My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 212

Chapter 212

Raphael

I tried to focus on the screen at the front of the room. One of my lead engineers was droning on about the new firewall, pointing at charts and lines of code that usually would have had my full attention. But my eyes kept sliding to the left. I kept looking through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls toward the corner desk.

Gianna was there. She was hunched over, her shoulders pulled in as if she was trying to make herself small enough to disappear. She hadn’t moved in ten minutes. She just sat there, staring at a screen that was probably still full of the mistakes I’d just yelled at her for.

Something sharp and uncomfortable tugged at my chest. It felt like a physical weight, pressing down every time I saw the way her head hung low.

Why am I looking at her? I snapped at myself, forcing my eyes back to the engineer.

But then I saw her face again in my mind. Not the face of the girl who had just pushed me away in my office, but the face she’d made when I told Aileen to take the file from her. The hurt in her eyes had been so deep. She looked like I’d just kicked a puppy.

And I don’t kick puppies.

I kill people who kick puppies.

I shifted in my chair, because I couldn’t stop thinking about the way she had looked at me.

Was I too harsh?

I tried to tell myself I was just being a boss. I had yelled at the tech team five minutes before she walked in. I had threatened to fire three developers who had been with me for years just this morning.

I was a hard man; everyone knew that. I didn’t give out participation trophies. If you messed up my code, you heard about it.

I treated her like any other employee…

But the lie felt thin. When I yelled at the developers, I was thinking about the stock price.

When I yelled at Gianna, I was thinking about the way she had pushed my chest and walked away.

I had looked for her weakest spot, the fact that she wanted to be seen as smart and I had hammered it until it cracked.

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