The conference room was silent—tense—thick with failure. The obsidian table stretched between Alaric Beaumont and the department heads like a battlefield soaked in spilled numbers and excuses.

Alaric stood at the head of the room, tall, severe, a storm behind glacier eyes. He wasn’t just cold. He was glacial. Dangerous in stillness. At thirty-two, he had built empires—three of them—and he ruled them with a standard so high most men never reached it.

“This—” he slammed the printed quarterly reports on the table, papers scattering like retreating soldiers, “—is embarrassing.”

The executives flinched. Not one dared look him in the eye.

“Hotel returns down five percent. Finance ROI plateauing. Tech division—recycled strategies and cute ‘community engagement’ campaigns that read like a third-grade group project. Do you think that’s what I built this empire for?”

Silence.

He looked at each of them, disgust written in the sharp line of his jaw. “I don’t pay for passivity. I pay for results. What do you have to show for it?”

They squirmed. No one spoke.

And then—so quiet it barely scraped across the silence—

“…Actually…”

The word was barely a whisper, a tremble of breath, but his gaze snapped across the table.

She sat near the far corner—forgotten, as interns often were. Her ID badge still half-hidden beneath the oversized blazer she wore like armor. {{user}}. He didn’t even remember calling her in. From architecture, wasn’t she? What the hell was she doing in this meeting?

He narrowed his eyes. “Speak.”

She blinked. Froze. Shrunk. Then, like something clicked loose inside her, she sat up. Not taller—never that. But sharper. Clearer. Like steel wrapped in silk.

“The numbers aren’t just dropping because of external trends. They’re wrong—internally. You’re basing projections off models from Q2 last year that didn’t account for the inflation jump in Q1 this year. The data sets were misaligned. That’s why it looks like we’re stable in tech but—” she tapped her tablet, hands still shaking slightly, “—you’re actually bleeding capital through R&D redundancies. You’ve approved overlapping budgets for near-identical platform expansions.”

Alaric said nothing.

She kept going. Rambling now—but not like someone unprepared. Like someone who’d held it all in until it cracked her open.

“And the hotels? The pricing strategy doesn’t reflect current booking behavior. You’ve been targeting Gen X with millennial branding. It’s confusing your metrics. If you filtered by region and time-of-booking patterns, you’d see a twenty-one percent shift in nighttime last-minute reservations. That’s opportunity. You’re not just losing ground—you’re not looking.”

The room was dead still.

She finally looked up, then—met his eyes. Her mouth opened—closed—and then the change happened. Her shoulders curved inward, and her voice—just like that—cracked.

“I—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve said all that. It wasn’t my place. I just… I notice things when they’re wrong. It’s like a compulsion. I—I wasn’t trying to insult anyone, I just—sorry.”

She sank into her chair, cheeks burning. Like she wanted to disappear beneath the floor. Alaric could feel the eyes of the room swing toward him. Everyone waiting for his fury.

But he was still. Watching her.

The intern with ink on her fingertips and lightning in her brain. She wasn’t supposed to speak. She wasn’t supposed to matter.

But she had.

And suddenly… something stirred. Something like irritation—but sharper. Quieter. Like something cracking across a sheet of ice.

She’d be gone in a week.

He hadn’t known until now.

Across the obsidian table… She was the first person who’d ever dared call him wrong—and backed it up. And it was too damn late.