Fated to My Cruel CEO novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Loan
On Monday morning Ansel Rhodes takes over the Carrow plant and gives 340 workers ten minutes to clear their lockers. Mona offers herself in their place, and the torn halves of a library card fit together.
At seven on Monday morning, six men in suits walked onto my plant floor and stopped the line.
I was standing at the packing station with a clipboard, three coffees deep, and I knew something was wrong.
Nobody stops the line at Carrow Packaging without calling me first.
The conveyor wound down and the whole floor went quiet.
Three hundred and forty people turned around to look.
The man in the middle of the six did not look at any of them.
He was tall, in a charcoal suit, with black hair cut close and a face that gave nothing away.
He walked straight to the platform by the loading dock and climbed it.
"Good morning," he said, and the speakers carried his voice to every corner.
"My name is Ansel Rhodes. As of this morning, Rhodes Capital holds every loan this company owes."
Nobody breathed.
"I called them in this morning. Carrow Packaging cannot pay."
A murmur ran down the line.
I put my clipboard down and started walking.
"Second shift is cancelled, effective now," he went on. "First shift has ten minutes to clear your lockers."
A woman at line four raised her hand.
She was in her fifties, with gray in her braid, and her badge said twenty-six years.
"Sir, what about the pension?"
He looked at her for the first time.
"Ask the Carrows what they did with it."
Her hand dropped.
Somebody near the back started to cry, quietly.
I reached the platform and stepped up beside him.
"Mr. Rhodes," I said. "I'm Mona Carrow. I run this plant."
He turned his head just enough to see me.
"Vice president of operations," he said. "Lowell Carrow's daughter."
"Yes."
"Then you're the first to go."
I had expected that.
"Fine," I said. "Fire me. Walk me out the front in front of everyone, if it helps."
"It does."
"But those people did nothing to you. Every one of them has worked here for years and they don't own a dollar of this company."
"Then they shouldn't have trusted a Carrow with their paychecks."
His voice was flat, almost bored.
I looked at his hands, because I could not stand to look at his face anymore.
He had a ring of keys in his right hand, and he was turning it over and over.
A small flat piece of something hung from the ring.
It was a scrap of laminated card, gone soft and gray at the edges, with a hole punched through the corner.
One side was torn straight down the middle.
My heart stopped.
I knew that card.
I knew the faded blue stripe across the top and the half of the word that was left.
GREER HOU.
I had one just like it.
I had worn it against my skin for twenty years.
I did not decide to reach for it.
My fingers found the thin chain at my collar and pulled it out from under my blouse.
On the end hung the other half, with its own punched hole and the letters that were missing from his.
SE LIBRARY.
I held it up in front of three hundred and forty people.
"Ansel," I said.
His hand went still on the keys.
For the first time since he walked in, something moved in his face.
He took one step toward me.
He took my half of the card between two fingers, not touching my skin, and he held his half beside it.
The torn edges met.
They fit the way they had fit on a cold night at a fence.
A ten-year-old boy had torn the card in half with his teeth and told a nine-year-old girl to run.
The floor was absolutely silent.
His eyes came up to mine.
I had never seen anyone's face change so fast.
The boredom was gone.
What replaced it was a cold, tired, terrible fury.
"Mona Pearsall," he said quietly, so only I could hear.
"Ansel, listen to me, they told me you were..."
"I looked for a girl named Mona Pearsall for twenty years," he said. "She was eating at Lowell Carrow's table."
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