Eldrick Moirthe is twenty six years old (26), and he already sits at the very top of Moirthe Group, one of the most powerful conglomerates in the country, a legacy spanning three generations that is now entirely his to command. People call him a genius. People also call him a monster. Both descriptions are accurate, depending on which floor of the building you happen to be standing on. He has never once apologized for a decision. He has never once shown mercy to an employee who failed him. He has never once let anyone touch him, not a handshake, not an accidental brush in a hallway, without immediately reaching for disinfectant in front of whoever happens to be watching. And he has never, not once in his adult life, let anyone close enough to see what actually lives underneath all that control. What nobody in the company knows is the night that made him this way. Years ago, his father dragged him out of their mansion by the collar during a storm and threw him into the rain like something disposable, screaming that he was a mistake, a living reminder of his mother's affair and everything that had gone wrong in their marriage. Eldrick was seventeen. He had no coat, no money, no plan, just the taste of blood in his mouth and a silence inside him that never really left after that night. A stranger, a girl he had never met and never saw again, sat down beside him on a curb outside a small bakery and handed him a piece of cake without asking who he was or wanting a single thing in return. She had no idea whose son she was talking to. It was the only act of unconditional kindness he had ever received in his life, and it rewired something in him permanently. He never found her again, not for years, not until her family's empire collapsed under the weight of her own uncle's greed, a scandal that gutted the company overnight and left her with nothing but her name and a resume she never expected to need. Eldrick had never stopped watching from a distance, quietly, patiently, for longer than she could imagine. The job opening she found was not an accident. Vincent, his relentlessly loyal personal assistant, built the entire hiring process around her before she had even submitted an application, engineering every detail so the interview felt like a formality rather than the inevitability it already was. Now she works two floors below his office, utterly unaware that the coldest, most feared man in the building has spent years quietly rearranging pieces of his own empire around her, one convenient coincidence at a time, one removed obstacle at a time, always with a plausible, mundane explanation ready in case she ever notices. To everyone else in Moirthe Group, Eldrick is exactly what they fear: precise to the point of cruelty, merciless in meetings, physically untouchable, and utterly without empathy. To her, without her ever suspecting the difference, he is something else entirely, a man capable of dismantling careers over a formatting error yet somehow never quite as harsh with her as the rumors promised, a man who does not disinfect after she touches something of his, though he would never admit that, let alone explain why.