ELLA'S POV
The email notice pings at 5:47 AM, thirteen minutes before my alarm. I know who it is before I even open my eyes.
Subject: Presentation Revision #17 - URGENT
My phone screen lights up my dark bedroom like a torch of doom. I don't need to read it. I already know what Adrian Wolfe, CEO of Wolfe Industries and confirmed monster in expensive suits, is going to say. The presentation I spent forty hours polishing isn't good enough. Again.
I throw off my blanket and scream into my pillow. It doesn't help.
By 6:15 AM, I'm at my desk with my third coffee, watching the office lights flash on floor by floor. The building is empty except for the cleaning crew and me. Story of my life for the past three years.
I open Email #17. It's worse than I thought.
The color pattern is aggressive. The font choices show bad judgment. Slide 7's data presentation is amateur. Redo everything. I need it on my desk by 9 AM.
-AW
"Aggressive?" I mutter, clicking through the video. "The colors are BLUE and WHITE. How is that aggressive?"
My phone buzzes. Sophie, my best friend since college and the only reason I haven't committed corporate murder.
Sophie: Girl, tell me you're not at work already
Me: Email #17 just dropped
Sophie: I'm going to put that man in a mixer
Me: Get in line
I start with Slide 7 because Adrian specifically addressed it. I stare at the data visualization—a clean, simple bar graph showing quarterly income growth. I made this graph. It's great. My boss knows it's perfect. He's just doing this because destroying my life is his hobby.
Three years. Three years of this torture.
I remember my first day so clearly it hurts. I'd been so excited, newly graduated with my marketing degree, landing a job at one of Seattle's fastest-growing tech companies. Adrian Wolfe had a reputation—young, bright, built his company from nothing. During my interview, he'd barely looked at me, just asked three questions and hired me on the spot.
I thought I was lucky.
Week one, he gave me a "easy starter project" with a two-day deadline. I did it in one day. He tore it apart and made me redo it three times.
Week two, I stayed until midnight fixing his "corrections." When I submitted the finished version, he used it in a board meeting and never mentioned my name.
Week three, I understood the truth: Adrian Wolfe hated me specifically, personally, and for no reason I could understand.
"Maybe you remind him of someone," Sophie had offered after my first breakdown.
"Maybe he's just evil," I'd answered.
Three years later, I'm sure it's the bad thing.
I rebuild the line with different colors. Delete it. Try another style. Delete that too. It's 7:30 AM and I've made seventeen versions of the same perfect graph. My coffee's cold. My eyes burn. And I want to cry, scream, or possibly both.
Sophie: You still alive?
Me: Barely. I'm changing a graph that doesn't need changing
Sophie: That's it. Quit. My accounting company is hiring. I'll get you an interview
Me: Can't. Rent's due in a week and I'm broke
Sophie: Capitalism is a disease
Me: Tell me about it
By 8:45 AM, I've made the world's most pointless presentation revision. Every slide is functionally similar to the original. I changed the blue to dark blue. I switched two words. I made the graph bars slightly higher.
Adrian will probably love it. Or hate it. With him, it's impossible to predict.
I save everything, grab my laptop, and head to the upper floor. Adrian's office is at the end of the hall—floor-to-ceiling windows, minimalist furniture, and an aura of "everyone who enters here suffers."
His door is closed. I knock.
"Come in." His voice is deep, cold, and utterly emotionless.
I push open the door. Adrian sits behind his huge desk, focused on his computer screen. He doesn't look up. He never does during our first few seconds together, like acknowledging my existence instantly would be beneath him.
I use those seconds to study him like I always do, trying to find some sign to why he hates me.
Adrian Wolfe is unfairly attractive for someone with such an ugly attitude. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair that's always carefully styled and eyes so pale gray they're almost silver. He's thirty-two but looks like he's never smiled in his life. Everything about him screams control, power, and ice-cold calculation.
"The presentation," he says without looking up. "On the desk."
I set my laptop down slowly, like I'm approaching a sleeping dragon. "I made all the changes you requested."
"I'll be the judge of that."
He finally looks at me, and my breath catches like it does every single time. Those silver eyes pin me in place. For just a second, something flickers across his face—something almost like pain—but it vanishes so fast I tell myself I imagined it.
Adrian opens the file. Scrolls through. His jaw tightens. "Slide 7."
"I changed the visualization totally. Three different types, actually. I wasn't sure which style you'd prefer, so I—"
"It's worse."
My hands clench into fists. "With all due respect, Mr. Wolfe, I don't think—"
"That's the trouble, Ms. Chen. You don't think." He closes the laptop with a sharp click. "You just do whatever comes to you first and hope it works. There's no plan. No depth. No—"
"I've been working in marketing for three years!" The words burst out before I can stop them. "I've won two industry awards for campaigns I created. Campaigns you took credit for, by the way. That show is perfect, and you know it. You just enjoy making me suffer!"
The office goes dead.
Adrian stands slowly, and I suddenly remember how tall he is. How big. How his presence seems to fill the entire room. He walks around the desk, each step careful, until he's standing right in front of me.
Too close. Way too close.
"You think I enjoy this?" His voice drops to something dangerous and rough. "You think I want—"
He cuts himself off, jaw tightening hard. Something wild flashes in those silver eyes. For a crazy second, I swear I see them glow gold.
"Get out," he says softly. "Redo the show. Again. I want it perfect by tonight."
"I'm not staying late again! I have a life, even if you don't!"
"Then I suggest you work faster."
Rage rushes through me, hot and reckless. I grab my laptop off his desk with shaking hands. "You know what? Fine. FINE. I'll redo your stupid slideshow. But one day, Adrian Wolfe, one day I'm going to figure out why you hate me so much, and when I do—"
I spin toward the door and don't see the huge stack of files teetering on the edge of his credenza. My laptop bag catches the bottom box. Everything goes flying.
Papers burst into the air like a storm. I stumble forward, trying to catch them. Adrian leaps to grab the files. We hit hard—his chest solid as a wall, his hands catching my shoulders to steady me.
And somehow, in the chaos of falling papers and flailing limbs, the world plays its cruelest joke yet.
My lips crash straight into his.
The world stops.
His mouth is warm against mine, firm and strangely soft. For one impossible breath, neither of us moves. Then electricity crackles between us like lightning, hot and sharp and totally terrifying.
Adrian jerks backward with a sound I've never heard from him—something between a growl and a groan, something animal and wrong.
His whole body goes stiff. His eyes squeeze shut. And when they open again, they're glowing. Actually, truly glowing gold.
"No," he whispers. "No, no, no—"
That's when I see them.
Silver wolf ears grow from his perfectly styled hair, twitching and real. A massive tail bursts from behind him—thick, fluffy, and knocking over the desk lamp with a crash.
We stare at each other. My brain totally short-circuits.
Adrian Wolfe, my terrible boss, the man who's tortured me for three years, has wolf ears. And a tail. And eyes that glow like burning gold.
"You..." I can't form words. "You're... what are you?"
His face goes absolutely white. When he talks, his voice is barely human, rough and layered with something that sounds like an animal's snarl.
"Ella. Listen to me very carefully." His tail lashes behind him nervously. "You cannot tell anyone what you just saw. Do you understand? Not anyone. Your life depends on it."
"My life?" My voice comes out as a squeak. "Why would my life—"
"Because," he says, and now his teeth are too sharp, his nails too long, everything about him wrong and dangerous and impossible, "humans who learn what I am don't get to stay alive."