3. Roman
ROMAN
H er voice hits different tonight.
I’ve listened to thousands of internal files. Voice memos. Recorded calls. Pitches. Whining complaints from mid-level execs trying to scrape attention like pigeons at my feet. I tune them out in seconds. Not even, if I’m being honest.
But Ivy?
I rewind.
Hit play again.
Over and over.
Just to listen to the soft cadence in her tone.
“Maybe I just want proof I existed. That I said something. That I didn’t just disappear one day without leaving a mark. But who am I kidding? No one will ever miss me.”
I pause it. Thumb hovering over the screen. Just sitting there with her voice echoing in my head like a goddamn pulse I can’t get rid of. Not that I want to.
That’s not a work memo. That’s not a report. That’s a confession. And the acknowledgement that she’s a ghost in this world. This is her secret.
And I shouldn’t have access to it.
But I do.
There’s nothing about Ivy’s life that I don’t have access to.
Not anymore.
I’m sitting alone in my private lounge at the penthouse suite in Florida with lights off and the city glowing like a corrupted motherboard through the floor-to-ceiling windows surrounding me. The glass reflects my own silhouette, but I’m not looking at me.
I’m staring at her.
Ivy.
Mine.
She doesn’t know I exist. Not yet. And that’s the part I like most. There’s no performance in her voice. No polish. No bullshit. Just raw, tired honesty—threadbare but still somehow standing.
She’s better than this.
Better than her job, her building, her entire fucking reality.
I can’t wait to fix everything for her.
But she’s still in it. Still choking down the corporate poison I built to make weaker people feel important. She doesn’t complain the way others do. She files escalations that make sense. Concise. Sharp.
She fixes problems no one else even notices.
And she doesn’t ask for anything.
I tap the audio file again and close my eyes. Let her voice wrap around me like smoke fanned from a flame of my obsession.
“…maybe I just want proof I existed…”
She’s trying to stay afloat in a world designed to drown her.
That’s not acceptable.
Not anymore.
Her willingness to take what’s given to her, without trying to take more…that’s what breaks me. What what tips the scales in my growing obsession
I’m not just going to watch her.
I’m not going to sit by and watch this world tear the last remnants of happiness from the amber-colored eyes I found in the file Asher gave to me when we landed in Florida.
I open her employee record and pull up her logged hours, call history, submitted tickets, and escalation reports. I devour every byte of it. She’s not part of the visible workforce. No commendations. No internal praise. But every fucking fix she logs is flawless.
She’s a goddamn ghost holding the company together from the shadows.
And no one’s looking.
Except me.
I lean back and exhale slowly. My pulse is steady. Controlled. But there’s an itch crawling beneath my skin again—familiar now. It means I’m about to do something irrational.
Or something brilliant.
Same difference.
I tilt my head, still listening to the soft cadence of her voice as the note ends once again. I don’t even remember hitting Replay.
She’s mine.
She just doesn’t know it yet.
But as I access her computer remotely, I start to plan.
I watch the blue light from her monitor flicker across her face when I activate the shitty built-in camera that comes standard in all company laptops.
She’s back at her makeshift desk, sipping from a mug that’s probably cheap and filled with bitter tasting coffee, eyes scanning lines of code like they’re something sacred.
She doesn’t blink often. Doesn’t fidget.
Just breathes in that quiet, measured way that tells me she’s lived through worse than a broken patch or a snapped login chain. Calm in the middle of chaos.
The city outside her window is rotting and decrepit, barely a blip on the skyline. The walls of her apartment are thin. The pipes knock every time the neighbors flush.
She deserves more.
Soon.
I can almost taste her surrender when I finally take what’s mine.
I pull my laptop into my lap and open the internal request system.
“Asher,” I say, not bothering to check if he’s still nearby. He always is.
“Sir?”
“I want a high-tier system sent to her apartment. Touchscreen, full optimization. Our best machine.” I’m already making mental plans for her to take her place at my side.
It may take her a minute to accept it, but she will.
Just like everything else I give her.
“For her?” He doesn’t sound skeptical—just confirming. Always efficient.
“Yes.”
I type the order myself, routing it through a shell incentive program I spin up in forty seconds. “Call it... accelerated resource reassignment. Tell her she’s being rewarded for problem resolution rates. Make it sound official. Bury it in the HR stream.”
“Understood.”
“And Asher?” I glance up at him. “Include monitoring.”
He nods once. No hesitation.
The system will give me access to usage logs, keystroke analytics, audio.
Video. If she disables it, I’ll know. If she doesn’t read the terms like most people don’t then I’ll have full, unrestricted access to every single thing she does.
And she’ll have allowed it, all without me having to hack a computer in my own system.
She won’t see it coming.
I flick back to her file. Her most recent complaints have already been buried by lazy supervisors and underpaid interns. I delete the originals and the logs that prove they ever existed. Then I create a new department, assign it a fake extension, and route her HR profile there.
From now on, everything that touches her from her pay, shifts in her schedule, internal communication—will come through me. I’ll be her own personal assistant.
I adjust her hours again. Just a nudge in the right direction.
She won’t know it yet, but I’ve already started controlling the flow of her life.
She’ll feel it, though.
The silence between her and her managers will stretch wider.
Her inbox will grow quieter.
Her assignments will grow fewer—but better.
More tailored.
More... mine.
She’ll wonder what changed. What she did wrong.
But she won’t complain.
Won’t understand.
She won’t suspect me.
Not yet.
But one day she’ll look back and realize— this is when it started.
This moment. This breath. This fucking second.
