The CEO's Forbidden Assistant

Chapter 5 - Dinner With Jules

"You're seeing someone," Jules said, not a question, the moment Mia walked through the door on a Friday night, distracted in a way she hadn't managed to hide.

"I'm not seeing anyone."

"You've been checking your phone every four minutes since you sat down. You never do that. Last time you were this jumpy was right before the internship at Merrow fell apart, so forgive me for being suspicious of whatever's going on with you now."

Mia dropped her bag on the counter, weighing how much of the truth she could hand over without turning it into something bigger than she had the energy for tonight. "It's complicated."

"Complicated how."

"There's someone at work. It's not what you think." She hesitated. "And someone's trying to use it against him. Against us. I don't really know how to explain it without it sounding insane."

Jules set down the spoon she'd been stirring dinner with, giving her sister the full, unimpressed attention only an older sibling could manage. "Try me."

Mia told her most of it, the arrangement, the rules, the envelope on her desk that morning, leaving out only the parts that felt too raw to say out loud yet. Jules listened without interrupting, her expression sliding from concern to something sharper, more alarmed, by the time Mia finished.

"Someone is blackmailing your boss," Jules said slowly, "using photographs of the two of you, and your plan is to help him investigate it yourself instead of going to the police."

"It's not that simple. If this goes public through official channels, it destroys him before we even find out who's behind it. The board would use it as an excuse to push him out, which might be exactly what whoever sent that note wants in the first place."

"And what about what happens to you if this doesn't get solved quietly? Have you thought about that part, or just about protecting him?"

The question landed harder than Jules probably meant it to. Mia sat down heavily at the kitchen table, some of her earlier resolve wavering. "I have thought about it. I just don't have a better option yet."

"You could walk away. Right now, before this gets worse. Quit, find another job, let him handle his own company's mess without you in the blast radius." Jules's voice was gentle but unrelenting, the same tone she'd used since they were teenagers figuring out rent together. "I'm not saying that because I don't think you can handle yourself. I'm saying it because I watched you convince yourself Merrow would work out too, right up until it didn't, and I don't want to watch you do that again with something this much bigger."

"This isn't the same. Merrow was a company that stopped valuing me. This is someone actively trying to hurt him, and by extension, me. If I walk away now, I don't stop being a target, I just stop having any say in how it gets handled."

Jules was quiet for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes. "Do you love him?"

The question hung in the kitchen, unanswered, longer than either of them was comfortable with.

"I don't know," Mia said finally, honestly. "I know I'm not willing to let someone destroy him without at least trying to stop it. I don't know yet if that's love or just refusing to lose something I've gotten used to having."

"That's not really an answer."

"It's the only one I've got right now."

Jules reached across the table and squeezed her sister's hand, worry and love tangled together in the gesture in a way that made Mia's throat tighten unexpectedly. "Then be careful. Whoever sent that photo knows exactly where you work, what you look like together, and how to make it hurt. That's not a stranger with a grudge. That's someone close enough to know your patterns."

The thought settled cold in Mia's stomach, because Jules was right, and because some part of her had already started turning over the same suspicion earlier that day. Only a handful of people had access to Daniel's calendar in enough detail to know about the Singapore trip before it happened. A shorter list still had reason to want him gone from the company badly enough to weaponize it.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Daniel, sent from the office where he was still combing through security footage without her.

Found something. Come in tomorrow early. We need to talk about who had calendar access to Singapore.

Mia stared at the message, Jules's warning still sitting heavy in her chest, and typed back the only answer she had.

I'll be there.

She didn't sleep much that night, running through names in her head, people she'd worked alongside for weeks without ever suspecting them of anything more than office politics. Somewhere on that list was someone willing to destroy two people's lives to get what they wanted, and Mia intended to find out exactly who before they got the chance to finish the job.