My heels were killing me by 11:15 PM, and the cold takeout coffee on my desk tasted like wet cardboard.
Everyone else on the 42nd floor had packed up and gone home hours ago. Even the cleaning crew had already passed through, leaving behind that faint smell of lemon bleach and stale air conditioning. Outside, November rain was smearing the Manhattan skyline into blurry streaks of red and yellow.
I rubbed my eyes, staring at the spreadsheet on my monitor for the fifth time. There it was again, a forty-million-dollar gap buried inside the Zurich merger numbers. If I waited until Monday morning to bring it up, the board would sign off on a bad deal before lunch.
So I printed the summary sheet, grabbed a pen, and walked down the empty hall toward Marcus’s office.
His door was half-open. Inside, the overhead lights were off, leaving only the small brass lamp on his desk lit. Marcus wasn’t sitting in his chair. He was leaning against the edge of the table with his suit jacket tossed over the sofa, scrolling through his phone. His white shirt was wrinkled at the elbows, and his tie hung loose around his collar like he’d tried to pull it off and gotten distracted halfway.
I knocked twice on the glass frame.
He didn’t jump, just looked up slowly over the top of his phone. “Tell me you’re not still working, Elena.”
“Okay. I’m not still working,” I said, walking in and dropping the printed sheet right next to his elbow. “I’m just saving you forty million dollars before Monday.”
Marcus let out a quiet breath through his nose, half tired and half amused, and set his phone face-down on the desk. He picked up the paper, his eyes scanning the highlighted column I’d marked in red ink. For almost a full minute, the only sound in the room was the rain tapping against the glass and the faint hum of the ventilation duct.
“Where did you pull the Q3 adjustment from?” he asked, not looking up.
“The subsidiary ledger. Nobody checked the currency conversion after Tuesday.”
He finally looked at me then. Up close, without a room full of executives between us, Marcus looked less like an untouchable CEO and more like a guy who hadn’t slept properly in three days. Dark shadows sat under his eyes, and a rough stubble darkened his jaw.
“You could have emailed this,” he said quietly.
“You don’t read emails after nine.”
“Fair point.” He set the paper down, leaning back on his palms against the edge of the desk. Instead of stepping away, he stayed right where he was, leaving barely a foot of space between my knees and his. “You’ve been staying past ten all week, Elena. What’s really going on?”
My throat went dry. I tried to keep my voice flat, casual. “I want the senior director spot when David retires next month.”
Marcus tilted his head slightly, studying my face like he was reading another balance sheet, except his gaze dropped for half a second to my mouth before coming back to my eyes. “You already had that job three weeks ago,” he murmured.
I blinked. “What?”
“HR has the paperwork sitting in drafts. I was waiting until Monday to tell you.” He shifted forward an inch, his voice dropping lower, rougher. “So that rules out the promotion. Try again. Why are you still here at midnight?”
Before I could come up with an answer that didn’t give me away completely, his fingers brushed lightly against the back of my hand resting on the desk. His skin was warm, rough, and entirely deliberate.
Down the hall, the private elevator bell dinged.