This is when I decided she doesn’t belong to anyone else. And I don’t care if it makes me a monster. I can’t give her the option to accept it. To learn about it.
When we finally get back to the city two days later, I relish the fact that she’s almost close enough to touch.
Soon.
The flaws in my supposedly flawless system.
My boardroom smells like money and fear when Asher and I walk into the room for the meeting I demanded after reading over Ivy’s files.
Ten executives. Two analysts. One outside consultant who already knows he’s about to lose his contract. They’re all staring at the digital wall display, trying to make sense of the predictive drop in user engagement and the rise in complaints.
I lean back in my chair, silent.
Asher’s seated at my right, tapping notes into a tablet, watching them sweat with a smirk pulling up one side of his mouth like this is all entertainment for him.
For both of us, really.
The consultant clears his throat. “The dip is temporary, we believe. Part of the adjustment curve as we shift to the new framework?—”
“It’s not,” I cut him off without looking at him.
Everyone goes still in the already silent room.
Perfect.
I finally lift my eyes from the second screen resting on my lap—the one showing a mirror Ivy’s desktop. She’s poking through a hidden directory I left in the new system, one she wasn’t supposed to find yet. Of course she found it.
She always seems to find the cracks. I’m not even watching her face and my dick is hard as steel. Just her keystrokes turn me on. Embracing the pain, because there’s no way in hell I’m about to adjust myself in a room full of these assholes, I turn my attention away from Ivy.
“You’re basing your projections on incomplete behavioral models,” I say to the consultant. “Your heatmap analysis is outdated, and your interface assumptions are wrong.”
He blinks, clearly caught like a deer in headlights. “With respect?—”
“No,” I cut him off once more. “You don’t have my respect. You have three minutes to walk out of this room and off this floor before I blacklist your firm from every vendor list I control. You’re lying to my face when accepting there’s an issue would have saved the contract.”
He pales. Scrambles for his briefcase. No one makes a sound as the door hisses closed behind him.
Asher speaks up, smooth as ever. “Do you want us to reroute the design contract?”
“Yes. Pull the sandbox team. Use the Phoenix prototype, the last one I buried.”
There’s a collective shift of unease at the table.
But Asher is the only one to question me, as always. Proving once again why he’s just as rich as I am, and only working with me because he enjoys it. “That model was?—”
“Too advanced for the market then. It’s not now.” I close the second screen and rest my forearms on the table, finally giving them my full attention.
Sort of.
“Realign the launch window. Give me early access to user test streams. And find me someone who can actually write clean backend code—without needing their hand held.”
I let the sentence hang there.
Neither of us speaks Ivy’s name.
But I think it.
Because she would never waste time asking for help. She’d figure it out, tear it apart, rebuild it better—and then apologize for being too efficient.
I can almost see it happening.
I want to see her do it with everything.
My business.
My systems.
Me.
One of the execs clears his throat. “Will you be reviewing the contract renewals this quarter?”
“No,” I say, standing. “You are.”
He opens his mouth to respond, but I’m already gone, my phone in my hand as I shoot a text to Paul. Asher moves silently on my heels.
Roman: I’m taking the car out alone. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Paul: Yes, sir.
“Watch them.” I tell Asher needlessly. “I don’t trust any of them. Not when she was able to uncover the stupidity without even trying. With Ruby’s bullshit trying to fuck with the business deal there, and now this… I don’t want any surprises.”
“Done.” Asher leaves me in the parking garage, returning to the offices to work even longer into the night. But I’m not stupid. I know he’s got his own games to play tonight.
I’ve got better things to spend my time on.
Like her.
I don’t use the GPS. I don’t need to.
I memorized Ivy’s address the first time I opened her profile.
I didn’t even mean to. Just saw it and didn’t forget. That’s how my brain works when something matters. How I knew that she matters.
The city changes as I drive. High-rises fall away, replaced by cracked brick, sagging gutters, rusted fences. Neon turns to flickering streetlamps. Every block is a little darker than the one before it.
It’s not the kind of place you live in, thrive in, or build a family in. It’s the kind you survive.
I slow when I hit her street. It’s quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes you listen harder, waiting for the wrong kind of noise.
There’s a corner bodega with the lights off and bars on the windows. A pile of trash bags that’s been sitting too long. A woman curled under a tattered blanket near a broken bus stop.
And then—there. Her building.
Three stories of chipped paint and exhaustion.
I park across the street and sit in the shadows, engine off, lights out. No one looks at me. No one pays attention to anything here. That’s the way people in this place stays safe. By pretending they’re invisible. That’s how she’s survived here.
My eyes scan the windows until I find hers.
Third floor. Single curtain drawn over one half. Light leaking through just enough to silhouette the outline of her monitor. She’s in there.
Alone.
Always alone.
And yet she keeps going. Keeps helping strangers. Keeps fixing things that no one thanks her for.
She’s stronger than anyone I know.
And she’s wasting away here. Soon, there will be nothing left of her. Or, there wouldn’t be, if I wasn’t already making moves.
It’s unacceptable, really. Letting her rot in this crumbling corner of the city like she doesn’t matter. Like her mind isn’t gold. Like her voice doesn’t hit like a slow-burning drug I’ll never be able to quit.
I don’t get out of my car.
Not tonight.
Because the second I see her face in person, I might not be able to walk away.
And neither of us is ready for that.
Not yet.
Soon.
It’s become my mantra when it comes to her. A promise that I’m going to keep. Soon, she’ll be mine. Soon, she’ll see the world she was born to rule. Soon, she’ll understand the power I am going to give her.
Soon.