna c*m laude, honor society, the whole performance. My thesis advisor had called me "one of the sharpest analytical minds" she'd taught in fifteen years. That sentence had not paid a single bill. The train lurched. Somebody's elbow caught my ribs. I closed the spreadsheet. The internship at Knight Industries had come through a university alumni connection, barely, at the last minute, and unpaid. Unpaid. I'd spent four years and sixty-seven thousand dollars becoming qualified for a job that didn't pay me. But it was Knight Industries. Everyone in the finance world knew that name. Even if I was filing documents in the basement, this was the kind of line on a résumé that could open a door somewhere. Somewhere being the operative word, because I had about four months of rent money left before somewhere became nowhere. Knight Industries occupied the top seventeen floors of a glass tower on Sixth Avenue that reflected the sky so perfectly it looked like the building was apologizing for existing. The lobby alone was the size of my entire block. Marble floors the color of old money. A security desk staffed by two men who both had the posture of people who had never once doubted themselves. I checked in, got my visitor badge, still a visitor badge, eight days in, and found the elevator bank. Forty-second floor. That's where interns went. It had the feel of a place that had been intentionally designed to be forgettable: gray cubicles, fluorescent lighting, a coffee maker that took six minutes to produce something that tasted like hot disappointment. I hit the button and waited. The elevator opened, and I stepped in. There was already someone inside. He was standing at the back, phone in hand, and he didn't look up when I entered. Dark suit, no tie, the kind of effortless fit that meant expensive tailoring and not a department store rack. Dark hair, sharp jaw, and a stillness about him that felt less like calm and more like controlled energy, like a building that was, technically, structurally fine but had something going on in the walls. I recognized him the way you recognize a face from a poster. Liam Knight. I'd done my research before starting here. Knight Industries' CEO was thirty-two, self-made after leveraging a small inheritance into a tech-and-acquisitions empire, and his press profile described him as "decisive, visionary, and relentlessly results-oriented." Which was journalist shorthand for difficult. I looked back at the elevator panel. I had pressed 42. The button for 58, his floor, the executive floor, was already lit. Neither of us spoke. That was fine. I was not going to speak first to Liam Knight at 8:06 in the morning on a Tuesday. I stared at the climbing floor numbers. Then my tote bag strap broke. Not gradually. Catastrophically. The entire left side gave out with a sound that was genuinely embarrassing, and the bag swung down and hit the elevator wall with a thud, scattering the contents across the floor: my laptop, a folder of printed résumés I'd been meaning to mail, three granola bars, a cracked phone charger, and, My NYU mug. The ceramic one with the chip in the handle. It skidded across the marble floor and stopped exactly at his shoe. Silence. I crouched down, fast, and started gathering everything. My face was hot. I was not going to acknowledge this. I was going to collect my items with dignity and pretend this was a completely normal Tuesday. "You dropped something," he said. I looked up. He was holding my mug. He wasn't smiling. He wasn't amused. His expression was completely neutral, which was somehow worse than if he'd laughed. "Thank you." I took it. Our fingers didn't touch. I stuffed it into what remained of my bag's functional capacity. The elevator reached 42. The doors opened. I stepped out. "You're the intern," he said. Not a question. I turned around. He was still looking at his phone. "Jenna Moore," I said. "Finance and analytics. Yes." He nodded once. The doors closed. I stood in the hallway for a second, bag hanging off one shoulder, mug in my other hand. That was it. That was my first impression on the CEO of the company where I desperately needed to build a future. I had dropped my granola bars on his shoes. I walked to my desk, set down my things, and opened my laptop. Seven new emails. One from my mom asking if I needed money. One from my student loan servicer. And one from the HR department with the subject line: "Intern Assignment Update — Moore, J." I clicked it. Effective Monday, you have been reassigned from general filing to the Analytics Support team, 44th floor. I read it twice. I hadn't requested a transfer. I hadn't even been here long enough to know how to request a transfer. I looked back at the closed elevator doors across the hall. He didn't even look at me twice. But somebody had moved me up two floors before I'd finished my first cup of bad coffee, and there was only one person in this building whose word could do that without paperwork. The question wasn't whether Liam Knight had noticed me. The question was why.