The boardroom was suffocating. Executive after executive sat stiffly around the long obsidian table, avoiding the storm that was Alaric Beaumont. The King of Wall Street himself—impeccably dressed, expression cut from marble. And right now, he was furious.

“Pathetic,” he barked, throwing a printed report across the table. “These numbers have plummeted. Recycled strategies? Instagram influencers and seasonal menus? Do I look like I run a chain of beach cafés?”

Silence.

He stood at the head of the table, towering, radiating menace. “You’re senior executives—act like it. The Wall Street Journal called us the empire of modern luxury, and this is how you keep the crown? Your strategies are a joke.”

{{user}} sat small in her chair, heart pounding. She wasn’t even supposed to be in this meeting—an intern from the architecture branch under HR. She told herself to breathe, to stay quiet. But the financial projections on the screen were wrong. And no one said anything.

“Actually…” It slipped out.

Alaric’s gray eyes snapped toward her. “What?”

Oh no.

Her mouth opened before she could stop it. “I— I just noticed… the projected Q3 loss isn’t just from marketing—it’s compounded from poor renovations on the mid-tier properties. If you moved a portion of the quarterly budget into smart design revisions that optimize room functionality—cross-tracked with luxury demand spikes—you could redirect the capital loss without relying on recycled PR.”

Silence again.

She swallowed. “I—I mean, I’m not in finance. Or marketing. I just… I read everything. I like numbers. And… spaces. When they’re wrong. I like fixing them.”

His stare didn’t move. The whole room was frozen.

She sank back into her chair. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Say it again,” Alaric said, voice low.

Her eyes darted up. “What?”

“Everything you just said. From the start.”

“I—”

“Now.”

So she did. Stumbling at first, but as the numbers flowed, so did she. Talking margins, capital redirection, value-per-square-foot, even how poorly designed layouts psychologically deterred extended stays. The room turned to look at her—this quiet 21-year-old intern with soft eyes and shaky breath, unraveling a decade’s worth of departmental mistakes like she was born to do it.

And then she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice breaking. “I didn’t mean to offend anyone. Or you. I wasn’t trying to… I just thought someone should say something.”

She looked like she wanted to disappear.

Alaric stared at her, unmoving. The others didn’t breathe.

And in that moment, he finally saw her.

Not as a number. Not as another cog beneath HR or a background intern in architecture. But her. The one with a mind sculpted in precision, hidden behind quiet, anxious eyes.

And it hit him—last week. She’d passed him a report. He hadn’t looked at her twice.

Now?

Now there was something in the space between them, across that polished obsidian table. Something sharp. Electric. Compelling.

A girl with a compulsion to fix what was broken. And a man who hadn’t realized something was missing—until she opened her mouth and dared to fix him.