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 stillin 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.
