Chapter 6 Pauline
Pauline
The news broke on a Monday, spreading through the office like wildfire through dry brush.
California Times had been acquired. Some anonymous billionaire had swept in over the weekend, closed the deal before anyone could blink, and now every single person in the building was losing their collective mind trying to figure out who.
I heard about it the moment I stepped off the elevator. Two women from accounting huddled by the water cooler, voices pitched low but not low enough.
“Hostile takeover,” one whispered.
“I heard it’s someone famous,” the other replied. “Someone controversial.”
“I heard the whole executive team is getting replaced.”
I walked past without slowing down. Speculation was a waste of energy. Whoever bought the company would reveal themselves eventually. Until then, worrying about it wouldn’t change anything. I had work to do, stories to chase, a career to build—assuming I still had a job by the end of the week.
The newsroom buzzed with nervous energy.
Gerald stood in the center of the floor with his face red, barking orders at anyone who made eye contact.
Alice had gathered a cluster of senior reporters near her desk, trading theories like currency.
I caught fragments as I passed: tech mogul, media conglomerate, foreign investor with shadowy connections.
I settled at my desk and pulled up my files.
The new owner didn’t show on Monday. Or Tuesday.
By Wednesday, the mystery had become its own kind of torture.
People jumped every time the elevator dinged, and conversations stopped mid-sentence when unfamiliar footsteps approached.
Gerald’s complexion had progressed from red to purple—a color I was beginning to associate with imminent cardiac events.
I kept my head down and focused on my screen.
Thursday evening, Ethan found me still at my desk, surrounded by folders stacked so high they blocked my view of the window.
“Don’t tell me you’re planning to sleep here.”
I looked up. He was holding two cups of coffee, steam curling from the lids, watching me with an expression caught somewhere between concern and amusement.
“Sleep is for people who aren’t trying to prove themselves to supervisors who hate them,” I said.
He set one of the cups in front of me and pulled a chair over without asking. “What are we working on?”
“We?”
“I’m here. I have coffee. Might as well make myself useful.” He surveyed the chaos on my desk with raised eyebrows. “This is the gang thing Alice gave you?”
“The gang thing Alice dumped on me so she could focus on stealing my leads. Yes.”
“Charming woman.”
“The absolute best.”
We worked in silence for an hour, maybe more, sorting through the mess and organizing by date and location and connection type. He was good at this, I realized. Patient. He didn’t try to fill the quiet with chatter, just worked beside me and occasionally pointed out something I’d missed.
“Here.” He slid a page toward me. “This name appears twice. Different contexts, but look at the dates.”
I looked. He was right. The same name, two separate incidents, three weeks apart. It could be coincidence, or it could be the thread I’d been searching for.
“Ethan.” I stared at the page. “This might actually be something.”
“You’re welcome.” He grinned, leaning back in his chair. “You can buy me dinner sometime. To celebrate. When you crack the story.”
He held my gaze a beat too long, and I felt the weight of it, casual words but was asking me something, and we both knew it.
I should have felt excited. He was kind and funny and present, everything that should have been appealing. But my chest stayed quiet. No flutter, no spark, just a mild warmth that didn’t quite reach anywhere important.
“Maybe,” I said.
He smiled like that was enough.
Friday morning, the energy in the building shifted.
I felt it the moment I stepped off the elevator. People were moving faster, standing straighter. Someone had vacuumed. The executive floor, usually quiet as a library, hummed with activity visible even from three stories below.
He was here. The mysterious new owner had finally decided to grace us with his presence.
Whispers followed me to my desk. Young. Handsome. Currently holding court somewhere upstairs. Half the women in the building had suddenly remembered urgent business on the top floor.
I rolled my eyes and opened my laptop.
Twenty minutes later, Alice appeared at my desk.
She was smiling—not her usual smile, the one that meant she was about to make my life difficult. This was something else, something smug and satisfied that made my stomach tighten with warning.
“You’ve been summoned,” she said.
“Summoned?”
“The new owner wants to see you.” Her eyes glittered with barely contained delight. “Specifically. By name.”
I stared at her. That didn’t make sense. I was a junior reporter, a nobody who fetched coffee and fact-checked other people’s work. New owners didn’t summon nobodies unless those nobodies were about to be unemployed.
“Why?”
“How should I know?” She shrugged, but her smile widened. “I’d hurry if I were you. He didn’t seem like the patient type.”
She walked away before I could ask anything else.
I sat at my desk for a long moment, trying to calm the sudden racing of my heart. This was fine. This was probably nothing. Maybe he was meeting with everyone individually—some kind of orientation.
Or maybe I was about to get fired and should update my resume before walking upstairs.
The elevator ride felt endless. I watched the numbers climb and tried to steady my breathing. My palms were damp, and I wiped them on my skirt and immediately felt ridiculous. Whatever this was, I could handle it. I had handled worse.
The executive floor was all glass and polished surfaces—the kind of aggressive minimalism that screamed money. An assistant sat outside the corner office, perfectly groomed, barely glancing up as I approached.
“Pauline Wells?”
“Yes.”
“Go right in. He’s expecting you.”
The door was heavy. I pushed it open and stepped inside.
The office was enormous, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city and sunlight streaming in so bright I had to squint. A massive desk dominated the space, dark wood and clean lines, positioned to make whoever sat behind it look powerful and intimidating.
The leather chair behind it faced the window. Turned away from me.
“I was told you wanted to see me,” I said to the back of the chair.
The chair spun around slowly.
Jack Specter sat there like he owned the place.
My blood turned to ice. I stood in the doorway of that ridiculous office and stared at him, and nothing—absolutely nothing—in my head made sense anymore.
He looked different here. Sharper, more polished than the man in sweatpants I’d yelled at in a parking lot. He wore a dark suit that fit him like a threat, his hair styled, his jaw clean-shaven.
