Addicted to My Enemy

The morning started the way most mornings did in the Monroe apartment, with the smell of instant coffee and the sound of her mother moving around the kitchen before the sun was fully up. "You're wearing that?" Diane Monroe asked, glancing at the blazer over the rim of her mug. "It's the only one I have." "It's a good blazer." Diane reached over and straightened the collar, the same way she used to fix Ivy's uniform before school, years ago, back when there had been money for uniforms that fit right the first time. "You'll be fine. Smarter than every person in that building put together." "It's a strategy firm downtown, Mom. Not a building full of geniuses." "Every building full of important people is a building full of people who got lucky once and never let anyone forget it." Diane pressed a small paper bag into her hand, a sandwich wrapped in foil. "Go. You'll miss the bus." Ivy didn't correct her about the name of the firm. She let the lie sit there, small and quiet, the way she'd been letting it sit for two weeks now, and told herself she'd explain everything once the internship was over and the resume line had done its job. The bus ride took forty minutes. The elevator at Voss Global took eleven seconds, and moved so smoothly that Ivy couldn't even feel it going up. That felt strange to her, stranger than the marble floors or the glass walls or the front desk woman who smiled like she'd practiced it a hundred times. Everything here looked easy. Ivy had learned a long time ago that nothing good is ever really that easy. She smoothed down her blazer, the only one she owned, bought secondhand from a thrift shop two bus rides from her apartment. Inside, the tag still had someone else's name written in faded marker. She'd cut it out that morning with kitchen scissors, careful not to leave a hole. "Thirty-second floor," the woman at the desk said, sliding a visitor badge across the counter. "Mr. Reyes will meet you there." Thirty-second floor. Ivy had already looked it up the night before, scrolling through the company directory on her cracked phone screen while her mother slept in the next room. That put her three floors below the top office, where Ronan Voss worked. She'd read that his office had windows on two sides and no chair for guests, because he didn't like people staying long. She told herself she didn't care. She told herself this internship was just a line on a resume, six months at the best strategy firm in the state, nothing more. She'd keep her head down, learn what she needed to learn, and leave before the name Voss could mean anything more to her than a paycheck. It was a good plan. It lasted about eleven minutes. Julian Reyes was easy to like, and that annoyed her a little, because she'd expected everyone in this building to be difficult. He had a warm smile and walked fast, like someone who actually enjoyed his job instead of pretending to. He held the door for her a beat longer than a stranger needed to, and the way he looked at her, quick, warm, maybe a little too interested, made Ivy think, watch out for this one, before she even knew his job title. "You're the wildcard hire," he said, holding open the door to the strategy floor. "Everyone's been talking about you." "That doesn't sound good." "You should've seen your application. Almost all our interns come from the same three schools. You came from none of them and still had the best case study score this year." He glanced at her. "Some people don't love it when the results don't match the name on the resume." Ivy kept her face calm. She'd learned long ago how to let comments like that slide off her instead of sinking in. "I'll try not to take it personally." "Don't. Ronan doesn't care where you went to school. He only cares if you're right." Julian pushed open a set of glass doors, and the floor opened up in front of her, rows of desks and glass-walled offices, a low hum of conversation that paused as a few heads turned toward the new face. "You'll meet him this afternoon, in the pitch review. Fair warning, he doesn't do small talk. He's not warm, either. But he's the best in this building at what he does, and if you can hold your own with him, you'll learn more in six months than most people learn in six years." "Got it," Ivy said, and tucked the warning away, right next to the promise she'd made her mother the night before she'd taken this job, the one Diane didn't know she'd broken. Whatever they offer you, whatever they pay you. Remember whose company that is. Her mother never said the name out loud. She never did, the way some people can't say the name of a sickness. But Ivy knew. Voss. The name that had sat like a splinter under her family's skin for eleven years, ever since her father's factory went dark, the letters stopped coming, and eight months later, so did he. She hadn't told her mother where the internship really was. She'd just said a strategy firm downtown and let Diane believe whatever she wanted to believe. Some nights, that small lie sat heavier on her chest than the truth it was hiding. But she needed this job. She was twenty-three, her mother worked two jobs just to keep the lights on, and her resume needed a name like this one to open the next door, and the one after that. Ivy told herself the internship was just a tool, not loyalty, not trust. She'd take what Voss Global could give her and walk away owing them nothing. She just hadn't planned on meeting two people who would complicate that plan so fast. And one of them wasn't even the person she'd been warned about. "Heads up," Julian said, lowering his voice as they turned a corner near a bank of windows. "That's Selena Cross. Her father's on the board. She runs Communications. She's a lot. Just brace yourself." A woman walked toward them, poised in a way that looked less like confidence and more like armor. Every step was careful. Every glance was checking something, cataloguing something, filing it away for later use. Her eyes swept over Ivy once, quick and sharp, like someone checking a stone for cracks. "New intern," Selena said. It wasn't really a question. She already knew the answer. "Julian's found himself another project." "Ivy Monroe," Ivy said, not letting the word project land the way it was clearly meant to. "I can introduce myself, actually." Something flickered across Selena's face, surprise, maybe, or the start of something sharper, before her smile slid back into place. "Careful, Julian. This one bites." She was already walking past them, but she paused and glanced back, her eyes lingering a second too long on Ivy's face. "Welcome to Voss Global, Ivy Monroe. Something tells me we'll be seeing a lot of each other." She didn't say it kindly. She didn't say it cruelly either. She said it like someone marking territory she didn't yet know was being crossed. Ivy watched her walk away, heels clicking against the marble floor, and felt something settle low in her stomach, somewhere between nerves and warning. Two people, in the space of five minutes, and already she had the uneasy feeling that both of them were going to matter far more than any six-month internship should ever allow. Julian touched her elbow, gently, nodding toward the elevator bank. "Come on. Let's get you set up before the pitch review starts. You've got a long afternoon ahead of you." Ivy followed him, and told herself, one more time, that she could keep all of this separate. The job. The name. The past sitting quiet in her chest like a stone she'd carried so long she'd almost forgotten its weight. She was wrong about that too, though it would take her longer to admit it than it had taken her to walk through the front doors.