Chapter 4
THRALL
The moment I set her down, I take three deliberate steps backward and focus on a fixed point somewhere above the treeline, a technique I developed in boardrooms when someone presents data so catastrophically wrong it triggers genuine homicidal ideation.
It works in boardrooms. It does not work here, because the problem isn't a badly formatted spreadsheet.
The problem is that Romee Lin weighs approximately nothing and fits against my palms like she was architecturally designed to rest there, and my hands still remember the exact shape of her.
My Orc instincts are not subtle things. They don't whisper politely from the back of my mind or present themselves as passing suggestions I can file away for later consideration.
They are loud, blunt, and completely indifferent to context, which means standing on a sunlit lawn surrounded by my own executives, I am fighting the very specific urge to put her back where she was and keep her there.
She smells like bergamot and something green and sharp, a clean citrus bite that cuts straight through the ozone of my own scent the moment I get close to her, and the fact that I can still detect faint traces of it on my palms is both biologically fascinating and professionally catastrophic.
"Alright," I announce, to no one in particular, already untying the fabric connecting my ankle to hers without looking at her face because looking at her face is currently inadvisable. "I need to work. Brogan, you're doing this activity."
"I don't want to do this activity," Brogan says. He's my head of product development and has the spatial awareness of a very large rock.
"Irrelevant. Do it anyway."
I walk back to the main lodge without waiting for anyone to respond, because I'm the CEO and I don't require permission to leave a three-legged race, regardless of what the laminated itinerary says about scheduled participation windows.
My private cabin is at the north end of the resort property, a deliberate choice I made before we arrived after reviewing the floor plans and identifying the maximum possible distance from the communal areas.
It has a proper desk, a decent ethernet connection, and enough square footage that I don't spend the entire time trying to fold my knees under furniture built for beings two-thirds my size.
I drop into the chair, open my laptop, pull up the current sprint backlog for the Horde Tech Q3 integration, and stare at it.
I gaze at it for four minutes without reading a single line.
The citrus scent is still on my palms.
I get up and wash my hands. Twice. Use the cedar soap from the basket of complimentary toiletries, which is aggressive enough to strip most things.
I sit back down. I read the first line of the sprint backlog.
I read it again. The words are in the correct order and they still mean nothing to me because somewhere between the words "endpoint" and "migration," my memory surfaces a very specific sensory detail, which is the precise way she gasped when I lifted her, this tiny, involuntary sound that she immediately tried to smother with indignation, and how her eyes went wide and dark before she remembered to look furious.
I close the sprint backlog.
The rational decision, the one that aligns with the five-year plan and the liability structure of my company and the basic professional boundaries I have maintained without issue for eleven years of running Horde Tech, is to find a concrete administrative reason to have Romee Lin reassigned.
Not fired, because that creates an HR event, but reassigned.
Another coordinator. Someone with less citrus and more generic corporate pleasantness.
I pull up the contract our HR director signed with her agency, Pinnacle Events, and start reading it with the specific goal of locating a breach of conduct clause.
I don't find a breach of conduct clause.
What I find instead is that the contract lists her as the account lead, names her specifically by name, and includes a performance addendum attached to the resort's overall satisfaction rating, which means if the retreat goes badly, the financial penalty comes directly out of her commission.
This is a detail I file away without particular interest and keep reading.
Then I pull her employee profile from the shared documents folder her agency sent across during the planning phase, because it's there and I am thorough, and I read it the same way I read acquisition targets, looking for weaknesses.
What I find instead is a pattern.
She's been the account lead on every major Pinnacle Events project for the last three years.
The downtown corporate gala in February.
The Mercer Industries product launch. The charity benefit for the Children's Hospital that got written up in three different industry publications.
All of them listed under the agency name.
All of them credited to the agency director, a man named Richard Hartwell, in the press releases and the award submissions.
There are internal planning documents included in the file, the kind HR makes you upload to the cloud for performance reviews, and I can see her fingerprints on every single one of them, specific phrasing and structural choices that are consistent across documents and completely inconsistent with anything Richard Hartwell's name has ever been attached to independently.
His solo projects are generic. Forgettable.
The kind of corporate event planning that mistakes expensive catering for actual experience design.
I lean back in my chair and think about this for a moment.
Then I find the most recent email chain in the folder, the one from three weeks before this retreat, and I read it with the particular focus I usually reserve for contracts that smell wrong.
It takes me approximately ninety seconds to confirm that Richard Hartwell has been presenting her concepts to clients under his own name, has been using her dependency on this specific retreat's success to keep her compliant, and sent her a personal email last Tuesday that uses the phrase "your continued employment" in a context that is not ambiguous about what it's doing.
"Blackmail," I say out loud, to my empty cabin. "That's just blackmail."
It's a clumsy version of it, the kind that relies on someone being too invested in the outcome to call the bluff.
And she is invested. That's obvious. The color-coded itinerary was not the work of someone coasting on someone else's professional safety net.
That was someone building a case for themselves with no margin for error, which means she already knows she's in a precarious position and she's been trying to outperform it.
I close the laptop and stand up.
The practical decision now is clearly to find her and discuss her employment situation, because I've just identified a material misrepresentation in the professional credentials of the agency Horde Tech has contracted for this event, and that affects the company.
It has nothing to do with the citrus smell or the way she said please with her voice doing something soft and involuntary at the edges. It's purely a business matter.
