Chapter 102
Chapter 95: Caught In The Act
Cameron’s POV
Claim
I had been impressed by that and then I had gone further and i asked him how he calibrated that.
He’d said: Whenever I get into that sort of mindset, I ask myself whether more information would actually change the decision, or whether I’m collecting information because the decision is uncomfortable and collecting is easier than committing to it.
I’d hired him the next day.
That was eighteen months ago. In eighteen months, he had become the most effective personal assistant I’d ever had, which was itself a category that contained several highly competent people
that were best at what they do, because I did not hire incompetent people, but he had set a bar so
high that even the highly competent people may struggle to reach. He was organized in the
specific way that suggested his organization wasn’t performing, or showing off to show that he
was good at his work, just for the sake of getting a higher bonus. No, he had the organized version
of someone who found disorder genuinely uncomfortable and had developed systems for preventing it that ran quietly in the background without requiring maintenance.
He anticipated things before I did. That was the part that had caught me first, before anything else -the way he’d identified what I needed before I’d identified it myself, had placed the information on my desk or the coffee on my desk or the postponed meeting in the calendar before I’d gotten to the point of recognizing I needed them and it had been something that kept shocking me, how he
knew me too well to be able to not misstep not even once.
It happened often enough that I’d started paying attention to how it happened, and what I’d found
was that he paid attention with the same quality of attention I’d noticed in myself and rarely saw in other people.
It was, I’d come to understand over eighteen months, the thing I found most-
I stopped that sentence before it finished.
The car pulled up outside the Preston Investments Pacific building, glass and steel in the Seattle rain, the upper floors lit with the after-hours glow of a company that ran across multiple time zones and therefore never entirely shut down. I got out, thanked my driver, and went in through the main entrance where the night security recognized me and nodded without requiring my badge.
The elevator to the executive floor was faster at this hour, no stops for the daytime foot traffic. I rode it up in the quiet, listening to the mechanical sounds of the building, and told myself I was
SAT
10
1/3
O
here for work reasons, which was both true and not the point. Claim I heard the giggling before I reached my office. That was the first thing that I registered as I made my way to my office, I could hear the sound of it, female and light, coming from the direction of my office suite in the particular way sound traveled in an empty corridor. The building wasn’t entirely empty; no there were people on other floors, the operations team that ran the Asia-Pacific desk well into the night, the analysts who treated office hours as flexible to the point of meaninglessness who lived here as their main house and going home was an option for them, out of their own choice and not that it was mandated by me. But the executive floor was generally quiet by this hour, my office suite specifically. I walked down the corridor and registered several things in sequence. First: two of my junior analysts standing near the alcove by the printer, who saw me coming and immediately froze, giving me the idea that they had been talking about something they shouldn’t have been talking about and were now attempting to look like they hadn’t been talking about but failing spectacularly. One of them-David, third year, good instincts, too much caffeine-actually took a step backward, which was the worst possible response to the situation and suggested he’d been saying something fairly specific about me or about something involving me and now I was there, making him feel exposed. Second: the murmured exchange between them as they clocked me and recalibrated, which I wasn’t supposed to hear but did, because I’d been told multiple times that I moved too quietly for a person my size. *Oh god, boss is here p> *Lyra just went to Lucian p> *Lucian has no idea p> *If Boss catches them in a compromising position p> I kept walking. I kept my face entirely neutral, which required more effort than it should have, which was itself information I catalogued and set aside as I tried not to dwell on those words. Third: the door to my office, which was not fully closed, from behind which came the sound of another voice-lighter, female, the particular pitch of someone performing a kind of attention that was aware of its own performance. SAT 2/3 Caught In The Act I opened the door. Clair The scene arranged itself in the way of things that had been in motion a moment before and had adjusted for an audience but not quite fast enough. Lyra Cheng-twenty-eight, events coordinator, someone who had been finding increasingly frequent reasons to be on the executive floor for the past three months especially when she had no business on this side of the building and her workload focused on the western aspect of the building and nothing in particular concerned her with my PA, because my PA only activities was to make sure that my schedule for the day was arranged in a way that made me tackle them effectively-was seated on the edge of/my desk. Not on a chair near my desk. On the desk itself, Her hand was in the process of unbuttoning Lucian’s shirt. Lucian was in my chair. Lucian, who I paid to manage my schedule and my correspondence and the various moving pieces of my professional life, was sitting in my chair with his face doing something complicated and red that I recognized as the specific expression of a person who’d been in the middle of something they’d convinced themselves was harmless and had just understood that it wasn’t. He looked at me. I looked at him. The room was very quiet for a moment when they registered my presence but was still processing “Miss Cheng,” I said. My voice came out exactly as I intended it to-level, clean, containing nothing that would give either of them anything to work with. “Give us the room p> Lyra Cheng was not, whatever else could be said about her, slow. She was off the desk and collecting herself before I’d finished the sentence. She didn’t speak-which was, I noted, the correct choice-and was through the door in a matter of seconds. I waited until her footsteps had faded. Comments SAY 10 LUCK DRAW > M Vote 165 Admins2