Chapter 2 - The Envelope on the DeskThirty minutes later, the ballroom had emptied. The guests had been ushered away, their champagne glasses cleared, the shattered glass swept up.
Nolan was back in the service hallway, aggressively scrubbing a stubborn stain off the baseboards with a wire brush, trying to force his mind back to his reality. His electric bill. The grinding noise in his 14-year-old sedan’s transmission. The dental appointment he had canceled twice.
He couldn’t afford to get involved. He was invisible. Invisible men didn’t fix billion-dollar family dynamics.
“Nolan.”
He looked up.
Grant Vale stood at the end of the sterile, fluorescent-lit corridor. He had removed his suit jacket, his silk tie loosened, sleeves rolled up to his forearms. He looked older without the armor of his corporate uniform.
“Mr. Vale,” Nolan said, wiping his hands on a rag and standing up slowly. “Look, if this is about downstairs, I apologize. I overstepped my bounds. I’ll clear out my locker tonight.”
Grant didn’t smile. He walked closer, holding a thick, cream-colored envelope.
“You have a daughter. Lily?”
Nolan’s guard went up instantly. “Yes.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen.”
“What’s wrong with her teeth?”
Nolan froze. The blood drained from his face. “Excuse me?”
“You’re a night maintenance worker pulling double shifts at three different commercial properties in Manhattan,” Grant said flatly, pulling a dossier from beneath his arm—a dossier that Nolan realized with a jolt had likely been compiled about him in the last twenty minutes by corporate intelligence. “Your tax bracket, your utility shut-off notices, and your daughter’s orthodontic history are an open book if you know where to look.”
“That’s an invasion of privacy,” Nolan snapped, his voice rising, anger finally replacing fear.
“It’s due diligence,” Grant corrected smoothly. He held out the heavy envelope. “Take it.”
“I don’t charity—”
“It’s not charity. It’s a retainer.”
Nolan stared at the envelope. “A retainer for what? I mop floors, Mr. Vale. I fix clogged pipes and change lightbulbs.”
“Tonight, my daughter wouldn’t let my chief of security, two pediatric psychiatrists, or her own mother touch her. She listened to a man sitting in a puddle of spilled champagne because you spoke her language,” Grant said, his voice dead serious. “Avery’s behavioral outbursts are escalating. The board is already whispering that my personal life is becoming a liability to the firm. I need someone who can break through her walls when I can’t.”
“You want to hire me as a babysitter?”
“I want to hire you as a crisis counselor and private liaison for my daughter. Salary: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. Full medical, dental, and college tuition coverage for Lily starting tomorrow morning.”
Nolan felt the world tilt off its axis.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
It was more money than he had made in the last five years combined. It would clear his debts, fix his car, buy a house, secure Lily’s future forever.
There was just one catch. In the high-stakes, cutthroat world of the Vales, nothing was ever free.
“What’s the catch?” Nolan asked, narrowing his eyes.
May you like
Grant’s face darkened, his jaw tightening into a hard line.
“The catch,” Grant whispered, “is that someone inside my company—someone close to me—is deliberately leaking Avery’s medical files to the press to tank my stock before the merger vote next month. And I need to know who it is before they destroy my family entirely.”
