Addicted to My Enemy

The Board Watches

The pitch went well. Better than well.

The client's lead man, a tired looking guy named Frank Delgado, leaned forward about twenty minutes in. Ivy could tell no one from Voss Global had really listened to him in a long time. By the end, he wasn't asking if the new plan could start. He was asking when.

Ronan didn't say a word the whole meeting. He sat at the head of the table, his face giving nothing away, and let Ivy run the room herself. Somewhere around minute fifteen, once her heartbeat finally slowed down, she understood what this really was. He wasn't just watching if she could win over the client. He was watching if she could hold a room without him standing behind her.

She held it.

After the meeting, out in the hallway, Selena Cross was waiting. Her arms were crossed, and her face wore a calm, pretty look that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Impressive," Selena said. "For an intern."

"Thanks."

"I mean it." And strangely enough, she seemed to. Priya plan would have lost us that client in a year and a half. Yours might actually keep them another ten years." She paused, her words careful and sharp. "You should be careful, though."

"Careful of what?"

Selena's eyes flicked toward the conference room, where Ronan was still gathering his things. "Careful about reading too much into the way he looks at people who impress him. Ronan and I have known each other since we were twelve years old. Our families have plans for us. He doesn't always say he agrees with those plans out loud. But he never fights them either." Her smile was thin, not unkind, but final, like a door closing softly instead of slamming shut. "I'd hate for you to get the wrong idea about where you fit in this building. You're good at your job. That doesn't mean you're someone he'd risk everything for."

She walked away before Ivy could answer, her heels clicking against the marble floor. Something cold and strange settled in Ivy's chest. Not jealousy, she told herself. She had no reason to feel jealous. Just annoyance, at being warned away from a man she'd sworn, only three days ago, to hate.

She almost believed herself.

That night, walking to the bus stop after a long twelve hour day, Ivy's phone buzzed. A text came in from a number she didn't know.

Good work today. R.V.

Four words. No warmth in them at all. And still, Ivy found herself reading them twice, then a third time, before she caught herself and shoved the phone back into her bag like it had burned her hand.

She thought about her father then, the way she always did whenever something at that company went right for her. His ghost seemed to sit somewhere behind her ribs, watching her climb the same stairs that had once taken the floor out from under him. Whatever they offer you, her mother's voice whispered in her memory, remember whose company that is.

Ivy remembered. She just wasn't sure anymore if remembering was enough to keep her heart safe from all of this.

The next morning, the whispers had already started.

Ivy felt it the second she stepped off the elevator, the way conversations dropped a little quieter as she walked past, the way a few heads turned to watch her with new interest. Word traveled fast in a building like this. By nine a.m., everyone on the strategy floor seemed to know that the new intern had rewritten a pitch overnight and won over a client the senior team had almost lost.

Priya wouldn't look at her. Julian gave her a proud little smile from across the room, the kind that made Ivy's chest warm despite herself. And Marcus Doyle, who she'd only met once in passing, leaned against her desk with his arms crossed and a grin on his face like he already knew a secret.

"So you're the one who made Ronan Voss hand over his own pitch slot," he said. "I didn't think that was possible."

"Apparently it is."

"Careful. People are going to start watching you now. Not just because you're good." Marcus tilted his head, studying her the way people study something they can't quite figure out. "Because he's watching you. And Ronan doesn't watch anyone."

Ivy didn't know what to say to that, so she said nothing at all.

By noon, Ronan called her into his office for the first time. It was smaller than she expected, plain compared to the rest of the executive floor, just a desk, two chairs, and that view of the harbor she'd admired her first day.

"Sit," he said, and she did.

He didn't waste time. "The client wants to move forward. They asked for you specifically to be part of the transition team."

Ivy blinked. "Me? I'm an intern."

"You were an intern yesterday. Today you're the person a client trusts more than anyone else on my staff." He studied her for a moment, something unreadable behind his eyes. "That's rare. I don't like wasting rare things."

The words settled strangely in her chest, warm and unwelcome all at once. She thought of her mother's voice again, the warning she carried like a stone. She thought of Selena's careful, sharp smile in the hallway. She thought of Julian's easy warmth, the way he made her feel seen without asking for anything back.

And she thought of Ronan, sitting across from her now, looking at her like she mattered in a way she hadn't planned on and didn't know how to stop.

"Thank you," she said, because it was the only safe thing she could think to say.

"Don't thank me yet," Ronan said quietly. "You haven't seen what this building asks of the people it decides to keep."

Ivy left his office with her heart pounding harder than it had all day, and the uneasy feeling that she'd just stepped further into something she couldn't walk back out of, no matter how hard she tried.