RUIN ME QUIETLY

Chapter Two

The silence after he said it stretched long enough that Wren could hear the building itself — the faint hum of forty-two floors of climate control, someone's phone ringing twice and stopping somewhere down the hall.

"Ashford Textiles," Callum said, like he was testing whether she'd flinch. "That was your father's. Before."

Before I destroyed it, he didn't say. He didn't have to. The word sat in the air between them anyway, and something in her chest went very still and very cold — the way it always did when she got close enough to the thing she'd spent three years circling.

"I don't see how that's relevant to the position," she said, too fast, and hated herself for it.

Something moved across his face — not quite a smile, more like the shadow one would cast if it existed. "No. I don't imagine you do."

He stood, unfolding to a height that made the desk between them feel smaller, and walked past her into the office beyond, leaving the door open behind him. Wren stared at it for ten full seconds, weighing what it meant, before she understood she was supposed to walk through. It wasn't an invitation. She'd learn later — longer than she should have taken to learn it — that it was a test, and that Callum Vance never did anything without deciding first whether it was one.

His office was too clean to be anything but deliberate. A single framed photograph on the shelf, angled so she couldn't see who was in it. A wall of windows looking out over a city that had once, briefly, belonged a little to her family too — back when there was an Ashford Textiles sign instead of a Vance Holdings tower eating the sky.

"Sit," he said, not looking up from his monitor.

She sat, and made herself study the room instead of him — safer that way. No family photos on the desk. No degrees on the wall, which struck her as strange for a man who otherwise seemed determined to remind everyone within reach exactly how impressive he was.

"Here's how this works," Callum said. "You'll have my calendar, my email, and enough access to make my life easier. You will not have opinions about my calendar, my email, or my life. Are we clear?"

"Crystal."

"You said that too fast. People who mean it don't say it that fast."

She held his gaze, because looking away felt like confirming whatever he already suspected. "Would you like me to say it slower?"

For half a second, something flickered across his expression that wasn't quite irritation. She filed it away with everything else she wasn't supposed to notice.

"No," he said finally. "I'd like you to start with my nine a.m."

He slid a folder across the desk without standing, which meant she had to lean forward to take it — one more small test disguised as nothing at all.

"Ms. Ashford."

"Mr. Vance."

"You should know I don't hire people I can't read." A pause, deliberate as everything else about him. "I made an exception for you. I'd like to understand why before one of us comes to regret it."

He already knows, she thought, and the folder in her hands felt heavier than the paper inside it should allow.

"I'm very good at my job," she said instead — the only true thing she could safely say out loud.

"I'm sure you are." He looked back to his screen, dismissing her without another word. "That wasn't the part I was asking about."

Wren stood and walked out, past the desk that had once, in some distant and unrecoverable version of her life, belonged to her family's future instead of his.

She made it as far as the elevator before she let herself breathe again.

The doors were sliding shut when a hand stopped them — not Callum's. A woman stepped in beside her, dressed like she'd never once in her life bought a blazer with the tag still half-attached, and pressed the button for the forty-second floor before glancing sideways at Wren with an expression that was somewhere between curiosity and warning.

"New assistant?" the woman asked, though it wasn't really a question.

"Started this morning."

"Huh." A small, private smile. "He usually fires them by lunch."

The doors closed. The woman said nothing else the rest of the ride up, and Wren spent all ninety seconds trying to place where she'd seen that face before — and failing to shake the feeling that she already knew, somewhere underneath the panic, exactly who she'd just met.