Chapter 341
She didn’t wait for the servers. She picked up the heavy silver platter herself, the rich creamy sauce wobbling with the movement, and walked out of the conference room, down the short hallway, to the large industrial trash bin near the freight elevator.
Belle ran after her. “Stop! Isolde!”
Isolde tilted the platter.
Slop. Crash.
The lobster, the sauce, the garnish — all of it slid into the garbage, landing on a bed of shredded paper and coffee grounds. The sound was wet and final.
The entire office went silent. Even the air conditioning seemed to stop.
Belle stared into the bin as though she had just witnessed a murder.
о𝘳𝗀а𝗻i𝘇𝖾 𝘺о𝘶𝗿 𝗹і𝖻r𝘢𝗿𝘆 𝗈𝗇 ga𝗅𝘯o𝗏e𝘭𝘀.с𝘰𝘮
“You are insane,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “I’m telling Gray. You’re a monster!”
Isolde wiped her hands on a napkin from the cart.
“Tell him,” she said calmly. “Tell him I don’t allow pests in the office. That includes vermin and vanity lunches.”
She turned her back on Belle and faced the stunned engineering team.
“Grab your coats,” she announced. “We’re going out.”
Dave, the lead engineer, blinked. “Where? We have a deadline on the compression code.”
“The deadline can wait an hour,” Isolde said. She looked at the team — the people who actually did the work, the people Grayson had always ignored. “My treat. Real food. Not status symbols.”
She led them to the elevators, leaving Belle alone in the hallway with the smell of garbage and expensive sauce.
The cafeteria downstairs was noisy, bustling, and reassuringly normal. It smelled of grease and sanitizer.
Isolde bought burgers, fries, and shakes for everyone, then sat at a long table with the junior developers.
“How is the compression algorithm coming?” she asked, dipping a fry in ketchup.
The team exchanged glances, visibly surprised. Belle had never asked about the work. She only ever asked whether the lighting made her look pale.
Sarah, a junior developer, hesitated. “It’s lagging. The Python script is clunky. We can’t get the load time under three seconds.”
Isolde reached into her pocket for a pen and grabbed a paper napkin from the dispenser.
“You’re using a nested loop, aren’t you?” she asked, sketching a quick diagram of the code structure.
Sarah nodded. “Yeah.”
“Try this instead.” Isolde drew a different logic path. “Route the data through a hash map before the sort function.”
Sarah traced the lines on the napkin with her fingertip. Her eyes widened.
“That reduces the load by forty percent,” she said, looking up at Isolde. “It bypasses the bottleneck entirely.” She paused. “Where did you learn this? I thought you were in admin.”
Isolde smiled and took a bite of her burger. “I read a lot. Let’s keep this particular breakthrough in-house for now, though. We don’t want competitors catching wind of our new methods.”
The team exchanged looks. The respect in their eyes had shifted into something more considered, more genuine.
Forty minutes later, back upstairs, Isolde found Belle in the hallway — not working, but crying into her phone.
“She threw the lobster in the trash, Daron! She’s a monster! I’m starving!”
Isolde walked past her and tapped the edge of Belle’s desk.
“Lunch is over,” she said. “Where are the files?”
.