Addicted to My Enemy

The Man in the Glass Office

The pitch review room had a wall of windows facing the harbor, and for a moment, walking in, Ivy let herself be distracted by the view. The water caught the afternoon light, ferries crawling like beetles between buildings. It was the kind of view her father used to talk about wanting, back when Monroe Textiles was still turning a modest, honest profit and he still believed hard work bought you a corner office eventually.

He never got the office. Ivy got the view instead, on her first day, as an intern in the company that had made sure of it.

"You're staring," a voice said, low and even, close enough behind her that she felt it more than heard it.

She turned, and there he was.

Ronan Voss did not look like a man who smiled easily, and up close, Ivy understood immediately why the internal gossip painted him the way it did. He had the kind of stillness that read as arrogance until you noticed it wasn't performative. He simply didn't move more than he needed to. Dark hair, cut with the precision of someone who didn't leave details to chance. A gray suit that fit like it had been built around his exact measurements, because it had been. He was younger than she expected, twenty-six according to the profile she'd read, but he carried himself like a man twice that, like someone who'd never had the luxury of being young.

His eyes moved over her once, unhurried, the way a person studies something they intend to figure out completely, and Ivy felt it land somewhere under her ribs, warm and unwelcome.

"Sorry," she said, not sorry at all. "The view's better than anything I've seen from a window before."

Something flickered across his face, not quite surprise, but close to it, like he hadn't expected an intern to say something unpolished and true instead of something safe.

"Ivy Monroe." He said her name like he was testing the weight of it, like it might mean something he hadn't decided on yet. "Julian's find."

"I prefer 'hire.' 'Find' makes it sound like you left me somewhere."

A pause. Julian, standing a few feet away, made a small sound that might have been a laugh he swallowed.

Something almost, almost, curved at the corner of Ronan's mouth. It vanished before she could be sure she'd seen it. "Sit," he said, nodding toward the long table, and Ivy noted, with some satisfaction, that there were, in fact, chairs for guests. The rumor was wrong, or maybe it had just never applied to her.

The pitch review was for a client retention strategy, a mid-tier logistics company threatening to walk after eighteen years with Voss Global. Ivy had prepared for three days, staying up long after her shift at the coffee shop ended, running numbers on her laptop with a cracked screen at her kitchen table while her mother slept in the next room. She hadn't expected to speak. Interns didn't speak in pitch reviews, not on day one. She'd planned to watch, take notes, learn the rhythm of the room.

But halfway through Priya Malhotra's presentation, polished, confident, and, Ivy thought, quietly wrong, she caught the error. A retention offer built around price concessions when the client's real complaint, buried in an email thread three slides back, wasn't about price at all. It was about being ignored. The company didn't want a discount. They wanted to feel like they mattered to a firm that had grown too big to notice them.

"You disagree with something," Ronan said, and every head in the room turned toward Ivy, because apparently he'd been watching her face this whole time, and apparently he didn't bother pretending otherwise. There was something almost intimate in being watched that closely by a stranger, something that made her pulse pick up before she could decide whether to be flattered or unsettled.

This was the moment, the one where she could stay quiet, stay safe, stay invisible for six more months and leave with a clean line on her resume. Or she could say what she actually thought, on her first day, to the one person in the building whose name she'd been raised to distrust.

"I think the offer is solving the wrong problem," she said.

Priya's expression went sharp and cold. Selena, at the far end of the table, arched an eyebrow like she was watching a car crash she had no intention of stopping. Julian looked, if anything, delighted.

Ronan didn't react at all. "Go on."

So she did.

She laid it out clean and fast, the buried email, the pattern of late responses from the account team, the way the client's language had shifted over six months from partnership to vendor. She watched Ronan's face while she spoke, looking for the flicker of dismissal she expected, the look every man in a room like this had given her before. It didn't come. He listened the way people listened when they were actually deciding whether you were right, not deciding how quickly they could stop listening, his eyes never once leaving her face, steady in a way that made her feel, for a few uncomfortable seconds, like the only other person in the room.

When she finished, the room was quiet for a beat too long.

"Rewrite the pitch," Ronan said, not to Priya, but to Ivy. "You have until tomorrow morning."

It wasn't a compliment. It wasn't warmth, either. But something passed between them in that moment, quick and electric, gone almost before she could name it, and Ivy left the room that afternoon with her father's ghost sitting a little heavier on her shoulder than it had that morning. Because some traitorous part of her, small, unwilling, furious with itself, had felt something dangerously close to wanting his attention again.

She told herself it wouldn't happen twice.

By the elevator, Julian caught up to her, grinning. "You do know that's the first time I've ever seen him hand his own review slot to anyone under Director level."

"Lucky me."

"That's not luck. That's him deciding you're worth watching." Something shifted in Julian's voice, quieter now, more careful. "For what it's worth, I noticed you first."

Ivy glanced at him, unsure what to do with the warmth in his eyes, the way he said it like it mattered to him more than he meant it to show. "Is that supposed to make me feel better or worse?"

"Depends which one of us you end up trusting more," Julian said, and though he said it lightly, like a joke tossed off in passing, something in his tone didn't quite land as a joke at all.

Ivy didn't answer. She stepped into the elevator, watched the doors close between them, and spent the ride down trying to decide which unsettled her more: the cold, unreadable man who'd looked at her like she was worth solving, or the warm, easy one who'd just told her, without quite saying it, that he already wanted to be chosen.

She had six months here. She was starting to suspect six months wasn't going to be nearly long enough to keep her heart out of a building built on her family's ruin.