I FELL FOR MY DADDY'S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND

Chapter.two

Monday morning, Rena's keycard didn't work.

She stood at the executive turnstile she'd walked through a hundred times since she was sixteen, badge pressed to the scanner, waiting for the green light that never came. A security guard she'd known for years wouldn't meet her eyes.

“I'm sorry, Miss Rena, “he said” Your access has been changed. You'll need to use the east entrance now.

The east entrance! The one interns used?

She walked the length of the lobby to get there, past the wall with her father's name engraved in gold letters above the reception desk, past employees who used to greet her by title and now just gave her that same careful, pitying smile everyone had worn since the funeral. By the time she reached the intern floor, her jaw ached from holding it steady.

Her desk was a cubicle, Grey walls, a secondhand monitor, a stack of files already waiting for her with a sticky note on top “Start with these”

Lucas found her twenty minutes later, leaning against the cubicle wall with the same easy smile he'd worn in the boardroom.

First day nerves? “he asked”

I'm fine Rena said

Good, because I need those account reconciliations done by Thursday. “He tapped the files of boring work, I know but everyone starts somewhere, even you.

There was something in the way he said “even you” that she couldn't place — not quite mockery, not quite kindness she filed it away and said nothing.

If you need anything, Lucas added softer now, I mean it. Family looks out for family. I know this can't be easy.

It was the first warmth anyone at the company had shown her since Friday, and despite herself, she almost believed it.

By lunch, she'd read the same paragraph of a financial report four times without absorbing a word. She stepped into the stairwell to call Jena, the only person she hadn't had to perform for since her parents died.

They gave me a cubicle, “Rena said” the second Jena picked up. A cubicle! Jena, I was supposed to be running this company.

“I know” Jena's voice was steady, the way it always was. “You want me to come key his car?”

Despite everything, Rena laughed — the first time since the funeral, “Don't tempt me.”

Seriously though. “Jena's tone shifted” Are you okay? Actually okay, not company-face okay.

Rena leaned her head against the stairwell wall. I don't know. Raymond said something to me before I left. About my parents' accident, like there's something I don't know.

There was a pause on the line. “What kind of something?”

“I don't know he wouldn't say more”

“Rena” Jena's voice dropped, careful, Be careful with him. Grief makes people vulnerable to whoever's standing closest, and right now that's him.

Rena didn't answer that. She wasn't ready to examine why the warning made her chest tighten instead of her head clear.

She returned to her desk after lunch to find Raymond standing over it, flipping through the same files Lucas had left her.

These numbers don't match the quarterly filing he said, without looking up. “Did you check them before Lucas signed off?”

“I started twenty minutes ago”

Then starting faster, he set the file down, finally meeting her eyes. Up close, in the fluorescent light of the intern floor, he looked less like the man from the boardroom and more like someone who hadn't slept. I'm not doing you any favors by going easy on you. If anything, I'll hold you to a higher standard than everyone else here.

“Because I'm the boss's daughter?”

Because you're capable of more than a cubicle, he said, and I need you to prove that to everyone in this building, starting with me.

For a moment, neither of them moved. It was the same charge she'd felt in the boardroom, the one she'd been telling herself for ten years was just admiration for a family friend. Up close, under fluorescent light, in a cubicle that used to be beneath her, it didn't feel like admiration anymore.

Raymond's phone buzzed against the desk. He glanced at the screen, and something in his expression closed off entirely.

I have to take this, “he said” already walking away, “Kayla”

Rena didn't know the name. But she watched him disappear around the corner, phone pressed to his ear, his shoulders squared in a way they hadn't been a second ago, and she felt something she had no right to feel.

She turned back to the files Lucas had given her, forcing herself to focus. Halfway through the second document, she found something odd — a reconciliation entry for a transfer dated the week before her parents' crash, routed through an account she didn't recognize, approved with a signature she couldn't quite read.

She was still staring at it when Lucas appeared behind her, close enough that she startled.

Anything interesting? “he asked, looking down at the page over her shoulder.

Rena closed the file before she'd fully decided to, “Just getting started”

Lucas smiled, easy as ever, and took the folder gently from her hands. “Don't stress yourself on day one” I'll have someone else finish that batch — you can start fresh tomorrow with something simpler.

He walked off with the file tucked under his arm before she could object, and it was only after he'd disappeared into his office that Rena realized her hands were shaking.

She didn't know what she'd almost seen. But she knew, with a certainty she couldn't explain, that she wasn't supposed to see it at all.