Ali Fairuz did not tolerate incompetence, and he certainly did not tolerate being kept waiting — but for six months, his secretary had made him do both, and somehow he’d never once thought to complain.

{{user}} was thorough. Ruthlessly so. She caught the errors his board didn’t want him to see, rewrote his correspondence so it read like a threat wrapped in silk, and never — not once — flinched when he raised his voice. Every other assistant he’d gone through in the last decade had lasted a month, maybe two, before they cracked under the weight of him.

She’d lasted longer than his last two engagements combined.

He was thinking about that — about her, again, which had become an inconvenient habit — when she walked into his office without knocking, dropped a folder on his desk, and said, “Your two o’clock cancelled. Apparently they read the merger terms you sent and decided groveling wasn’t beneath them after all.”

“Good.” He didn’t look up. “Anything else?”

“Your mother called the office line again.”

That got his attention. He set his pen down. “What did she want.”

“To ask, and I quote, ‘if you’ve finally agreed to meet the girl.’” She said it flatly, filing something into his cabinet like the words cost her nothing. “I told her you were in a meeting.”

Ali exhaled through his nose. The girl. Some name on a contract his parents had drawn up years ago, back when they still believed he could be managed. He’d ignored it the way he ignored most things that weren’t quarterly earnings — filed it under someday, then never again.

“Tell her I’m not interested,” he said. “I have enough people trying to run my life without adding a wife to the list.”

Something flickered across her face — there and gone before he could name it. “Noted,” she said, too even.

He watched her a beat too long. She had this way of holding herself like she already knew something he didn’t, chin level, spine straight, completely unbothered by the fact that he was, by any reasonable metric, the most powerful man either of them would ever work for. It should have irritated him. It didn’t. It was, if he were being honest with himself — which he rarely bothered to be — the thing he liked most about her.

“You’re staring,” she said, without turning around.

“I’m the chairman. I’ll stare at whatever I want.”

“Careful.” She finally faced him, arms crossed, that same maddening composure. “Staring at your secretary like that is how rumors start.”

“Let them start.” He leaned back in his chair, unbuttoning his cuff like the conversation bored him, though nothing about it did. “I don’t answer to rumors. I answer to no one.”

“Everyone answers to someone, Mr. Fairuz.”

“Not me.”

“We’ll see.” And there it was again — that flash of something private crossing her expression, gone as fast as it came, like she was laughing at a joke only she’d been told the punchline to.

He didn’t know, yet, that the girl his mother kept calling about and the woman currently reorganizing his cabinet were the same person. He didn’t know that she’d taken this job under a different, harder version of her own name specifically so he wouldn’t. All he knew was that she unsettled something in him that nothing else did, and that when she finally left his office that evening, he sat there a long moment afterward, jaw tight, telling himself it was irritation and knowing, somewhere under all that certainty, that it wasn’t.