Chapter 5
Anna
I walked into Hunter Interactive on Monday morning like I was attending my own execution.
The building looked different when you entered it expecting to leave.
More intimidating. The lobby was all polished concrete and glass, with massive screens cycling through trailers for Hunter Interactive’s latest titles.
A character from their flagship franchise, some armored warrior mid-leap, frozen on a sixty-inch display like she was judging everyone who walked past. The security guard nodded at me.
I nodded back. At least someone in this building acknowledged my existence without hostility.
Miles was waiting by the elevators, looking like a man who’d been expecting me and had prepared remarks.
"Before you say anything," he started.
"I’m just here to get my stuff."
"You’re not getting your stuff."
"Miles, he fired me. I think that’s pretty final."
"It’s not final." He pushed off the wall and fell into step beside me. "Trust me. I’ll talk to Jace,"
The rest of the elevator ride was silent.
I stared at our reflections in the metal doors.
I looked like I hadn’t slept for two days, which was accurate, because I hadn’t.
Not really. I’d spent the rest of the weekend replaying the club scene on a loop, each replay more humiliating than the last, my brain helpfully adding details I’d missed in real time.
The way his face looked when I cupped my own chest. The exact pitch of my voice when I told him his ego was a city.
The sound of my vomit hitting custom tailoring.
The doors opened to the executive floor. And there he was.
Jace Hunter, standing in the corridor outside his office like he'd been summoned by the specific frequency of my bad luck, looking exactly as he always did—as if disorder was something that happened to other people. His office door was open behind him, and I could see the interior from here.
Every surface, every angle, exactly where it had been on my last day.
Monitors glowing with dashboards I couldn't read from this distance.
Nothing had shifted. Nothing ever did in that room, except the Rubik's cube on the corner of the desk—the only object that looked like it belonged to a person rather than a corporation.
He looked at me the way you’d look at a stain you thought you’d cleaned but that kept reappearing.
"I thought I was clear," he said, voice cool, stripped of anything resembling patience.
"Crystal clear," I replied. "I’m here to pack my things. You don’t have to worry about sharing air with me for much longer."
"Then pack quickly," he cut in.
"You don’t have to be rude about it," I shot back.
"I’m not being rude," he said flatly. "I’m being efficient."
"Those are the same thing when you do them," I muttered.
Miles stepped between us, holding up both hands.
"Okay. Both of you. Breathe." He looked at Jace. "She’s not leaving."
Jace’s eyes moved to his brother. "Excuse me?"
"The contract." Miles reached into his bag and pulled out a folder.
He held it up like a lawyer presenting exhibit A, which, given that he was a PR executive and not a lawyer, was either impressive or deeply calculated.
Probably both. "Three-month probation clause.
Termination during the probation period requires documented cause, reviewed by HR and approved by legal.
A verbal firing in a nightclub corridor at midnight does not meet the threshold. "
I stared at Miles. "You put that in the contract?"
"I draft all executive employment agreements. It’s standard language." He said it with a straight face, but his eyes were doing that thing where they looked just a little too pleased with themselves.
Jace took the folder. Opened it. His eyes cut down the page. His expression didn't change, but I watched his grip on the paper tighten until the edges bent inward.
"You engineered this," he said to Miles.
"I followed company policy."
"You wrote the company policy."
"Which is why it's so well written." Miles smiled—slow, wide, every tooth on full display and aimed directly at his brother.
"You can involve legal if you want. But the process takes weeks, generates questions from the board, pulls focus from the Meridian launch, and in the meantime, she stays.
So maybe we skip the part where you make this harder than it needs to be. "
Meridian. I'd seen the name on documents during my first week.
Hunter Interactive's biggest upcoming release, an open-world RPG that the gaming press had been losing their minds over for two years—a title that could make or break a studio's decade, and one a CEO couldn't afford to be distracted from by a legal dispute over a nightclub firing.
Miles knew exactly what card he was playing.
Jace looked at the contract, then at us. I could see him running calculations behind those gray eyes, searching for the exit in a room his brother had carefully designed to have none.
Then he turned to me.
"The suit," he said.
"What about it?"
"You destroyed a twelve-thousand-dollar suit. You owe me twelve thousand dollars."
The number landed like a punch. Twelve thousand. That was more than I’d made at the diner. That was more than I’d arrived in Miami with. That was a number designed to make me fold.
I didn’t flinch.
"Fine," I said. "I’ll pay you back."
"In full."
"In installments. Monthly." I held his gaze. "Unless you’d prefer a kidney. I’ve got two, and at this rate, I’m not using them both."
He didn’t respond right away, which was new. I’d been bracing for another ice-cold dismissal, but instead he just looked at me, like he was recalculating and the math wasn’t adding up the way he wanted.
"Should I set up a formal arrangement?" I continued. "Get it notarized? You probably have twelve lawyers. Should I borrow one?"
He stared at me for a long beat. Then, barely audible, more to himself than to anyone in the room: "Why is she so impossibly hard to get rid of."
He turned. Walked into his office. The door closed behind him with a click that sounded very much like a man who’d run out of ammunition.
Miles exhaled. "That went better than I expected."
"Better? He just charged me twelve thousand dollars for a suit I ruined with cocktail vomit."
"But you still have a job." He patted my shoulder. "Perspective. Don’t worry about the suit, I’m going to—"
"I’ll pay for the suit myself. Don’t offer."
"I wasn’t going to."
"You were. I interrupted you."
He sighed. Rubbed the back of his neck. His usual easy charm dimmed for a second.
"He's not always like this," Miles said.
He caught my expression and reconsidered.
"Okay. He's mostly like this. But underneath the ice and the sanitizer and the emotional availability of a filing cabinet, he's—" He stopped.
