Kara
The conference room door clicks shut behind me. I don’t run. I walk, one careful, limping step at a time, down the hallway toward my corner of purgatory.
I can feel his eyes on the back of my head, a phantom pressure. Hunter Callahan.
I’m almost to my desk when a sharp voice cuts through the office hum.
“You. Stop right there.”
I turn. Arabella is marching toward me, her face a thundercloud of fury. Marcus follows a few steps behind, looking uneasy.
“What in the hell was that?” she demands, her voice low and vicious, for my ears only. The entire bullpen is pretending not to listen.
I lower my eyes. “I’m sorry, Ms. Devlin. I just wanted to help.”
“Help?” she hisses. “You made me look like an idiot. You made my entire team look like idiots. In front of Hunter Callahan.”
“That wasn’t my intention.” My voice is a mouse’s squeak.
“I don’t care about your intentions,” she snaps. “I care about results. And the result is that you embarrassed me. You are here to file papers and fetch coffee. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Ms. Devlin.”
“Your little logistical insight was a fluke. A lucky guess from a half-wit.” She leans in closer, her expensive perfume a suffocating cloud. “Don’t ever speak in a meeting again. Don’t even breathe too loudly. Your only job is to be invisible.”
“I understand.”
She straightens up, her composure returning as she raises her voice for the benefit of the office. “Since you have so much time on your hands to daydream about shipping lanes, you can take on a new project. The archival records room needs to be reorganized. Top to bottom.”
Marcus frowns. “Bella, that’s a massive job. We have a temp agency for that kind of…”
“I wasn’t asking you, Marcus,” she cuts him off without a glance. “Cora can handle it. I want every project file from the last twenty years catalogued and digitized. You can start now. I expect a progress report by the end of the day.”
She turns on her heel and stalks back toward her office, Marcus trailing in her wake like a well-trained dog.
I stand there for a moment, the office’s silent judgment washing over me. The archives. A dusty, windowless room in the sub-basement. A tomb. It’s not a job. It’s a banishment.
Perfect. No one will look for me there.
An hour later, I’m surrounded by ghosts. The room smells of decaying paper and dust. Boxes labeled with my father’s handwriting are stacked to the ceiling. It’s a physical history of the company I built.
This is where they sent me to be broken. This is where I’ll forge my first weapon.
I pull the burner phone from my pocket. The one my mother gave me the key for. It feels cold and heavy in my hand. One contact is saved in it. A single name: Leo.
My thumb hovers over the call button. Leo was my head of security. More than that, he was my father’s right hand, a man whose loyalty was to the Devlin name, not just the paycheck. He was quietly forced into early retirement a month after my ‘accident’.
I press the button.
It rings twice. A gravelly voice, older than I remember, answers. “Who is this?”
My own voice is barely a whisper. “Leo? It’s Kara.”
Silence. For a long moment, I think he’s hung up. Then, his voice, thick with disbelief. “Miss Devlin? That’s not possible. You’re… you’re gone.”
“The reports of my death were greatly exaggerated,” I say, the words tasting like ash. “Are you somewhere private?”
“One second.” I hear a door close, the sound of a lock clicking. “Okay. I’m alone. My God, Kara. We all thought… after the fire…”
“The fire was their second attempt, Leo. The car crash was the first.”
Another pause. I can almost hear the gears turning in his sharp, methodical mind. “They said the brakes failed. A mechanical defect.”
“They lied,” I say, my voice flat. “They left me to die, and when that didn’t work, they finished the job a year later. Or they thought they did.”
“Those bastards,” he growls, the sound a low rumble of pure fury. “Arabella and that snake, Callahan.”
“The very same,” I say. “I need your help, Leo. I can’t pay you what you’re worth, not yet. But I can offer you a chance to make things right.”
“You don’t have to pay me a damn cent,” he says, his voice fierce. “I’d do it for your father. I’ll do it for you. What do you need?”
Relief floods through me, so potent it makes me dizzy. I lean against a dusty filing cabinet. “I have two missions for you. Both require absolute discretion.”
“Discretion is my middle name. Go ahead.”
“First, I’ve transferred the contents of a small trust fund into a numbered account. I’m sending you the details now. I need you to start buying Devlin Industries stock.”
“Buying stock?” he asks, confused. “The price is stable.”