He looked like what he was: a billionaire who had just bought a major media company and was sitting in his new throne room waiting for the peasants to grovel.
And he was looking at me like he’d been waiting for this exact moment.
“Pauline.” He said my name like he was savoring it, testing the weight of it. “Have a seat.”
I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. My feet were rooted to the expensive carpet and my heart was slamming against my ribs so hard it hurt.
“What are you doing here?” The words came out sharp and accusatory.
“I own the building.” He tilted his head, watching me. “I can be wherever I want.”
“You bought my company?” I shot out, disbelief scraping my voice raw.
“Technically, I bought a company. The fact that you work here is incidental.”
“Incidental. You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to believe whatever you want.” His voice was calm—infuriatingly calm. “You always have.”
I felt something hot and dangerous building in my chest—fury and disbelief and a kind of wild, hysterical urge to scream at the sheer audacity of the man sitting in front of me.
“I already paid you back,” I said. “The car. Every cent. You got your money.”
“I did. Thank you for that.” He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes never left mine. “Though I have to say, draining your savings account over a scratch seemed excessive. I would’ve accepted a payment plan.”
My jaw clenched so hard my teeth ached. “I don’t want your charity.”
“It wouldn’t have been charity. It would have been basic financial sense.”
“I don’t want your financial advice either.”
“What do you want, Pauline?”
“I want to do my job,” I said. “Without games or whatever this is.”
“I wasn’t aware you doing your job precluded me from making business investments.”
“Business investments.” I laughed, bitter. “This is harassment. Stalking. An extremely expensive way to make my life miserable.”
“You think I bought an entire media company to torment you?”
“Did you?”
“That’s quite an ego, Wells.”
“That’s not an answer, Specter.”
I gritted my teeth at the absolute cocky look in his eyes.
“True, I bought this place.” He stood, and suddenly the room felt smaller. He was taking up more space than seemed fair. “But I'm not going to apologize for a business decision that had nothing to do with you.”
He walked toward me. I took a step back without meaning to—and he noticed.
Something flickered in his eyes—amusement, maybe, “This place was undervalued and had potential. The fact that you work here was a bonus.”
“A bonus.”
“An unexpected one.”
“Unexpected? You didn’t know I worked here?”
“I found out after the deal was already in motion.”
“And you didn’t think to mention it? To warn me? To do anything other than summon me to your office like I’m some kind of—”
“What would you have preferred?” He cut me off, moving closer. “A phone call? A text? You’ve made it abundantly clear you don’t want to hear from me. What exactly was I supposed to do?”
“Stay away from me. That’s what you were supposed to do.”
“Hard to do when you work for me now. And now you can’t escape.”
I felt the words land somewhere beneath my ribs, my body tensing into that fight or flight mode.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’ve been running from me for seven years, and I still don’t know why.
” He moved around the desk, closing the distance between us.
“It means you paid me back for a repair bill rather than pick up the phone and have an actual conversation. It means every time I try to talk to you, you act like I’m something you need to escape from. ”
“Maybe that’s because you are.”
“Am I?” He stopped right in front of me, close enough that I could smell him, something familiar that made my chest ache. “What did I do, Pauline? What terrible thing did I do that made you disappear from my life?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It matters to me.”
“It shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s over.” I forced the words out through the tightness in my chest. “Whatever we were, whatever you thought we were—it’s done. It’s been done for seven years. You need to let it go.”
“And if I can’t?”
His eyes were searching my face, looking for something I couldn’t give him, and I felt the pull of it—the gravitational force of Jack Specter, the way he had always made me feel like the center of something even when I knew I wasn’t.
I took another step back. Put distance between us. Made myself breathe.
“That’s not my problem,” I said. “I’m here to work. That’s all. Stay away from me, Jack. I mean it.”
I turned and walked out before he could respond.
My heels clicked against the polished floor—too loud, too fast. I couldn’t slow down. If I stopped, I might turn around. If I turned around, I might say something I couldn’t take back.
The elevator doors opened and I stepped inside and pressed the button for my floor and watched my reflection in the polished metal. I looked pale. Shaken.
Jack Specter owned California Times. Jack Specter was my boss.
I went back to my desk and stared at my computer screen without seeing it. Ethan caught my eye from across the room, concern written all over his face. I shook my head slightly. “It’s fine,” I said, though nothing about me felt fine.
The files from the gang investigation sat in a neat pile where Ethan had organized them. The lead he’d found waited for me to follow it.
I pulled the first folder toward me and started reading.
If Jack Specter wanted to buy companies and play games, that was his problem.
But my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and the words on the page kept blurring, and somewhere in the back of my mind I could still hear his voice asking ‘what did I do’ like he genuinely didn’t know.
Like he had no idea he’d broken my heart.
I lasted approximately ten minutes before I cracked.
I couldn’t stop being restless, so I grabbed my phone and texted my traitorous best friend—the one who had apparently decided that sisterly loyalty now extended to feeding her brother classified information about my whereabouts like some kind of well-meaning double agent.
How could you? You promised!
The message delivered. The little checkmarks appeared. No response.
She wasn’t responding, which meant she had seen it, read it, and was currently hiding behind whatever plausible deniability she thought she had.
I buried my face in my palms.
How was I supposed to survive seeing Jack Specter every single day? How was I supposed to walk into this building and do my job and pretend my heart wasn’t trying to claw its way out of my chest every time I heard his name?
Claudette Specter-Ashford was going to owe me approximately one million apologies and a lifetime supply of wine.
I put my phone away and opened the investigation files again.
Work. I could focus on work. But even as I forced myself to read, I could feel it—that familiar ache in my chest, the one I’d spent seven years trying to bury.
Jack Specter was back in my life.