The CEO’s Hamster

One

The Ice Queen

Victoria

By eight forty-five on Monday morning, I had already fired someone.

By nine, three executives had sweat through their expensive suits.

By nine fifteen, I had remembered why I preferred numbers to people. Numbers never smiled while they lied to me.

The man in Procurement had sworn he was innocent. They always did. I had slid the printout across my desk anyway: Marlowe Group’s counteroffer on the Denver contract, matched to my own bid down to the last dollar. I watched his face drain to the color of old paper.

“Ms. Hayes, I have two kids,” he said. “I would never—”

“Only four people in this building had seen those figures,” I said. “You are one of them.”

“Then it’s one of the other three.”

“Perhaps.” I did not look away. “But I can’t afford to find out slowly.”

He left with a cardboard box and the last of his dignity. Something in my chest tightened as the elevator doors closed behind him. I ignored it. I had a great deal of practice ignoring it.

The whole floor went quiet as I walked back to my office. Keyboards stopped. Eyes found their screens. Somewhere behind me, a young analyst whispered two words she believed I couldn’t hear. The Ice Queen. I had heard them before. I had stopped minding years ago. A queen, at least, was a person no one dared to interrupt.

At nine, the other three sat across from me in the glass conference room while I laid out, in a perfectly level voice, exactly what I would do to anyone who had spoken to Marlowe Group. I did not threaten. I never threatened. I simply described the future, one sentence at a time, and watched three grown men discover that their collars had become very tight.

By nine fifteen, the room had emptied. The only sound was the hum of the air conditioning and the soft tick of my heels as I crossed to the window. My coffee had gone cold. I hadn’t touched it.

“Cancel my eleven o’clock.”

My assistant glanced up from her tablet. “Mr. Reynolds of Marlowe Group flew in from Chicago specifically for that meeting.”

“Then he can fly back. A man doesn’t beat my price to the dollar and then expect coffee.”

“Richard Hale from the board has also called twice about Denver.”

“Tell him I’m busy firing people.”

She hesitated. “Victoria—”

I lifted my eyes. That was all it took. I had been told that my eyes, a deep hazel, were sharp enough to make grown men forget their talking points. I had never needed to raise my voice. People had learned that I didn’t need to.

She stopped.

“Cancel it,” I said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She disappeared through the glass doors. A minute later she slipped back in, placed a fresh cup on my desk without a word, and took the cold one away. She had worked for me long enough to know when not to say You haven’t eaten. She said it anyway, with her eyes. I pretended not to see.

I turned toward the windows. Thirty-one floors below, Manhattan looked almost peaceful: taxis like spilled yellow beads, the river flat as steel. I loved the city from up here. The distance. The order. The illusion that everything below could be controlled if I simply watched closely enough.

Magazines liked to call my face striking rather than soft. I preferred striking. Soft things broke. My black suit was tailored to the millimeter, my cream silk blouse buttoned to the collar, my dark-brown hair falling neatly over my shoulders. Nothing about my appearance was accidental. Nothing about my life was either.

At thirty-one, I was the CEO of Hayes International, the company my father had once told me I would never be capable of running. I could still hear the way he had said it, bored, as if he were commenting on the weather. I had proved him wrong. Proving people wrong was the thing I did best. It had never once made me happy.

Denver was not just a contract. It was the first deal I had won entirely on my own, without my father’s name on the paperwork, and a thief had tried to take it from me before the ink was dry. I would find them. I always did.

On the corner of my desk sat a cream envelope embossed with the crest of Valentieri Group, a partnership proposal from one of the most powerful investors in Europe. I had answered it with two polite sentences and left the rest to my lawyers. I didn’t trust men who wanted to be my partner before they had ever met me.

Beneath the formal letter, though, someone had added a line in blue ink, in a slanting, unhurried hand: I have waited a long time to meet you.

I had read it twice and filed it under flattery. Men like that always tried flattery first.

My phone vibrated. Jamal.

I answered reluctantly. “I’m working.”

“Good morning to you too, Your Majesty.”

I closed my eyes. “Jamal.”

“You sound like someone just murdered your puppy.”

“I don’t have a puppy.”

“Exactly. That’s your problem.”

Despite myself, the corner of my mouth lifted. Jamal had that effect on people. He was the only person I knew who could walk into a room full of billionaires wearing a purple suit, gold shoes, and sunglasses and somehow become the most memorable person there. He was loud. Dramatic. Unapologetically himself. And completely impossible to intimidate. In a life built on people who wanted something from me, he was the one person who had never asked for anything but my company.

“There’s a charity gala tonight,” he announced.

“No.”

“You haven’t heard the details.”

“I don’t need to.”

“Beautiful people.”

“No.”

“Free champagne.”

“No.”

“Powerful businessmen.”

I paused. “Still no.”

“Victoria.”

“Jamal.”

“When was the last time you had dinner with a human being who isn’t on your payroll?”

“I have one.”

“You have spreadsheets.”

“Spreadsheets are peaceful.”

He groaned. “Half your board is on the guest list. So is Marlowe Group.”

I went still.

“Somebody in that ballroom is going to be very nervous tonight,” Jamal said, softer now, because he knew exactly which door he had just opened. “Wouldn’t you like to watch?”

I looked at the printout on my desk. At the neat column of figures that someone had handed to a stranger. I had already asked IT for every access log, every badge swipe, every forwarded email from the four of us. Tonight I would add the one thing a log could never tell me: who could not meet my eyes. I thought of the empty office waiting for me tonight, the spreadsheet that would balance, the takeout I wouldn’t finish.

“Two hours,” I said.

“Three.”

“Two.”

“Fine.” I heard him clap. “Wonderful! I’ll pick you up at seven. And wear something that isn’t black.”

“I own black.”

“I know. It’s a cry for help.”

The call ended. I stared at the phone. Two hours. That was all. Two hours away from my carefully controlled world, spent studying faces for a lie.

I told myself that was the only reason I was going. A leak was a problem. A problem was something I knew how to solve. It was much safer than admitting that some small, stubborn part of me had been waiting, for longer than I cared to remember, for something to interrupt the quiet.

My eyes drifted back to the envelope, to that single line of blue ink. I turned it face down, the way I always did with things I didn’t understand.

Outside, the city went on spinning, indifferent to all of it. I picked up my pen and went back to work, because work was the only thing in my life that had never once failed to love me back. It was a lonely sort of loyalty. I called it freedom.

I did not know that I would spend the evening hunting for a traitor, and forget, within minutes, that I had ever been looking. I did not know that across a crowded ballroom, a stranger in an Italian suit would look at me as though he had been waiting half his life for me to turn around.

I only knew it was Monday, and I had already won the morning.