The Administrative Assistant

Chapter 3 The Broken Habit

I read the message twice. *Fix it. Write for her.*

Chloe’s latest social media post took less than a second to find. She smiled into the camera with one hand on the sapphire.

The caption read: *Feeling so loved and appreciated. Some people just know how to treat their muse. ✨*

The photograph had been posted before I reached the apartment. I closed the app.

I opened my contacts. Julian, his assistant, his mother, his board members, and every friend who had treated me like part of the furniture went onto the blocked list. It took under a minute.

I packed next. Three years of my life fit into a single suitcase and my laptop bag.

My clothes occupied one section of the closet. The rest of the apartment still looked exactly as Julian’s designer had arranged it.

The sterile, minimalist rooms had always looked more like a showroom for Julian’s success than a home. Even after three years, little in them belonged to me.

I put the apartment key in the center of the granite kitchen island. Then I rolled my suitcase out and locked the door.

(Julian's POV)

“What do you mean, you can’t get past the firewall?” I hit the conference table with my palm. The tech team went quiet. “There are twelve of you in this room.”

Peterson, the head of IT, turned his laptop toward me. “The primary administrator locked the core patents. Every Vance credential is dead. We can see the shell of Aegis, but not the architecture.”

An error window covered his screen. Peterson had tried every access credential the team possessed and received the same denial.

“Harper did this.” She wanted an apology after last night. She had chosen a bad time to make demands.

“Restore it,” I said. “I don’t care how.”

My phone rang again. Another board member. Through the glass wall, Chloe was crying in my office because Forbes had canceled her interview.

The board had been calling every five minutes.

I found my assistant in the corridor. “Go to the apartment and bring Harper here. Drag her by the hair if you have to. She gets one hour to fix Aegis, or she’s fired.”

Once Harper remembered who paid her salary, she would come back. She always came back.

My assistant hurried toward the elevators. I went back into the conference room and told Peterson that Harper had one hour. By then, I expected her to be sitting in her old chair with the system open.

(Harper’s POV)

Julian’s assistant found the key on an empty kitchen island.

By the time he called Julian, I was twenty thousand feet above the city in Sebastian’s Gulfstream.

I traded the cheap prosecco from Julian’s parties for champagne. The streets disappeared beneath the clouds.

Clouds covered the window a few minutes later. No messages lit my screen. No presentation waited for me to finish under Julian’s name.

My administrative assistant badge stayed on Julian’s desk. I carried one suitcase home under my own name.

We turned east toward New York. At Teterboro, a black Rolls-Royce waited beside the private runway. Sebastian leaned against the rear door with his hands in his coat pockets.

He took my suitcase. “Rough night?”

“Productive.”

Back at Vance Group, a courier entered the lobby with a formal cease-and-desist order. The legal envelope required Julian’s signature. More notices would follow it.