By Monday morning, the kiss had settled into the city's bloodstream like caffeine. The memes were still multiplying, but the headlines had shifted to the next round of bloodsport: the bid for the Valmont Logistics contract—a multi-billion euro lifeline to anyone who could land it.
Two names on the shortlist: RavenCorp and Blackwell Industries.
The meeting was at nine sharp in RavenCorp's glass-and-marble fortress. By 8:45, the boardroom was already lined with senior execs, legal, strategy, and enough caffeine to fuel a war. The Valmont delegation was due any second, and everyone looked like they were prepping for a live execution.
Damien was at the head of the table, jacket off, sleeves rolled to forearm level, reviewing slides with a focus that could slice steel. I slid into my seat on his right, tablet in front of me, hair pinned, dress in a shade that looked expensive without trying.
"You've got the last segment," he said without looking up.
"I thought—" I started.
"You're closing. After me," he said, still scrolling through data points. "Make it clean, make it decisive."
"You want me to play mascot or assassin?" I asked.
His mouth barely moved. "Assassin."
Before I could respond, the doors opened and in walked the Valmont execs—three men, two women, all dressed in understated European money. Behind them, like a bad penny, came Adrian Blackwell. His suit was perfect, his smile sharper, and he'd clearly decided not to waste an invitation to a public duel.
"Gentlemen, ladies," he said, glancing at me like I was a footnote, "let's talk about moving Europe's biggest logistics network into the future."
We all sat. Valmont's lead negotiator, a tall man named Duval with a voice like cold water, nodded to Damien. "You first."
Damien stood, clicked the remote, and began dismantling Blackwell's opening pitch before it even existed. He went straight to the numbers—fleet modernization, port efficiency, cross-border customs optimization. No fluff, no filler. Then, halfway through, he paused and looked directly at Adrian.
"Your projections assume outdated customs regulations," he said, voice even. "That's a three-year lag. Which means your ROI is fiction."
A ripple of discomfort moved through the table. Adrian's jaw twitched, but he smiled. "We've accounted for contingencies."
"Not this one," Damien said, and turned to me. "Ms. Voss, your turn."
The room shifted. All eyes on me. No warm-up, no easing in—just the stage, the lights, and the expectation.
I stood, tapped my tablet, and the screen behind me shifted to my first slide: Port Throughput 2026 — Scenario Analysis.
"Gentlemen, ladies," I began, "RavenCorp's model doesn't just account for regulatory changes. It leverages them. Under the EU's new Green Freight Initiative, carriers who cut carbon emissions by fifteen percent in five years qualify for a fifty-percent tariff reduction. That's not an expense—it's a market advantage."
I moved through the slides, layering hard numbers with clean visuals: trade lane maps, emissions curves, projected savings. Then I added the kicker—creative, but grounded.
"We've secured provisional agreements with two Baltic ports to pilot automated customs clearance tied to blockchain tracking. The system cuts processing time by thirty-five percent, which in logistics terms is the difference between ahead of schedule and out of business."
Duval's eyes narrowed in interest. One of his deputies scribbled something fast. Adrian's pen didn't move.
I closed the deck with a single, uncluttered slide: Speed + Compliance = Profit.
"That's the math," I said. "Everything else is noise."
Silence for three seconds, then Duval leaned back. "Impressive. Concise. Refreshing."
Adrian tried to break the moment. "Of course, innovation is meaningless without stability—"
Damien cut in smoothly. "Which is why we've paired vision with execution. And execution with leadership." He nodded toward me in a way that read like a statement: She's not here to decorate the chair.
The meeting ended with handshakes that felt heavier on our side of the table. Valmont's delegation left, promising to deliberate.
The moment the door shut, Damien turned to me. "Good."
"Good like passable, or good like you'd trust me with the whole pitch?" I asked.
"Good like I'd put you in front of the board tomorrow and watch them try to keep up," he said.
Hazel, who had been parked at the far end taking notes, grinned like she'd just won a private bet. "Blackwell looked like someone swapped his coffee for decaf."
I sat back down, adrenaline still high. "He's not going to take that quietly."
"Of course not," Hazel said. "And that's where my day gets interesting."
It didn't take long.
By lunch, the first "exclusive" had dropped on a second-tier business blog: RavenCorp's New Face: Heiress or Headache? The article recycled old photos of me at charity galas, threw in speculation about my "sudden" rise in corporate influence, and quoted an "anonymous source" claiming my logistics model was "a recycled academic exercise."
The source wasn't anonymous to me. It had Adrian's cadence all over it.
I forwarded the link to Hazel. She called me before the typing dots disappeared.
"Do not reply," she said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it," she accused.
"I was thinking about buying the site and deleting the archives," I said.
"Tempting," she said. "But we go surgical. We drop a white paper on the Green Freight Initiative by four p.m., authored by you, peer-reviewed by RavenCorp's strategy unit. The headline becomes Voss Leads Sustainability Push, and the smear looks like yesterday's news."
"Make it happen," I said.
By three o'clock, the white paper was live on RavenCorp's investor portal. By three-thirty, the business blog had "updated" its article to include the new data, with a grudging note about "industry recognition." By four, our share price had ticked up a point.
But Adrian wasn't done.
At four-fifteen, a fake Twitter account started posting that I'd plagiarized sections of my university thesis to build the Valmont proposal. The posts included blurry screenshots of "matching text" and hashtags about integrity. They were just plausible enough to stick if ignored.
