THREE MONTHS OWED TO A TYRANT CEO Chapter 1 — The Worst Monday of My Life
I have a theory about Mondays.
They are not bad by accident. They are bad by design. The universe sits down every Sunday night, looks at your week ahead, finds the one thing that could go spectacularly wrong — and schedules it for Monday morning. First thing. Before you've even finished your coffee.
The irony, in my case, was that it was somebody else's coffee that started everything.
My alarm went off at five forty-five.
I silenced it, stared at the ceiling for exactly thirty seconds the way I always do — just long enough to remind myself that rent doesn't pay itself — and got up.
The apartment was small. It had always been small. One bedroom that doubled as a living room if you pushed the bed far enough against the wall, a kitchen the size of a generous closet, and a bathroom where the hot water worked about sixty percent of the time. That morning it didn't. I showered cold, dried off fast, pulled my hair into a ponytail that I told myself looked intentional, and was out the door by six twenty.
The delivery company I worked for — Zipline Express, which was neither zippy nor expressive but paid eleven dollars an hour plus tips — started morning routes at seven. I had four packages and one food order to deliver before nine. Easy enough, usually.
The food order was the problem.
It was a catering pickup from a coffee place called Grind — the expensive kind of coffee place where a single cup costs as much as my lunch. Two large Americanos, one flat white, a stack of pastries in a box, all of it packed into a carrier bag that I was supposed to deliver to a firm called Voss Industries on the forty-second floor of the Harrington Tower downtown.
I had delivered to that building twice before. In and out, no issue. Suits everywhere, marble floors, front desk people who looked at me like I had wandered in from a different planet. I was used to it. You develop a kind of armor in this job. You smile, you hand over the order, you leave. Easy.
I never made it to the forty-second floor.
The lobby of Harrington Tower at seven fifty in the morning is controlled chaos. People everywhere — suits, laptops, security badges swinging, coffee cups in hand, everyone moving like they have somewhere important to be and about four minutes to get there.
I came through the revolving door holding the carrier bag in both hands, careful with it, already thinking about the three other packages I had to drop off across town before nine. I was watching the bag. Making sure the cups weren't tilting. Making sure the pastry box was balanced.
I was not watching where I was going.
Neither, as it turned out, was he.
We collided at the exact center of the lobby, right where the marble floor has that ridiculous gold V inlaid in it — Voss Industries branding, I later found out, because apparently when you own the entire building you get to put your initial on the floor. The impact was sudden and sharp. My shoulder hit something solid. The carrier bag lurched. I grabbed for it — got one cup, lost the other. The lid wasn't on tight enough. It never is, with these places.
Coffee went everywhere.
I mean everywhere.
On the floor, on my jacket sleeve, on the bag — and on the white shirt of the man I had just walked into.
For a second neither of us moved.
I looked at the spreading brown stain soaking through what was clearly an extremely expensive white dress shirt. Then I looked up.
He was tall — I noticed that first. The kind of tall that means you have to actually tilt your head. Broad shoulders, dark hair, a jaw that looked like it had been carved by someone who was in a very serious mood that day. He was maybe thirty, thirty-one. Handsome in a way that was almost annoying — sharp and cold and completely symmetrical, the kind of face that belonged on the cover of a business magazine with a headline like RUTHLESS AND RISING or something equally dramatic.
His eyes were gray.
Not the soft kind of gray. The kind of gray that a sky turns right before a storm decides it's done being patient.
He looked down at his shirt. Then he looked at me.
I waited for the apology.
I'm serious — I genuinely waited for it. Because he had walked into me. I had been standing there, both hands full, clearly visible, and he had come out of wherever he came from without looking and we had collided and that was not my fault. I was prepared to be gracious about it. I was going to say something like "no worries, these things happen" and mean it and move on with my morning.
Instead he said, "Do you have any idea what you just did?"
His voice was low and even. Not shouting. Not panicking. Just — cold. Like the temperature in the lobby had dropped four degrees in the last ten seconds.
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"That shirt." He looked down at it once more, then back at me. "Do you know what that shirt costs?"
Something tightened in my chest. Not embarrassment. Closer to the particular feeling I get when someone who has never struggled a day in their life decides to speak to me like I am the inconvenience in the situation.
"With respect," I said carefully, "you walked into me."
A muscle moved in his jaw. "Excuse me?"
