His Contract: Billionaire Boss, Fake Fiancée

Chapter 2: The Forty-Fourth Floor

The Analytics Support team occupied a space that felt like it was trying too hard.

Someone had put a motivational poster on the wall — "Data Drives Decisions" — in the kind of sans-serif font that showed up on LinkedIn infographics. There was a standing desk that nobody was standing at, a whiteboard covered in half-erased numbers, and six people who all looked up when I walked in with my broken-strapped tote bag and my NYU mug like I was either a new colleague or a cautionary tale.

I went with confidence. Fake it until the lease renewal.

"Jenna Moore," I said. "Reassigned from forty-two. Analytics support."

A woman at the nearest desk looked up over her glasses. Late thirties, natural hair pulled back, reading glasses on a beaded chain. Her nameplate said Diane Reeves, Senior Analyst.

"You're early," she said.

"I'm always early."

She studied me for exactly three seconds. "Sit there." She pointed to a clean desk by the window. "Password's on the sticky note. Don't lose it. The system logs you out every thirty minutes, and IT takes forty-eight hours to reset credentials, so don't do something stupid like stick it to your monitor where anyone walking by can read it."

"Where should I stick it?"

"Inside your left desk drawer, face down."

"Got it."

She went back to her screen. I went to the desk.

Floor 44 had windows.

That sounds minor. It wasn't. Floor 42 had been interior-facing, fluorescent, and sealed, the kind of space that made you lose track of whether it was day or night, summer or winter, whether the outside world still existed or had quietly given up while you were filing quarterly reports.

Up here, through floor-to-ceiling glass, I could see midtown Manhattan spread out like a circuit board; the silver-gray geometry of buildings, the thin thread of the Hudson in the distance, and the sky above it all pressing down low and pale, the way it did in February when winter had overstayed its welcome.

I sat down, found the sticky note, and typed in the password.

The system loaded a dashboard of active projects, flagged items, and a queue of data sets waiting for cleaning and review. Someone had left a half-eaten pack of Cheez-Its in the top drawer. I closed it. Not my business.

I started with the flagged items.

By 11 a.m., I had cleaned three data sets, cross-referenced two supplier contracts for inconsistencies, and flagged a numerical error in a procurement report that had apparently been sitting there for six weeks unnoticed.

Diane walked by my desk, glanced at my screen, and said nothing.

At 11:43, she came back and set a mug of coffee next to my keyboard without being asked.

I took it as a passing grade.

The email came at 12:17 p.m.

Not from HR. Not from a department head. From an address I didn't recognize: L.Knight@knightindustries.com.

Subject line: No subject.

I stared at it for a moment before I opened it.

Ms. Moore — The procurement error you flagged this morning was from a vendor account that has been under internal review. Your note has been forwarded to the appropriate team. Continue flagging anything that looks inconsistent. — LK

That was it. No greeting beyond Ms. Moore. No good work or nice catch. Just four sentences and two initials.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, because something about the phrasing snagged in my brain. "A vendor account that has been under internal review."

Had been. Present perfect. Meaning it wasn't new. Meaning someone already knew about it.

So why had it been sitting in the flagged queue for six weeks?

I typed back: Understood. I'll keep flagging. — J. Moore

I deleted the dash and my name. Then I put them back. Then I sent it before I could second-guess myself again.

Lunch was a twelve-dollar chopped salad from the building's ground-floor deli that tasted like someone had described a salad to someone else, who had then assembled it from memory. I ate it at my desk while reviewing a set of partnership agreements from the previous fiscal quarter.

Diane ate at her desk too. So did most of the floor.

"Do people here ever actually leave for lunch?" I asked her, at around the twelve-minute mark of listening to her eat a container of Greek yogurt with the intensity of someone defusing something.

She didn't look up. "Some do."

"But you don't."

"I leave when the work is done." She turned a page. "The work is never done."

"That's bleak."

"That's Tuesday."

I smiled at my screen and kept reading.

At 2:30, I went to find the bathroom and got completely, genuinely lost.

Floor 44 had a layout that made no architectural sense — a long corridor that turned back on itself, a set of glass-walled conference rooms that all looked identical, and a staircase that apparently led directly to a server room and nowhere else useful. I stood at a T-junction, both directions equally unhelpful, and was studying the overhead signage when I heard voices from around the corner.

Not arguing. Not quite. The particular flat, careful tone of professional disagreement — the kind where both people were pretending to be reasonable while saying something that wasn't.

"— the Q2 numbers don't support that projection, Marcus, and you know it."

"The projection accounts for the Seoul acquisition."

"The Seoul acquisition hasn't closed."

"It will close."

"It will close if Park signs. Park hasn't signed."

I recognized the second voice before I turned the corner. I didn't turn the corner. I stood very still and looked extremely interested in the fire exit sign.

"We present the projections as conditional," the first voice said. It was a man I didn't recognize — late forties, probably, based on the cadence. Marcus, apparently.

"We present them as accurate," Liam Knight said. "Or we don't present them."

A pause.

"The board—"

"The board sees what I show them. Flag it as conditional or pull it from the deck."

Another pause, longer.

"Understood."

Footsteps. I turned and walked back the way I came, quickly, found the bathroom by accident and out of genuine necessity, and returned to my desk without looking at anything on the way.

I sat down. Put my hands on the keyboard.

Did not type anything for approximately ninety seconds.

The board sees what I show them.

On the surface, that was a CEO saying he controlled the presentation. Reasonable. Normal.

But the delivery sat in my chest like a pebble. Not alarm. Not certainty. Just the particular discomfort of a sentence that had more than one possible meaning, spoken by a man who had already moved me up two floors this morning for reasons he hadn't explained.

I thought about the procurement error. The vendor account under internal review. The data set that had sat flagged and untouched for six weeks before I arrived, and noticed it on my first morning.

Continue flagging anything that looks inconsistent.

I opened the procurement report again.

I started reading from page one.

At 5:58 p.m., I packed up my laptop, tucked the NYU mug into the bottom of my salvaged tote bag, and rode the elevator down alone.

The lobby was emptying out in the particular New York way — hundreds of people moving fast, everyone with somewhere to be, the revolving door cycling in and out like a lung.

I pushed through it and stepped onto Sixth Avenue.

The cold hit me across the face, sharp and immediate, carrying the smell of bus exhaust and roasted chestnuts from the cart on the corner. The sky had gone the deep iron gray of a February evening, and the streetlights had already clicked on, orange pools on wet pavement.

I pulled my coat tighter and started walking toward the subway.

My phone buzzed.

A Google Alert I'd set up three months ago, back when I was still hopeful enough to track industry news: Knight Industries — Trending.

I stopped walking. A cab leaned on its horn behind me. I stepped to the side.

The alert linked to a gossip column. Page Six. And the headline, sitting above a photo I hadn't known was being taken, read:

"Knight in Shining Armor? NYC's Most Eligible Billionaire Finally Has a Date."

The photo was from this morning.

The lobby security camera angle. Me, stepping out of the elevator, NYU mug in hand, looking over my shoulder at the closing elevator doors.

And Liam Knight, framed in the gap before the doors shut, looking — not at his phone.

Looking at me.

The caption read: Who is she?

I stared at my cracked phone screen for a long moment.

Then I put it in my pocket and kept walking.

I am going to need a better tote bag.