Chapter 3 - Flashback — The Broken Stack
Six weeks earlier.
The afternoon sun streamed through the blinds of Dominic’s sprawling ground-floor office. The room smelled of old leather, polished mahogany, and expensive cuban tobacco.
Dominic sat in his matte-black wheelchair behind a massive mahogany desk, reviewing financial ledgers that detailed millions of dollars moving through his private accounts. Across the room, Megan Foster was performing her daily cleaning routine, quietly wiping down the glass display cases lining the wall.
As Megan moved near the edge of the desk, her elbow brushed against a tall, meticulously organized stack of confidential acquisition documents.
The stack tumbled, cascading across the hardwood floor in a noisy array of paper and color-coded folders.
Dominic’s jaw tightened instantly. He spun his wheelchair around with practiced, effortless speed, the rubber wheels gliding over the rug, stopping directly in front of Megan.
His dark eyes glared down at her with terrifying intensity, his powerful chest rising and falling beneath his black suit vest.
"Do you understand what you just did?" Dominic asked, his voice dangerously low, dripping with icy venom.
Any other employee in the Buckhead estate would have trembled, apologized profusely, or broken down in tears under such a gaze.
Megan did neither.
She stopped wiping the glass, looked up at Dominic’s imposing frame, and then calmly crouched down onto the floor. Without a trace of panic in her eyes, she began gathering the scattered pages one by one, aligning the edges with neat, steady motions.
She looked directly up into Dominic’s cold eyes and spoke with absolute composure:
May you like
"I made a mistake. Show me the order and I’ll fix it."
Dominic froze. He leaned forward in his wheelchair, his hands resting on the armrests, staring at her as if she were an alien creature. No one spoke to Dominic Mason in that tone. No one demanded instruction from him with such calm, unshakeable dignity.