"I was standing right here. Both hands full. You came from the left and you weren't looking where you were going." I kept my voice level. I'm good at keeping my voice level. I've had a lot of practice. "I'm sorry about the shirt. But the collision wasn't my fault."
The lobby had gotten quieter around us. Not silent — Harrington Tower is never silent — but the immediate radius had definitely taken notice. I saw a woman near the front desk look up from her computer. A security guard shifted slightly.
The man in the stained shirt looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that was clearly meant to make me feel small. It probably worked on most people.
"Do you know who I am?" he said.
I looked at him. "Should I?"
Something moved in his expression. I couldn't tell you what. It was gone too fast.
"My name is Adrian Voss." He said it the way people say things they expect to land like thunder.
It did land. I knew the name. Voss Industries was on literally half the buildings in this part of the city. I had delivered to his company before. I knew he was rich. I knew he was powerful. I knew all of that.
I said, "Okay."
That was apparently the wrong answer.
His name, as I found out in the next ten minutes whether I wanted to or not, was Adrian Voss, and he was the CEO of Voss Industries, and the shirt I had ruined — that he had walked into me and ruined, but we were apparently not revisiting that — was a custom-made Italian dress shirt that cost, according to the man himself, eight hundred dollars.
Eight hundred dollars. For a shirt.
I did the math on what I made per hour and stopped doing the math because it was making me feel ill.
He had produced a phone from somewhere — summoned an assistant, a sharp-faced woman named Clara who appeared beside him like she had been waiting just off-stage — and the two of them had a brief, quiet conversation while I stood there holding my demolished coffee carrier and trying to decide whether this was actually happening.
Then he turned back to me.
"Eight thousand dollars," he said.
I stared at him. "I'm sorry — what?"
"The shirt. The dry cleaning. The coffee that was supposed to be delivered to my meeting which will now be delayed. The time this has cost me this morning." He looked at me with those storm-colored eyes completely flat. "Eight thousand dollars."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. It came out before I could stop it — a short, sharp, disbelieving laugh. "Eight thousand dollars."
"Is something funny?"
"Sir, I make eleven dollars an hour."
"That's not my problem."
I looked at this man. This tall, cold, impeccably dressed man standing in the lobby of his own building with coffee on his shirt, telling me with a completely straight face that I owed him eight thousand dollars.
"I'm not paying you eight thousand dollars," I said.
"Then we can discuss this with my legal team." He turned slightly, as if the matter was decided.
"For a coffee spill."
He stopped. Turned back. "For a ruined shirt, a disrupted morning, and a delayed client meeting worth considerably more than eight thousand dollars. You're getting the charitable version."
I stared at him. He stared back. Neither of us moved.
And I don't know what it was — the morning, the cold shower, the eleven-dollar-an-hour math I had just done in my head, the way he was looking at me like I was a problem to be solved rather than a person standing in front of him — but something in me went very, very still.
"I'm not intimidated by you," I said quietly.
Something shifted in those gray eyes. Just barely.
"You should be," he said.
I was twenty-three minutes late completing my morning route.
I thought about the interaction the entire time. I thought about it while I dropped off the remaining packages. I thought about it on the subway back to the depot. I thought about it while I filed my incomplete delivery report and explained to my supervisor Derek — who was a decent man but had the stress tolerance of a medium-sized chihuahua — why the Voss Industries order had been compromised.
Derek went pale when I told him which building.
"Voss Industries," he repeated.
"The coffee spilled. It wasn't—"
"Lena." Derek sat down. "Adrian Voss is one of the most powerful men in this city. If he decides to make a complaint against this company—"
"He walked into me, Derek."
"That doesn't matter."
"It absolutely matters—"
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number. I almost ignored it. Something made me pick up.
"Miss Carter." The voice was not Adrian Voss — too polished, too carefully neutral. A lawyer's voice. "My name is James Holt. I represent Mr. Adrian Voss. We'd like to discuss a settlement arrangement for the incident this morning."
I closed my eyes.
Then I opened them.
"I'm listening," I said.
I should not have listened. I should have hung up and gone home and eaten whatever I had in the fridge and gone to bed and woken up tomorrow and let the whole thing go.
But I listened.
And that was how three months of my life stopped belonging to me.
The meeting was set for four o'clock.I told myself I would stay calm.I was wrong about that too.