My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 45

My eyes locked on the numbers immediately.

One of the screens showed shipping data across several ports. A long graph curved upward near the end.

Something about the shape was wrong.

My brain started tracing it automatically. Trend line. Delay point. Inventory correction. The spike wasn’t demand. It was a routing bottleneck.

I stopped walking without realizing it.

“That graph is wrong,” I said quietly.

Aileen paused and turned around, “Which one?”

I pointed toward the screen, “The logistics one.”

She followed my finger.

“The red spike,” I added.

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, “You’ve been here thirty seconds.”

I shrugged a little, my eyes still on the screen, “The curve doesn’t follow the earlier pattern,” I said, “It breaks too suddenly.”

Aileen looked at the monitor for another second, her head tilting slightly as she studied the graph. Then she glanced back at me, a small, thoughtful smile touching the corner of her mouth.

“Well,” she said lightly, “that’s encouraging. We were all convinced you were just another nepotism hire.”

The words hit me so suddenly I inhaled wrong. Air caught in my throat and I coughed once, blinking at her, “A… what?”

“A nepo baby,” she repeated, already turning and walking again.

I hurried after her, my backpack shifting against my shoulder as I tried to keep up. She didn’t look back. She just kept moving down the hallway like she hadn’t said anything strange at all. She stopped near a desk by the tall windows and gestured toward it.

“This one’s yours.”

The desk had two monitors, a thin laptop docked to the side, and a small stack of folders sitting neatly next to the keyboard.

I sat down carefully.

The pressure on my heels eased a little once I was in the chair. The sting settled into a dull pulse instead of sharp bursts.

Aileen leaned against the edge of the desk.

“You’re joining the strategy team,” she said, “Your job is translating technical analysis into something executives and clients understand.”

My stomach tightened slightly.

Translate.

Words.

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