“It won’t be for long,” I say. “I need you to set up a series of shell corporations. Untraceable. I want you to buy small, irregular amounts. Never enough to trigger an SEC flag. We’re building a ghost position in my own company.”
“A ghost position,” he repeats, the understanding dawning in his voice. “I can do that. I still have contacts who owe me favors. What’s the second mission?”
This is the hard part. The part that makes it all real.
“The car crash,” I say, my voice dropping. “Arabella and Marcus wrote it off as an accident. I need you to prove them wrong. Look at the maintenance records, the garage it was serviced at, the tow yard reports. Someone tampered with my car, Leo. I need to know who.”
“Consider it done,” he says, his voice like iron. “I’ll start with the service garage. I remember the owner was a cousin of Marcus’s mother.”
My blood runs cold. A detail I never knew. A connection I never made. “Find me proof, Leo. Something hard. Something I can use to burn them to the ground.”
“I won’t let you down, Miss Devlin. It’s good to have you back.”
“It’s good to be back,” I lie. I end the call and slide the phone back into my pocket.
For the rest of the day, I work. The impossible task Arabella gave me is a meditation. I don’t just organize. I absorb. I find the original plans for the handbag line she’s championing, and I see the corners she cut. I find the budget reports for marketing and see how much she’s spent on self-promotion.
By five o’clock, I’ve completed a section that should have taken a week. I send a concise, detailed progress report to Arabella’s email, exactly as she requested.
Her reply is a single, sharp summons. “My office. Now.”
I limp my way back upstairs. The office is emptying out, but she’s there, sitting at her desk, my report on her screen.
She doesn’t look up when I enter. “This report. It’s very detailed.”
“Thank you, Ms. Devlin. I wanted to be thorough.”
“You digitized three hundred files in six hours?” she asks, her voice laced with suspicion.
“I found a more efficient way to scan the documents in batches,” I say simply, a half-truth that protects my real secret: I already knew the filing system by heart.
She finally looks at me, her eyes narrowed. She was expecting me to be overwhelmed, covered in dust, on the verge of tears. She was expecting me to quit. Instead, I’m standing here, calm and efficient.
It unnerves her.
“Fine,” she says, waving a dismissive hand. “Don’t think this impresses me.”
She picks up a crystal vase from her desk, filled with wilting peonies. “This is unacceptable. I need fresh flowers. Daily.”
“Of course. I’ll arrange a service.”
“No,” she says, a cruel little smile playing on her lips. “No service. I want Star Gazer lilies. The specific deep pink varietal. And I want them from the little shop in the old city market. They’re the only ones who get the color right.”
The old city market. It’s an hour across town in rush hour traffic. It closes at six. It’s currently five forty-five.
Another impossible task. Another test.
“Right away, Ms. Devlin,” I say, my voice perfectly even.
“And I want you to personally retype the quarterly investor forecast,” she adds, pushing a thick, coffee-stained manuscript across her desk. “Our software mangled the formatting. I need a clean copy. On my desk when I get in tomorrow.”
I look at the manuscript. It’s at least two hundred pages of dense financial data. It will take all night.
I just nod. “Yes, Ms. Devlin.”
I take the manuscript and turn to leave. I can feel her staring at me, her frustration a palpable force. She keeps throwing impossible things at me, and I keep catching them without a word. My quiet competence is a mystery she can’t solve, and it’s driving her insane.
“Cora,” she says, stopping me at the door.
I turn back.
“Why are you even here?” she asks, a genuine, frustrated curiosity in her voice. “A job like this… it’s beneath anyone with a shred of ambition.”
I give her the most broken, pathetic smile I can muster.
“I don’t have ambition, Ms. Devlin,” I whisper, letting my eyes drift to the scar on my face. “I just need a job. I’m just grateful for the chance.”
Her face clears, the suspicion replaced by the familiar look of smug pity. She understands this. She understands a broken thing being grateful for scraps.
“See that you remember that,” she says, turning back to her computer.
I walk out of her office, out of the building, and into the evening rush. She thinks she’s won. She thinks she’s put me in my place.
She has no idea that Leo is already moving my pawn across the board. And she has no idea that I know a florist two blocks from here who gets a secret, daily delivery from that very shop in the old market.
They think the game is about impossible tasks and public humiliation.
I’m playing a different game entirely.
