Prudence POV
The numbers on the screen bled into one another, a river of black digits on a white background that was blurred and had long since ceased to hold any meaning. I'd been staring at the same spreadsheet for twenty-nine minutes. The quarterly profit-and-loss statement for our European division, a document that usually commanded my rapt, granular attention, might as well have been written in a foreign code that I don't understand.
Because all I could see was the stormy gray of his eyes.
THAT'S ENOUGH!!!!
I pushed back from my desk, the leather of my chair sighing in protest. The clock on the wall read 8:14 PM. The offices outside my glass wall were dark and silent, my employees having long since fled to their personal lives, their families, their messy emotional entanglements. This was my time. The quiet hours when the empire was mine alone, when I could think, and plan, and solidify my control without the distraction of human noise.
But tonight, the silence was a canvas, and my mind was projecting a relentless, high-definition film starring Justin Steele. He was hatched on my mind.
It had been forty-eight hours since the meeting. Two days. In that time, I had overseen the successful launch of a new serum, fired a underperforming regional manager, and negotiated a 15% discount from a stubborn Swiss supplier. I had done everything I always did. I had been efficient, decisive, ruthless.
And yet, he was there. A ghost in the machine of my mind.
I walked to the window, pressing my palms against the cool glass. The city sprawled below, a map of ambition and loneliness. I had conquered this view. So why did I feel so… unmoored?, why was I lacking contact with reality?
It was his hands. That was the most ridiculous part. Not his challenging intelligence, not his unsettling gaze. His hands. Strong, capable, with those faint callouses on his palm. What were they from? Sailing? Working on some vintage car he undoubtedly owned? The image was so vivid, so at odds with the soft, manicured hands of the men I allowed in my orbit. Damien's hands had never known a day of real work. They were instruments for signing papers and holding champagne flutes. Safe, predictable hands.
Justin Steele's hands looked like they could build something. Or tear something down.
A hot, sharp feeling coiled in my stomach. Annoyance. No, fury. Fury at myself for this unprofessional, juvenile fixation. He was a business contact. A variable in an equation. I needed to solve for X and move on.
"Men are dogs, but are they really dogs??"
The old mantra, my shield and my salvation, felt thin, the words worn smooth from overuse. I tried to summon the clean, cold anger I'd felt with Damien. The satisfying click of a problem solved. But the memory was pale, washed out, like a sun-bleached photograph. It held no power against the full-color, high-resolution presence of Justin.
My phone buzzed on the desk. A flicker of something...anticipation made my heart stutter before I crushed it. It was just Anya, with her nightly summary.
But for a split second, a stupid, treacherous part of me had wondered if it was him.
This was intolerable. I need to clear my head.
I strode back to my desk, my heels striking the floor with violent precision. I opened a new browser tab, my fingers flying across the keyboard. Justin Steele. Steele Industries. Background.
I knew this already. I had done a deep dive before the meeting. But I was going to do it again. I was going to find the flaw, the crack, the human weakness that would reduce him from this specter of masculine competence back to a mere man. A manageable man.
I scrolled past the Forbes articles lauding his "maverick genius," past the business journals analyzing the "Titan phenomenon." I went deeper, into the grainy social media photos from charity galas, the archived society page announcements.
There were pictures of him with women, of course. Tall, willowy, beautiful women who looked like they'd been bred for the sole purpose of standing beside a man like him on a red carpet. Heirlooms. They smiled their polished, vacant smiles, their hands resting lightly on his arm. But his eyes, even in these photos, held a distance. He was performing. Just as I did.
There was no scandal. No messy divorces, no drunken arrests, no rumors of cruelty or incompetence. The man was a fortress, just like me. It was infuriating.
The only thing that came close was a brief, years-old article about a failed start-up in his early twenties. A tech venture that had burned through millions before collapsing. The article quoted a nameless source calling Steele "reckless" and "arrogant." But the piece ended with him leveraging his remaining capital into what would become the first cornerstone of Steele Industries. He hadn't been broken by failure. He'd used it as fuel.
Just like I had.
The realization was a cold shock. Our narratives were parallel lines. We had both taken pain and used it as a foundation for power. The symmetry was… disturbing.
I slammed the laptop shut. The sound echoed in the silent office. This was getting me nowhere. I was just feeding the obsession, giving it more data to fuel its fire.
I needed a different tactic. I needed to remind myself of the reality of men. Not the phantom of Justin Steele, but the tangible, disappointing truth.
I leaned back, closing my eyes, and I made myself remember.
---
Marcus.