His eyes drifted toward the closed door, then came back to me.
"We're worried about him, Anna. Our family.
He doesn't have anyone outside of us, and even with us he keeps everyone at arm's length. "
He was quiet for a moment. I didn't fill it.
"I'm not asking you to fix him. I'm just asking you to not give up on the job because he makes it difficult."
Worried. That word stayed with me all day.
I spent the morning learning the systems I could access from my own computer.
His filing was organized with a precision that felt almost religious.
Every folder labeled in his handwriting, neat capital letters, no shortcuts.
Every document dated. His calendar was blocked in fifteen-minute increments, color-coded: green for internal meetings, blue for external, red for calls, gray for blocks labeled "non-negotiable personal" every Thursday from two to four.
I didn’t ask about those. I had a feeling I already knew.
During lunch, I took a chance to visit the game development floor, which buzzed with a different energy entirely.
"You’re the new assistant, right?" A woman with short hair and a pixelated dragon on her tee stopped next to me, coffee in hand. "I’m Priya. Art department. Welcome to the madhouse."
"Anna." I smiled. "Is it always this intense?"
"This is a slow day." She grinned. "Wait till we’re three weeks from a launch. People sleep under their desks. Literally. There are blankets." She nodded toward Jace’s floor. "How’s the boss?"
"Still alive. So am I. I’m counting that as a win."
She laughed. "You’ll fit in fine."
Through the glass walls, I could see concept artists at dual-monitor setups, sketching character designs that looked half-finished and entirely beautiful.
Programmers hunched over code, headphones on, the universal sign for don’t talk to me.
A testing room in the corner where someone was playing through what looked like a boss fight, dying repeatedly and taking notes between each attempt.
The walls were covered in framed artwork from past titles, and a glass case near the elevator held awards.
Golden joysticks, BAFTA Games nominations, a D.I.C.E. trophy.
This was what Jace Hunter had built—this entire floor of creativity and precision and obsessive attention to detail. It was his.
Jace’s office stayed closed all day. Emails came. Bullet points. Instructions without greetings or sign-offs. I did what was asked, filed what needed filing, answered the calls he rerouted to my desk, and didn’t knock on his door.
But at the end of the day, when the floor had emptied and the cleaning crew started their rounds, I saw him.
He was standing by the elevator bank, alone.
He'd put on gloves. Thin, dark leather, pulled on with the care of someone performing a ritual, each finger tugged into place, the leather smoothed over his wrists.
Then the hand sanitizer came out. Applied over the gloves—which made no practical sense.
But he worked it into the leather anyway, finger by finger, thorough and unhurried, his eyes never lifting from his own hands.
I watched him for longer than I meant to.
A group of employees rounded the corner, laughing about something. Jace stepped to the side. A full-body flinch that put three extra feet between him and the nearest person. His shoulders drew up. His chin dropped. And for one second, before the mask slid back into place, I saw it.
Was his aversion to people not just ego—not just his world being too big for everyone else?
I’d thought he hated me particularly. Now it looked like he hated everyone equally. I was more than curious. A bad habit I never dropped.
The elevator arrived, and he stepped in alone as the doors closed. The floor went quiet.
That night, on Miley’s couch, with her twelve-dollar candle burning on the coffee table and a container of leftover Thai from the place on Calle Ocho balanced on my knee, I opened my laptop and typed his name.
Jace Hunter.
The results were business, almost exclusively.
Industry profiles. Keynote speeches at gaming expos.
Interviews about Hunter Interactive’s development philosophy, their proprietary engine, the Meridian launch timeline.
A Forbes feature from three years ago called him "the most private CEO in the gaming industry", which felt like calling the ocean "damp".
No social media. No candid photos. No interviews where he talked about anything other than frame rates and fiscal quarters.
But buried in a lifestyle magazine piece, one of those fluffy articles about executives and their hobbies, I found a detail that stopped me mid-scroll.
He collected orchids. Rare ones. Kept them at his home. The article described it as a "meticulous private collection".
There was a photo of a Dendrobium nobile, petals pale pink and delicate, and a caption that read: Hunter’s collection includes several species considered endangered in their native habitats.
I stared at the screen. He grew flowers?
I kept scrolling. Past the business profiles, past the industry awards, past a photo of him at E3 where he looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on the planet.
And then, in an older archived piece from a wire service, a single line buried in the third paragraph of an article about Hunter Interactive’s founding.
Hunter, whose family relocated him to London following a kidnapping incident, has maintained a notably private personal life.
One line. No details. No follow-up. Just a fact dropped into a sentence like punctuation, like it didn’t rewrite everything.
I closed the laptop. Sat in the dim living room, the candle throwing shadows across the ceiling, the Thai food growing cold on my knee.
"You okay?" Miley asked from the kitchen doorway.
"Yeah." I wasn’t. But explaining meant saying it out loud, and I wasn’t ready for that. "Just thinking."
"About work?"
"About orchids."
She gave me a look. "That’s either very zen or very concerning."
"Probably both."
I went to bed but didn’t sleep right away. I lay in the dark and thought about the space between who someone showed the world and who they were when nobody was watching. About gloves in an elevator, orchids in a private collection, and a Rubik’s cube on the corner of a perfectly organized desk.
I wasn’t going to fix him. Miles didn’t ask me to, and I wouldn’t have agreed if he had. I had enough broken things in my own life without volunteering for someone else’s.
But I could bring him orchids. A peace offering. An apology that didn’t require words, because Jace Hunter clearly wasn’t a man who trusted words.
I needed this job. And if earning a truce with Jace Hunter meant learning his language, I’d learn it—one flower at a time.