Hazel's phone exploded. She skimmed, cursed, and started barking at the digital team. Damien appeared in the doorway like he'd been summoned.
"Handled?" he asked.
"Handling," Hazel said. "We trace, we crush, we bury."
"Bury isn't enough," he said. "We salt the ground."
His eyes met mine. "You still feel like an assassin?"
"More than ever," I said.
By five, Hazel's team had traced the fake account to a PR firm with ties to Blackwell Industries. By six, a letter from RavenCorp's legal department was in their inbox, cc'd to half the business press. By seven, the account was gone, the screenshots debunked, and the conversation had shifted to speculation about how Adrian could be that sloppy.
Damien leaned against my office door, hands in his pockets. "First day in the corporate war. Thoughts?"
"I like the part where I win," I said.
His mouth did that almost-smile again. "Tomorrow's round will be uglier."
"I'm counting on it," I said.
By the next morning, Valmont had moved us to "exclusive negotiations"—corporate-speak for Blackwell's out, but we're not signing yet.
The email landed in Damien's inbox at 7:03 a.m., and by 7:05, Hazel was leaning on my doorway with the kind of grin that announces good news before you hear it.
"You're about to make a lot of people in this building less afraid of you," she said.
"I didn't know fear was the problem," I replied.
"It's always the problem," she said. "Win something this big and they'll at least pretend to like you."
In the boardroom at nine, Damien confirmed it with two words: "We're leading."
A ripple of satisfaction moved around the table. I caught Adrian's absence in the quiet—no smug interruptions, no shadow leaning in the corner. But absence is never the same as retreat.
We spent the morning hammering through final adjustments to the proposal. Damien gave me the export compliance segment to rewrite; I turned it around in thirty minutes, trimming eight redundant pages and replacing them with a two-page visual summary.
He read it, nodded once. "You have a clean mind for this."
"Don't sound so surprised," I said.
"Not surprised," he replied. "Noted."
Lunch was a blur of emails and half a salad, eaten while reviewing port authority agreements on my tablet. Hazel perched on my desk, scrolling through her phone like she was hunting.
"Here," she said, shoving the screen toward me. Another article, this one in a glossy lifestyle magazine: Corporate Cinderella: How Isla Voss Went from Unknown Heiress to RavenCorp's Risky Bet.
The piece was worse than the headline—photos of me as a teenager, speculation about my "mysterious" years in Europe, an "analysis" of my clothes during the Valmont pitch. Every line designed to make me look like a fashion plate who'd wandered into the wrong meeting.
"Blackwell's fingerprints again?" I asked.
"Feels like it," Hazel said. "But they're smarter this time—routed it through a freelance writer with just enough plausible deniability."
"Then we go smarter," I said.
We dropped a behind-the-scenes video of the pitch prep on RavenCorp's official channels—me and Damien in a war room full of maps, data streams, late-night coffee cups. The footage was cut fast, sharp, no glamour shots, just work. The caption: Strategy isn't magic. It's math.
By dinner, the lifestyle piece had been bumped off the trending list. The comments under our video were full of investors applauding "the brains behind the pitch."
But Adrian wasn't aiming only at my image.
At 8:12 p.m., Hazel called from her apartment. "He's going after your allies," she said. "Two minor ports in the Baltic—both on our automation pilot—just got sudden offers from a 'private investment group' to fund alternative modernization. Triple the budget we allocated."
"Private investment group," I repeated. "He's buying them out from under us."
"That's the idea."
I was already pulling up our project dashboard. "If we lose either, the model's still viable. Lose both and our edge shrinks to nothing."
"I'll get Damien on," Hazel said.
"No," I told her. "I'll handle the ports. He handles Valmont. We don't split our fire until we have to."
The next morning, I was on a call with both port directors by 7 a.m. I listened, I asked questions, and then I offered them something Adrian wouldn't—equity in the automation platform, not just a one-off payout. A seat at the table instead of a bag of cash.
It landed.
By noon, both ports had reaffirmed with RavenCorp. Hazel sent me a celebratory GIF of a wolf chasing a fox off a cliff.
That afternoon, Damien stopped by my office. He leaned against the doorframe, unreadable.
"I heard about the ports," he said.
"I figured you would."
"You didn't loop me in."
"You didn't need to be looped," I said. "It's my segment. I handled it."
For a second, I thought he might be angry. Instead, he stepped inside and closed the door.
"Most people in this building wouldn't have done that without checking. You did. And you were right." His eyes held mine. "That makes you dangerous—in the right way."
"Dangerous isn't the same as trusted," I said.
"It's the first step," he replied.
By Thursday, Valmont's board called Damien directly. We were their pick. Contract negotiations would take weeks, but the public announcement was in two days.
We stood side by side in the elevator down to the garage, the air thick with unspoken calculation.
"You know Adrian's not going to take this loss quietly," Damien said.
"I'm counting on it."
"Why?"
"Because I'd rather see the punch coming," I said. "And because if he keeps swinging in public, every miss makes him smaller."
The elevator doors opened. Damien's mouth curved just slightly.
"Maybe I should let you lead more pitches," he said.
"Maybe you should," I replied.
That night, Hazel sent me a screenshot: Adrian's private jet, tagged in Paris. Caption: Meeting with key partners. She added a note: Want me to guess who?
I didn't have to guess. The ports were secure, Valmont was ours, but Europe was a big board. Adrian was already moving his next piece.
And I intended to be ready when it landed in my corner.