My Boss’s Hidden Heir (Elara and Marcus) novel Chapter 3

The Devil’s Proposal

Elara hailed a taxi, dropped into the back seat, the taxi smelled like stale coffee.

Elara rummaged through her tote bag for the third time, fingers brushing past lip gloss and crumpled receipts, searching for the USB drive that held Marcus’s edited Q4 reports. If she’d left it on her kitchen counter, she was dead. Not metaphorically dead. Actually dead. Marcus Thorne would fire her on the spot, and worse, he’d do it with that blank expression that made you feel like an insect he’d stepped on without noticing.

Her fingers closed around the small drive. She exhaled.

“Rough morning?” the driver asked, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

“You have no idea.”

Rough didn’t cover it. The past week had been hell wrapped in a nightmare and served cold. She’d worked through Christmas, editing financial projections while her mother slept in a hospital bed and five pregnancy tests sat hidden in her bathroom drawer like evidence of a crime she couldn’t undo.

And Marcus. God, Marcus had made sure she earned every cent of her salary. Emails at 2 AM. Revision requests on Christmas Day. A forty-page report that needed complete reformatting because he decided he didn’t like the font. The man was the devil in Dior. No, worse. He was heartless in Hugo Boss. Satan in Suitsupply.

Why not just quit? The question had been circling her brain for three years like a vulture.

Because she couldn’t.

Before this job, she’d been a janitor at a corporate office in Manhattan, mopping floors at 5 AM and dodging the eyes of executives who looked through her like she was furniture.

Jobs were scarce when you didn’t have connections or a degree from the right school. And this job, for all its hell, paid well. Well enough that her mother had a hospital bed instead of dying on a clinic floor. Well enough that Leo, her junior brother, could stay in community college. Well enough that she could keep Victor, the debt collector from taking the last thing they owned.

The taxi pulled up to Thorne Dynamics Tower, all glass and steel stretching into the grey January sky like a middle finger to everyone who couldn’t afford to work there.

Elara paid the driver and stepped onto the sidewalk. The building loomed above her. She made the sign of the cross, muttering under her breath, “Dear God, about to work with the devil again today. Keep me safe.”

It was sarcastic. Mostly.

The lobby was already buzzing with employees, everyone moving with that particular Monday morning energy that felt more like a death march than a workday. Elara checked her phone. 8:47 AM. She was late.

“Elara!”

She turned to find Emeka striding toward her, coffee in one hand, his designer scarf draped over his shoulder like he was walking a runway instead of heading to accounting. He looked her up and down, eyebrows rising dramatically.

“Girl, you’re glowing. What happened during the holiday? You met someone?”

“Emeks, I’m late. Can we not?”

“Oh, we’re absolutely doing this.” He fell into step beside her as they headed toward the elevators. “You’ve got that glow. That ‘I had good sex’ glow. Spill.”

“There’s nothing to spill.”

“Lies. I can smell lies, babe, and you reek of them.”

Elara’s phone buzzed in her hand. She glanced down at the screen.

*Mr. Thorne: My office. Now.*

Her stomach dropped to her feet.

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