I grab my jacket, mostly because the afternoon is cooling, and head toward the lake.
The resort property is irritatingly picturesque, the kind of deliberate natural arrangement that costs someone a significant amount of money to make it look like it happened by accident.
Pine trees, a gravel path, a wooden dock extending over water that's currently reflecting the late afternoon sky in shades of copper and grey.
I can see the kayak storage area from the main path, a row of brightly coloured fiberglass hulls stacked in a wooden rack near the water's edge, with a laminated chart attached to the fence that I'm confident Romee Lin made herself.
I can also see two people near the treeline at the kayak area, and I stop walking.
She's backed against a pine tree, one hand gripping the clipboard at her side with her knuckles pale, and the man standing in front of her is not one of mine.
He's human, medium build, wearing a resort polo that marks him as affiliated with one of the other corporate groups using the property this weekend.
He's standing so close she'd have to push him to create space, and his body language is the specific posture of someone who has decided that refusal is merely a negotiating position.
Her chin is up and her jaw is set and she is absolutely maintaining composure through pure force of will, but her free hand has found the back of the tree and is pressing flat against the bark like she's using it to anchor herself.
He says something that makes her expression sharpen with revulsion, and she turns her face slightly away from him in a clear and readable signal that he ignores completely.
Every rational, modern, professionally appropriate instinct I have developed over eleven years of corporate life goes quiet.
What is left is significantly older and considerably less interested in nuance.
The gravel path crunches under my boots as I close the distance, and I don't bother moderating my stride or my weight or the sound of my approach because I want him to hear me coming.
He turns before I reach them, which is the correct survival response, as he processes my size with the specific sequence of recognition that moves through people who've never been in a room with an Orc before.
His face goes from startled to recalibrating to something attempting to be casual and landing considerably short.
I stop directly behind Romee, she'd only need to take a small step back to be against me, and I look at the man over her head with the expression I use for board members who waste my time.
"Who are you," I say. It isn't a question.
"Dale Delray," he says, and straightens up with the posture of someone trying to recover ground. "I'm with Vandermeer Capital, we're—"
"I didn't ask who you work for." My voice has dropped into a register that empties rooms in my office. "I asked who you are. And why you're standing that close to my event coordinator."
The words come out with a possessive weight I didn't entirely intend but don't bother walking back, because the intention behind them is clear and accurate and he needs to understand it.
Dale Delray looks at Romee, then back up at me, and something in the overall geometry of the situation finishes calculating for him.
"We were just talking," he says.
"You were just talking," I repeat, and let the silence after it do the work. I've found that silence does a significant amount of work when you're my size and someone already knows they're wrong. "Then you're done."
He looks at me for another moment. Then he puts his hands in his pockets with the specific body language of someone choosing a graceful exit over a principled stand, nods once in a way that commits to nothing, and walks back up the path toward the main lodge without looking back.
I watch him until the path curves and he's gone from sightline.
Then I look down.
Romee has turned around to face me, clipboard still in a white-knuckled grip, and she is looking up at me.
"I had that handled," she says, and her voice is steady and sharp, which is a better performance than most people could manage right now.
"I know," I say, because she did. She was handling it.
The tree at her back was a tactical choice, I recognized it, she'd reduced the angles he could approach from and was managing the situation with the resources available to her, which were limited and didn't include, for example, being six-foot-ten. "I handled it faster."
Her jaw works slightly. "You can't just loom at people until they leave."
"I wasn't looming. I was standing. The looming is incidental."
She exhales through her nose, this short sharp breath that's fighting a laugh she clearly doesn't want to give me, and drops her gaze to the clipboard for a moment while she reassembles the professional composure the last ten minutes have been steadily dismantling.
She does it. She's efficient about it, the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her chin, the click of a pen she picks up from the clipboard clip and holds like a prop that helps her feel organised.
"Thank you," she says finally, and it costs her something to say it plainly without the defensive wrapper, I can tell by the small compression of her mouth around the words.
"I need to talk to you," I say, and the words come out more heavily than I intended, weighted with the thing I've been turning over in my mind since the moment I watched her handle that situation with nothing but tactical thinking and extreme will.
She looks up from her clipboard, her dark eyes sharpening with the particular attentiveness she reserves for potential logistical crises.
"If this is about reassigning the afternoon kayak slots, I already told Brogan that the rotation is locked and we're not shuffling the teams around just because the marketing department thinks they need a competitive advantage—"
"It's not about the kayaks," I interrupt, as the shift happens in real time.
Her shoulders tense slightly, the professional mask she's been carefully reconstructing tilts at an angle that suggests she's recalibrating, reassessing what this conversation might actually be about.
Something shifts in her expression, a subtle wariness that flickers across her features like shadow moving through water, present enough that I catch it, guarded enough that she clearly doesn't want me to.
She sets the clipboard down with deliberate care, as though she's placing a weapon on neutral ground, and waits.
The lake catches the last copper light behind her, and I'm standing in the shadow of the pines with the citrus scent back in range and the memory of her weight in my hands refreshed and updated by the last four minutes, and I am beginning to suspect that the rational, professional conversation I've planned is going to be considerably more complicated to deliver than I anticipated.
"It's about your agency," I say, and watch her face do something she doesn't mean to let it do.
"What about my agency," she says, and her voice is perfectly level, which is how I know she already knows what I found.