Page 59 of The Secretary Volume II

I encrypt the file before they can load it.

Then I sit there in the dark, watching nothing at all, fingers twitching over keys I don’t press.

And I think:

Next time, I want to be there.

Not watching.

Not waiting.

There.

She wouldn’t see it coming.

They never do.

But I’d make sure she remembered.

33

Lena

Iwake up expecting the worst.Pressure.A follow-up message.A calendar invite I’m going to agonize over accepting.Maybe another dinner—this time without the plausible deniability.Instead, I get an email.

Subject line: Reassignment Notification.

From HR, no less.Because nothing says “you’re doing great” like being quietly shuffled into a new role by an unmonitored inbox.

It reads:

Lena,

Effective immediately, you’ve been reassigned to Executive Strategic Oversight.Your access credentials have been updated.Badge activation is complete.Please report to 302 Winthrop Lane at 9:00AM.

– Shergar Operations

That’s it.No context.No signature.Just an address dropped into my morning like a trap door.I reread it twice.Then I Google it.

Winthrop Lane isn’t another office building.

It’s a house.A very expensive house.

Ellis’s house.

For a full minute, I just stare at the screen, waiting for some kind of follow-up.A clarification.A “don’t worry, this isn’t weird.”

But no.Just that one line of direction, dropped like it’s perfectly normal to send an employee to her boss’s residence for an unscheduled… what?Orientation?Performance review?Sacrifice?

I should be panicking.I should be packing a bag and googling “workplace boundaries” and “how to fake your own death.”

But instead—I feel relieved.Because I didn’t say yes last night.I didn’t go home with him.I didn’t let the silence do the talking.And yet—here I am.Still employed.Promoted, no less.

Maybe I was never expected to say yes.Maybe this is what saying no gets you.I iron my shirt twice.I put on the nicer perfume.The one I save for interviews, funerals, and conversations with men who smile too slowly.If this is how Shergar plays, if Ellis’s offer was some kind of test to see whether I’d bite, then fine.I can be efficient too.

The house is… not what I expected.Or maybe it’s exactly what I expected and I was just hoping to be wrong.Sleek.Cold.Minimal.A shrine to architectural restraint.The kind of place where even the fruit bowl has performance anxiety.

There’s no receptionist, no security, just a front gate that opens when I scan my badge and a front door that’s already unlocked.Which, on the scale of corporate red flags, is somewhere between “free drinks at a networking mixer” and “we’re like family here.”