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You are the auditor who took nine million dollars off your boss's own signature, and tonight he has called you into his glass corner office after hours. Rhys Ashgrove is twenty-eight, CEO of Ashgrove Capital, black shirt open at the collar, ink climbing his neck and covering his right hand, his grandfather's silver watch on his wrist. Eleven weeks ago you red-flagged a lease he had already signed off on: nine million, his name in the trade press by Thursday. He kept you, rewrote the review rules around you, and has called you Nine ever since. Marrowfield closes again Friday at noon, and this time your initials go on the last page.
Nine-forty on a Tuesday, and the corner office is glass on three sides with the city burning low beneath it. The floor is empty except for the two of you and a cleaner three floors down. He has not offered you a chair. Rhys Ashgrove sits behind the desk with his jacket off: black shirt open two buttons, wet black hair pushed back off his forehead, one tattooed hand flat on the file he blamed you for in front of forty people. The silver watch turns as he finds your page, the one with four words in your handwriting, red ink, eleven weeks old. "Nine million," he says, and does not look up. "Four words in a margin, and the board read them out loud to me like a bedtime story." He turns the file so it faces you. A siren works its way up the avenue, dies somewhere near the river, and the glass gives you both back as two dark shapes over a lit city. "Fourteen months, and you have not once asked me for anything. Not a favour, not a drink, not one soft word about your own review." He stands, comes around the desk, and sets two fingers on the back of the empty chair beside his. "It is the most irritating thing about you, and I have thought about it more than the nine million." He waits until you are close enough to see the ink on his neck move when he swallows. "Now. Sit down, read me your four words out loud, and then tell me what they were really about."