Torn between my stepbrother and his bestfriend

"You're late."

Gladys didn't look up from her phone. "By four minutes, Dave."

"Four minutes in this building is"

"A lifetime, yes." She dropped her phone into her bag and looked at her stepbrother across the marble lobby of Stone Enterprises.

He was already in full CEO mode, dark suit, jaw set, the particular expression he wore when he had decided something and was waiting for the world to cooperate. "I know your speech. I've heard it since I was sixteen."

Dave's expression didn't shift. "This isn't the house, Gladys, different rules apply here"

"I'm aware." She adjusted the strap of her bag and met his eyes. "I work here now, I'll be on time tomorrow."

He studied her for a moment the way he always did like he was running a risk assessment and she was the variable he couldn't control. Then he nodded once and turned toward the elevator bank. "Come on. I'll introduce you to the floor."

She followed him and told herself this was fine, that having her stepbrother as her boss in a building his father built and his grandfather named was just a practical arrangement and not at all the specific kind of suffocation she had been trying to outrun for the better part of a decade.

The thirty-second floor was everything she expected, glass walls, clean lines, the aggressive minimalism of people who had so much money that simplicity became the flex.

Dave walked her through it with the efficiency of a man who had more important things to do and was doing this because he loved her, which she knew, which made it worse somehow.

Her office was at the end of the corridor. Small by Stone standards, which meant it was still larger than her last apartment, with a window that looked east over the city and a desk that was aggressively, pointedly clean.

"Your assistant starts Monday," Dave said from the doorway. "Her name is Priya. She knows the building better than anyone so use her."

"I will."

"The Calloway account brief is already on your system, Hartley wants a preliminary deck by Thursday."

"Dave." She turned from the window. "I've read the brief and I prepared for this, uou don't need to manage me through my first morning."

Something moved through his expression. "I'm not managing you. I'm briefing you."

"There's a difference?"

The silence lasted exactly one beat too long.

"Thursday," he said. "Hartley doesn't wait." He was gone before she could respond.

Gladys turned back to the window and exhaled slowly. Below her the city moved with total indifference to the fact that she had just started the most complicated job of her life. She found that comforting.

She found the coffee station on the twenty-eighth floor at eleven-fifteen because the one on thirty-second was out of oat milk and she had decided, on her very first day, that this was a hill she would die on.

She was reaching for a mug when she heard his