He was a celebrated pianist, all long fingers and soulful eyes. I'd met him at a benefit for the symphony. He'd played a piece by Chopin that had made the entire audience weep. Afterward, he'd looked only at me. For six months, I was his muse. He wrote sonatas for me, whispered that my beauty was a perfect, silent melody. It was flattering. He was sensitive, artistic, the antithesis of the jock who had broken me.
Then I came to his loft unannounced one afternoon and found him with his violinists. Both of them. He wasn't embarrassed. He was exhilarated. "Prudence, darling," he'd said, his eyes glazed, "we're just exploring the harmony of bodies. It's a new composition. Would you like to join us??he asked" I was flabbergasted
I had left without a word. The next day, I bought the building his loft was in and served him an eviction notice. He'd pleaded, said it was the artist in him, that he couldn't be caged. I'd told him his new composition was entitled "Homeless in B-Flat." He'd called me an ice queen. I'd considered it a promotion.
---
Julian.
A philanthropist. A man who dedicated his life to saving the rainforest and rescuing shelter dogs. He was kind. Genuinely, boringly kind. He never forgot a birthday, always held doors open, and spoke in gentle, measured tones. He was safe. He was the human equivalent of beige.
I ended it after four months. There was no incident, no betrayal. I simply realized one evening, as he was passionately describing a new water-purification system for a village in Botswana, that I felt nothing. Less than nothing. A great, yawning emptiness. His goodness was a weight, a constant, gentle pressure to feel something I was incapable of feeling. His love was a room with no windows, and I was suffocating.
When I told him it was over, he'd cried. Quiet, dignified tears. He'd asked, "What did I do wrong?" And I, in a moment of rare, brutal honesty, had said, "Nothing. That's the problem." He never understood. Men like Julian never do.
---
Damien.
The most recent. The most blatant. The investment banker with the calculative eyes and the safe, predictable ambition. He was a accessory. A handsome, functional purse to carry on my arm to public events. He understood the transaction. I provided status; he provided a presence that warded off questions about my personal life. I thought he was smart enough to understand the rules.
But even the well-trained dogs eventually bite the hand that feeds them. His betrayal was almost a relief. It was a familiar script. It reaffirmed my worldview. It was comfortable in its ugliness.
These were the men I chose. The artist, the saint, the opportunist. All flawed. All manageable. All, in the end, disposable. Their departures were blips on my radar, minor administrative tasks. They were lessons that reinforced the central thesis of my life: love is a vulnerability I cannot afford. Connection is a risk that leads only to ruin.
I opened my eyes. The memories were like old scars
I could trace their outlines, but the pain was a distant echo. They should have been a balm. They should have reminded me that I was right, that my system was flawless.
But instead, the silence in the office felt heavier. The memories of Marcus, Julian, and more people up to the recent Damien didn't diminish Justin's presence; they highlighted it. They were shadows, and he was the substance. They were echoes, and his voice in my mind was a clear, resonant bell.
He wasn't a starving artist begging for inspiration. He wasn't a gentle soul begging for connection. He wasn't a greedy climber begging for scraps from my table.
Justin Steele was a king from a neighboring kingdom. He wasn't asking for anything. He was looking at my empire and calculating whether an alliance was worth his while. He saw me not as a muse, a savior, or a meal ticket, but as a peer. A potential equal.
The thought was terrifying. It was also, God help me, the most thrilling thing I had felt in a decade.
"No," I said the word aloud, the sound sharp and final in the empty office.
This was how it started. This was the slippery slope. The first crack in the dam that would lead to a flood of feeling, of vulnerability, of pain. I had seen what happened to women who let themselves be captivated by men like him. They lost themselves. They became orbiting moons to a brilliant sun, their own light extinguished.
I would not be a moon.
I turned back to my computer, but I didn't open the financials. I opened the design schematics for our new flagship store in Tokyo. I dove into the pixels. I obsessed over the Pantone codes for the wall colors, the tensile strength of the custom shelving, the traffic-flow algorithms for the checkout lines. I buried myself in the granular, the measurable, the concrete.
I worked until my eyes burned and the numbers on the clock blurred into 1:37 AM. I worked until the image of his smile faded into the background hum of exhaustion. I worked until my mind, too tired to conjure his face, could only focus on the immediate, physical need for sleep.
I stood, my body stiff, my mind finally, blessedly blank. I walked through the dark office, a ghost in my own kingdom. As I waited for the elevator, I caught my reflection in its polished brass doors. A pale, beautiful, empty ice sculpture. Damien's words.
For the first time, the description didn't feel like a shield. It felt like a prison sentence.
The elevator arrived with a soft chime. I stepped inside, the doors closing behind me, sealing me in silent, descending metal. And as I descended from my ivory tower into the sleeping city, a single, traitorous thought broke through the wall of my exhaustion.
What would it feel like to melt? Nooo, I screamed