CHAPTER 6: A Gift and a Trap

Ana's POV

I didn't sleep.

The number glowed on my phone every time I picked it up, and I picked it up all night.

Fifty thousand dollars. More money than I had ever held in my life, and all I could feel was the shape of it tightening around my throat.

The last time a man left me money, it had been a few crumpled bills on a nightstand and a note that called me a whore he had rented. And I had torn it to pieces.

I couldn't tear fifty thousand dollars, but I could hand it back, and I would, the moment the building opened.

By the time I walked into his office the next morning, my voice was ready.

He was at his desk this time, sleeves pushed to his elbows, reading something on a tablet he set down the second I crossed the threshold. He always did that. Stopped whatever he was doing and gave me the whole of his attention, like the rest of the world could wait.

"Miss Voss."

"I can't keep it." I laid my phone on the desk between us, the notification still open. "The money. I came to ask you to reverse it properly this time. Take it back."

He looked at the screen. Then he looked at me. He didn't reach for the phone.

"Why?"

"Because it isn't right." I kept my chin up. "Three days in. No paperwork, no policy, nothing on record. People are already whispering about me, Mr. Strauss. This makes it worse. It makes it look like I’m being bought."

"And are you?"

"No." The word came out harder than I meant. "I am not for sale. I have never been for sale. I worked for this job and I'll keep working for it, but I'll not take money I didn't earn so it can sit on me like a leash."

That was the word. The one that had been troubling me all night. But the second it left my mouth I wished I could take it back, because his eyes sharpened, the way a man's do when you have told him something true by accident.

"A leash?" he repeated.

"I shouldn't have said that."

"No. It was honest. I prefer honest." He stood, came around the desk, and leaned against the edge of it, close enough that I caught the clean dark scent of him, the one that did something low and strange in my body every single time. "So let me be honest back. The money is yours. No conditions. No record needed, because I own the record. A manager of your caliber doesn't run my biggest launch out of a hotel room, eating sad food off a tray and pricing the cheapest box in the worst part of the city."

My face went hot. He had said almost the same thing yesterday, and it still landed like he had read my diary.

"How you live reflects on this company," he went on, before I could speak. "On me. So I fixed it. That is all this is." He tilted his head. "Unless you would rather make it about something else."

"I wouldn't."

"Then it's settled. Keep the money. Find somewhere that locks properly and lets you sleep." He said it like a door closing. "We have more important things to discuss."

That was when I saw the face.

Beyond his shoulder, past the wall of glass that gave his office to the whole floor, a woman from accounts had slowed by the corridor. She wasn't looking at her phone. She was looking at us. At him leaning towards me, at how little air was left between his body and mine, and her eyes were already doing the math that I knew would be a story by lunch.

I stepped back before I decided to. And he noticed.

"Let her look," he said quietly, not turning his head. "She works for me too."

"That's easy for you to say." My pulse was going. "You're the one they envy. I'm the one they'll call cheap."

"Then give them nothing to say." He didn't move away, but his voice changed, smooth and sure, sliding the conversation exactly where he wanted it. "Which brings me to the thing that matters."

He picked up the tablet, scrolled, turned it to face me. The launch chart. My launch chart, the one I had built over four sleepless nights, but the reporting line had been redrawn.

Every box that used to sit above mine was gone. The middle managers. The regional heads. The whole layer of people who were supposed to stand between a new hire and the man who ran everything.

"As of this morning, you report to me," he said. "Directly. No buffers. No one between us. The launch is too important to lose anything in translation, and you are the only person in this building who understands it the way I need it understood."

I stared at the chart.

On paper it was a dream. A woman two years out of the game, handed a senior role she had no business landing, now reporting straight to the boss with no one to slow her down or steal her wins. Any marketer alive would crawl over glass for it.

But I felt… the thing he wasn't saying.

No buffers meant no witnesses. No one between us meant no one to see how often ‘us’ would happen.

"That's a lot of access to one person," I said carefully.

"You earned it." His eyes didn't leave my face. "Or don't you trust yourself to handle it?"

"I can.. I can handle it," I said without thinking.

"Good." He set the tablet down, and for a moment something flickered behind those dark blue eyes, there and gone, like a card turned face down before I could read it. "Then we understand each other."

"We do." I gathered my phone off his desk, the fifty thousand still glowing, still mine whether I wanted it or not. The conversation was over. I had come to give something back and was leaving with more than I walked in with, and the woman in the corridor was already gone, already telling it. "I'll have the rollout deck for you by Friday. Directly, I suppose."

"Friday." He almost smiled. "I look forward to it, Miss Voss."

I turned for the door. My hand was on the handle when his voice came from behind me. Quietly.

"One more thing."

I stopped, but I didn't turn around.

"I want you in every meeting from now on," he said. "Starting tonight."