Contracted To The Man I Misunderstood

The Enemy Within

ELOWEN

I woke up groggy. My head felt like lead and my vision was blurry. I'd had way too many glasses of wine last night both at the event and after I'd gotten home.

The alcohol was a reward for surviving the night honestly.

Well I was in my apartment and not some random hotel room, so that was a good start.

I laid in bed waiting for the pounding in my head to subside so I could get up for some aspirin and prepare for work.

Ugghh… Having a hangover at work was going to be a b***h.

My phone rang loudly, disrupting the silence and my post drinking wallowing.

I grabbed it from my nightstand and checked to see who it was. Nadine Hayes.

My absolute best friend in the solar system (because the “world” does not truly encompass how amazing she is).

She was calling to give me s**t, I was sure of it.

I answered the phone.

"You look like death, don't you," Nadine said, without so much as a hello.

"You can't see me."

"I don't need to see you. I can hear the hangover in your voice, Elowen. It has a very specific frequency." There was the familiar clatter of her keyboard in the background — Nadine was already at the office, because Nadine was always at the office, some kind of caffeinated machine that ran on spreadsheets and mild disapproval of my life choices. "How many glasses?"

"I stopped counting after the toast to my own public execution."

"Dramatic."

"Accurate." I pushed myself up against my pillows and immediately regretted it. The room tilted. "It was a lot, Nadine. I had two hundred strangers assessing my worth like I was a runway sample. I earned the wine."

"Fair. How was the actual event, though? Before the drinking-your-feelings part."

I thought about the rooftop. The cigarette smoke and the city lights and a man whose name I still didn't have, who somehow knew mine anyway.

"Fine," I said, because I wasn't ready to turn it into words yet, wasn't sure I wanted Nadine's sharp eyes on it before I'd figured out what it even was. "Long. My sisters were doing the thing where they smile at me in public and mentally set me on fire."

"Charming as ever." A pause, and something in the quality of it changed — less teasing, more careful. "Listen, that's actually partly why I'm calling. Before you come in."

I sat up straighter despite my head's furious objection. "That's never a good sentence starter."

"It's probably nothing."

"Nadine."

"I mean it, probably nothing. But Priya in merchandising flagged something this morning — one of the resort pieces from the new line, the emerald wrap dress, your design — showed up on a boutique site out of Milan. Small label, nobody's heard of them. Listed as an 'original.'"

I blinked, waiting for my hungover brain to catch up. "Copied?"

"Looks that way. Could be nothing — could be some influencer's stylist got handsy with inspiration boards, it happens more than you'd think. I've already got legal glancing at it." Her voice had that clipped, efficient rhythm she got when she was already three steps ahead of a problem, cataloguing exits before most people noticed the room was on fire. "I just didn't want you walking in blind."

"How exact is exact?"

"Exact enough that Priya sent me a side-by-side and I had to look twice to tell which one was ours."

That woke me up faster than any aspirin could have. I swung my legs out of bed, phone wedged between my ear and shoulder, hunting for the ibuprofen on my nightstand with the single-minded urgency of someone suddenly far more sober than they'd been thirty seconds ago.

"Okay," I said. "Okay, that's — okay. Pull everything on it. I want to see the boutique site, I want to see when the piece was uploaded, I want a timeline."

"Already on it. Elowen —" She stopped herself.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'll have it ready by the time you're in. Go be hungover somewhere productive."

She hung up before I could push. That was Nadine's move — say almost nothing, then vanish before you could ask her what the almost-nothing meant. I stared at my phone for a second, that small itch of unease settling somewhere under my ribs, the kind that doesn't announce itself, just sits there quietly rearranging your morning.

I told myself it was probably nothing. A copycat. An overzealous freelancer somewhere with a Pinterest board and no shame. These things happened in fashion constantly — half the industry ran on borrowed silhouettes and creative amnesia. It didn't have to mean anything.

I almost believed myself the whole time I was in the shower.

By the time I made it into the Alverelle building forty minutes later, sunglasses on indoors like the absolute cliché I was, I'd mostly talked myself down. One dress. One knockoff label nobody had heard of. Not exactly a five-alarm fire.

The lobby was doing its usual morning performance — assistants with lattes moving at the speed of anxiety, the low hum of a hundred conversations about hemlines and quarterly numbers. I nodded at a few people I recognized, ignored the ones who were clearly trying to work up the nerve to ask me about the gala, and made it to the elevator without incident.

Valeria was already at my office door when I got there, tablet in hand, looking as composed and unbothered as she always did. "Morning. Coffee's on your desk, and Nadine wants ten minutes whenever you're free."

"Now's fine," I said, dropping my bag on the chair and reaching gratefully for the coffee. "How bad does today look?"

Valeria's expression didn't shift, not even slightly. "Full calendar. Nothing urgent besides what Nadine flagged." A small pause. "I heard about the Milan thing. Ugly."

"You heard already?"

"Priya mentioned it in the group chat." She said it lightly, already turning to leave, tablet tucked under her arm like nothing about the morning concerned her at all. "Let me know if you need anything pulled."

I watched her go, and something about the ease of it — the way she said ugly like she was commenting on the weather — snagged at the edge of my attention for half a second before I let it go. I had bigger things to focus on than reading into my assistant's tone. I always had bigger things.

Nadine came in two minutes later, laptop already open, sliding into the chair across from my desk without waiting for an invitation. She never did.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what we've got."

She turned the screen toward me. The boutique site was small, minimalist, the kind of clean aesthetic that was supposed to read as elevated and mostly just read as cheap template with good lighting. And there it was. My emerald wrap dress. The exact drape I'd spent three weeks perfecting, the asymmetric seam I'd fought my patternmaker over, right down to the button placement I'd changed at the last minute because the original felt wrong.

Not inspired by. Not similar to.

Mine.

"When did they post it?" I asked, my voice flatter than I meant it to be.

"Six days ago." Nadine's jaw was tight. "Which is a problem, because our line hasn't launched yet, Elowen. Nobody outside this building should have had eyes on that design six days ago."

The room went very quiet.

"Nobody outside this building," I repeated slowly, "meaning it came from inside."

"I'm not saying that yet." But she wasn't looking at me when she said it, which told me everything her words weren't willing to.

I thought about all the people who'd had access to that design file. The studio team. Legal, for licensing. Valeria, who handled half my correspondence and had my calendar memorized better than I did. My sisters, technically, who still had building access despite doing absolutely nothing that justified it.

I thought about the smiles at dinner. The jabs at the gala. Everyone knew it was going to be one of my sisters.

I pushed the thought away before it could finish forming. That was paranoid. That was hungover, sleep-deprived, still-rattled-from-a-rooftop-stranger thinking, not real thinking.

"Pull the access logs," I said instead. "Everyone who touched that file in the last month. I want names."

Nadine nodded, already typing. "I'll have it by the end of the day."

I looked back at the screen, at my own design staring back at me from a stranger's website, and felt that same itch from the shower return — quieter this time, but heavier. Like something underneath the floor of my life had shifted half an inch, and I hadn't quite worked out yet what it had dislodged.

I didn't know yet that this was the small crack. The first one. The kind that doesn't look like anything until you're standing in the rubble wondering how you missed it.

I just knew my head still hurt, my coffee had gone cold, and somewhere in Milan, a piece of me was being sold under someone else's name.